ABSTRACT
The Yom Kippur War was a war that the Soviet Union did not want. The period preceding the war had been one in which Moscow had sought to deter both the Egyptians and the Syrians from their war plans. Indeed, it was a period in which the relationship with the Arabs had deteriorated in large part because of these Soviet efforts. Moscow had invested quite heavily, both politically and militarily, in Egypt and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in Syria, primarily in order to obtain and maintain a system of air bases and naval facilities important to its Mediterranean naval squadron and disposition vis-à-vis the American sixth fleet (and its Polaris components). The Soviets had taken the unprecedented (for Moscow) step of placing close to 20,000 military personnel and advanced defensive missiles in a non-Marxist, non-contiguous, Third World country, Egypt, in order to shore up the government of Gamal Abdul Nasser, which had made possible this Soviet military and political challenge to western power in the region. In so doing, the Soviets came close to destroying the nascent détente emerging with the West, and particularly the United States, in the early 1970s. It was both to preserve this détente and, most importantly, to avoid the risk of military confrontation with the United States that Moscow sought to deter Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat and Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad from initiating a new Arab-Israeli war. A military crisis in the Middle East, where both superpowers were heavily and directly committed, was deemed by Soviet experts as one which could easily, if not inevitably, escalate to global proportions, not only destroying détente but precipitating a superpower conflagration. 1
