Mideast Contestants Race to Build Missile Arsenals

The Middle East, where tanks and air power ruled the battlefields in hostile decades past, has entered an unsettling era of mushrooming missile arsenals.

Over the last weeks and months, regional military machines have been flexing their missile strength at an accelerating pace. The contestants give identical rationales for the buildup: to match strides with their rivals.

Both Israel and Iraq have test-fired powerful new rockets. Egypt is working on an intermediate-range missile, and Saudi Arabia has placed in desert silos a long-range, nuclear-capable heavyweight bought from China.

Other Middle East nations have stocked a range of battlefield rockets over the years. Even Lebanon’s beleaguered Christian forces, once armed mainly with artillery and hand-carried grenade launchers, are reported to possess a handful of Soviet-made short-range missiles, supplied by Iraq.

“We have a missile race,” affirmed Heino Kopietz, a Middle East specialist at London’s International Institute of Strategic Studies, in an interview Dec.15. “Everybody is on their toes now.”

Mordechai Gur, a former Israeli army chief of staff, added: “We have to deter the use of missiles, full stop.”

Technology is bought, adapted or home-developed, and increasingly beyond the capability of the United States, the Soviet Union and other major powers uncomfortable with the Middle East arms race to restrain. The reduction of big-power tensions in Europe has yet to spill over to the region, and Third World producers are helping fill the demand for new weapons.

U.S. Defense Department spokesman Pete Williams, commenting on this month’s Iraqi test, warned that the burgeoning arsenals are “a serious and growing worldwide concern.” In the taut relations of the Middle East, he said, missile proliferation “undermines regional security and peace.”

Officials in the Soviet Union, whose southern territories are within range of Middle East missiles, have expressed similar alarm.

According to military analysts, only Israel among Middle East powers is capable of arming missiles with nuclear warheads. But Iraq, Iran and Libya are reportedly seeking nuclear technology, and they and several other countries in the region are believed to have the potential to develop chemical warheads, dubbed by analysts as “the poor man’s atomic bomb.”

Strategically, the development of missile forces by Iran and the Arab countries threatens to upset the regional military balance characterized by superior Israeli air power. To keep its foes at bay, Israel had long relied on its ability to strike at installations deep in enemy territory without fear of immediate retaliation. Its 1981 bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor outside Baghdad was a celebrated example.

Now an Israeli preemptive air strike can be countered with the push of a button, although Israel’s nuclear capability still poses a telling deterrent.

Hedging their bets for a non-nuclear confrontation, the Israelis have embarked on a U.S.-supported program to develop an anti-missile missile system called Arrow, another notch on the gear of escalation.

Outside the Arab-Israeli tensions lies the threat that missile proliferation poses to the Arab States and Iran themselves. While battlefield missiles were first used in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, long-range missile warfare was introduced to the region during the nine-year conflict between Iraq and Iran which ended in a fragile truce in the summer of 1988.

Each side threw every available type of missile, from every possible source, at the other. Soviet-made Scud B rockets, adapted for greater range by reducing the weight of the warhead, fell on both Baghdad and Tehran. The Iran-Iraq war also reintroduced another ominous weapon, poison gas, which had not been used so extensively since World War I in Europe.

“The use of missiles was legitimized during the Iran-Iraq war,” said Shai Feldman, a researcher at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv.

French-supplied Iraqi fighters pounded Iranian shipping in the Persian Gulf with French-made Exocet missiles (and accidentally hit the U.S. frigate Stark in 1987, with the loss of 37 American lives). The Iranians countered by deploying Chinese-made Silkworm anti-ship missiles along the gulf’s strategic Strait of Hormuz.

Saudi Arabia, alarmed by the buildup, went on the market and bought the ponderous Chinese CSS-2 East Wind missiles, which have an range of up to 1,800 miles, depending on the warhead. The East Wind can carry nuclear warheads to the maximum range, but the Saudis insist they have no intention of becoming a nuclear power. Independent observers say the missiles are being retrofitted with conventional warheads, which would limit the range to 1,000 miles, still sufficient to hit targets in Iran, Israel or elsewhere in the Middle East, though without pinpoint accuracy.

Few Restraints

Kopietz, the London analyst, labeled the Saudi weapons a “psychological cosmetic,” but added that that is what spurs proliferation.

“The Saudis are telling Iran, ‘We can buy these and we can use them,’ ” he explained. “The Iraqis are building their own because neither the Soviet Union nor the United States will sell them a missile.”

In the race to match missile for missile, there have been few restraints except price and availability. And even those restraints are being evaded by the ambitious development and adaptation programs in Iraq, Iran and Egypt, which reportedly is receiving technical help from Argentina.

In 1987, seven Western industrial nations, including the United States, Britain, Japan, France and West Germany, formed the Missile Technology Control Regime, with the aim of curbing the spread of missiles with a range of 180 miles or more. The signatories are committed to block the sale of missile parts and related equipment to Third World countries. But the commitments have proven less than airtight.

According to the chief prosecutor in Munich, a West German company has sold components for a rocket valve to Libya. An official with the French firm Aerospatiale told a reporter at this year’s Baghdad air show that his company was prepared to “respond to any need of the Iraqi defense production.” The official was quoted as saying that negotiations for the transfer of missile technology were under way.

Meanwhile, according to press reports, Libya’s Moammar Kadafi is shopping in the missile market, reportedly for the Brazilian-made Oteiba, which has a 375-mile range.

Iraqi Strides

Iraq’s claim on Dec. 7 that it had launched a 48-ton rocket into Earth orbit and developed two models of 1,200-mile-range military missiles surprised even analysts who had closely followed its wartime and postwar efforts.

“We achieved a complicated scientific leap,” Military Industries Minister Hussein Kamel, brother-in-law of President Saddam Hussein, told Baghdad Radio. “ . . . We successfully tested the launching of the a three-stage rocket to outer space.”

Not until 48 hours later did U.S. officials authenticate the claim.

“I can confirm that the Iraqis have launched a rocket powerful enough to put a small payload into space,” said a Pentagon spokesman. Another Defense Department official said the North American Aerospace Defense Command had tracked an object “for four or five revolutions” of Earth, although it was not clear whether it was the final rocket stage or a payload.

Kamel said the test was the first phase of a space program, presumably aimed at putting a spy satellite into orbit over the Middle East.

The 1,200-mile-range missiles that Iraq claims to have developed would have direct military application.

At United Nations headquarters in New York Dec.14 Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz said of the intermediate-range rocket: “We have to take into consideration, for defense purposes, that our country is still being threatened by Iran. We are in a position of no war and no peace.”

Threat to Israel

The same weapon could reach Jerusalem, as can the Scud B rockets fired at Tehran during the war. They have a range of about 570 miles, boosted by more than 150 miles through alterations reportedly designed with the help of West German engineers. Syria, Egypt and the Saudis also own missiles capable of hitting Israeli targets, and the Soviet-supplied Syrian SS-21 Scarab missiles have a high degree of accuracy.

There has been no Iraqi claim that their new intermediate-range missiles have been tested. Intelligence reports on Iraq have focused instead on development of an advanced version of the Argentine Condor rocket, reportedly in collaboration with the Egyptians and the Argentines. In the Middle East, the rocket has been dubbed Badr 2000, and has a projected range of about 600 miles.

More alarming than Iraqi success with a mid-range rocket would be the potential of the tested space booster, which could put Iraq in a satellite-launching club with Israel and developing countries such as India and China. Theoretically, the booster could be adapted for use as an intercontinental ballistic missile, some Western experts noted.

The U.S. Senate is considering further legislation to combat the spread of ballistic missiles, although the effort seems to be aimed primarily at Syria and Libya rather than Israel, an ally of the United States.

“I don’t believe that the likelihood of Great Britain, France or Israel engaging in atomic/biological/chemical weapons is anything but remote,” said Arizona Sen. John McCain, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, speaking on a television hook-up to a recent conference in Tel Aviv. “I don’t have confidence” about Hafez Assad, the Syrian president, or Kadafi. “So the legislation and the effort I have been engaged in have clearly tried to differentiate those countries I have mentioned and those which are less stable and are in fact more aggressive.”

However, Kopietz, the International Institute of Strategic Studies analyst, argued that Israeli power is the problem.

“To end this race,” he said, “America will have to get Israel to step down first” in any disarmament program.

“For the time being, these weapons are being sought by people for essentially defensive purposes,” Don Kerr, another IISS analyst in London, declared before the Iraqi test. “These states want to be listened to.”

Israel, meanwhile, has moved ahead with its own rocket program. In September, in a report that Israeli officials refused to confirm or deny, the Soviet news agency Tass said Israel had test-fired a surface-to-surface missile from an area near Jerusalem 900 miles west into the Mediterranean.

Other reports identified the missile by the code name Jericho 2, the same rocket that put a satellite into orbit in September, 1988. The Israeli Jericho 1, current kingpin of their missile force, has a range of 375 miles and can be fitted with chemical, conventional or nuclear warheads.

Meanwhile, nuclear technology is also being sewn throughout the region. A West German company and China are said to have provided Iraq with technology to produce enriched uranium, the key ingredient for building nuclear weapons.

Israel has reportedly helped South Africa build a long-range missile in return for guaranteed supplies of enriched uranium and facilities to test booster rockets in South Africa.

The State Department, in response to reports of Israeli-South African missile and nuclear cooperation, pressed Israel to sign the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but Israel has refused. The Israeli government does not confirm that it has nuclear weapons, and compliance with the treaty would open its nuclear facilities to international inspection.

At the U.S.-sponsored conference on arms control two weeks ago in Tel Aviv, Jed Snyder, a Pentagon consultant, said that Israel should drop its non-nuclear pose to make its nuclear threat “credible.”

Nick Williams reported from Nicosia and Daniel Williams from Jerusalem.