The International Institute for Strategic Studies said in a report published here today that many new, highly sophisticated weapons developed in the United States and the Soviet Union would be employed by both sides if a new war broke out in the Middle East during the next few years, but that nuclear weapons were not likely to be used. The report found that Israel and Syria have more than replenished their military stocks since the Yom Kippur War and that Egypt is likely to be in a similar position shortly.
With regard to Israel, the IISS report said that country is reported to have stock-piled sufficient ammunition and spare parts to sustain a war of the 1973 intensity for at least 21 days. Israel’s armed forces were expanded in 1974 beyond their 1973 strength and new weapons, both produced by Israel’s expanding arms industry and acquired from the United States, came into the inventory. By the end of 1974, Israel had more than made up its Yom Kippur War losses, according to the IISS.
OIL WEAPON WOULD BE RENEWED
Although Israel is said to have acquired a nuclear weapons potential, a new Middle East war would not be a nuclear war. But it would almost certainly lead to a renewed use of the “oil weapon” by the Arab oil-producing countries, which fact gives particular significance to the repeated statements by American policy-makers that military intervention to protect oil supplies should not be excluded, the IISS study said.
According to the study, such intervention would not be likely to secure sufficient quantities of oil in time to avoid the strangulation of major industrial countries and would produce serious rifts between the U.S. and its allies. But the American warnings are likely to have some deterrent effect if only by introducing an element of uncertainty into Arab calculations, the IISS report said.
The report said that hostilities in the Mideast and over oil would no doubt involve both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It noted that although the USSR continued throughout 1974 to emphasize detente and its policy refrained from complicating American Middle East diplomacy, skepticism about detente has been growing in the U.S. partly as a reaction to what seemed to many as an “overselling” of detente by former President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.
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