ABSTRACT
The military coup that erupted in Yemen in 1962 seemed to offer Nutting Nasser the perfect opportunity to reassert his leadership. Yemen’s Imam al-Badr was one of the world’s most backward and obscurantist rulers. Amer was Nasser’s first vice president and the deputy supreme commander of Egypt’s armed forces. The trip to Khartoum was to be Nasser’s first outside Egypt since the defeat and was a key element in his strategy. The proposal that Egypt presented at the Arab foreign ministers conference that convened in Khartoum at the beginning of August was almost identical to an agreement Nasser and Faisal had signed two years earlier but that was never carried out: cease-fire, withdrawal of Egyptian forces, and cessation of Saudi assistance to the royalists. The rebuilding of Egypt’s air defenses was to prove a particularly difficult and frustrating enterprise. For a year or more after the defeat, Nasser and Mohammed Fawzi placed their hopes primarily on the fighter-interceptor arms.
