What happens when a postcolonial state attempts to challenge the global concentration of advanced technology? From artificial intelligence to nuclear technology and advanced weapons, this question has once again moved to the center of global politics. Yet the struggle over who possesses advanced knowledge, who is permitted to develop it and who claims the authority to deny it to others has a much longer history. On July 23, 1962, exactly 10 years after Egypt’s revolution, former President Gamal Abdel Nasser offered his own answer. Rockets rose over the Egyptian desert as Egypt marked the anniversary of the 1952 revolution. Nasser declared that the country had entered the missile age. The spectacle reflected ambitions that extended well beyond the missiles themselves. Emerging from colonial rule and repeated military defeats, Egypt sought to demonstrate that it could acquire and produce advanced technologies long-monopolized by the industrialized world. For Nasser, the missile program was not simply about military power. It formed part of a broader project of technological sovereignty: the belief that political independence remained incomplete without the capacity to master modern science and industry. The response quickly became international. Israeli intelligence launched a covert campaign against the German scientists helping build the program through intimidation, kidnappings, letter bombs and assassination attempts. West Germany struggled to balance its growing economic and diplomatic ties with the Arab world against mounting Israeli pressure and the moral and political legacies of the Second World War. Washington increasingly viewed Egypt’s ambitions through the language of regional stability, proliferation and its evolving security partnership with Israel. Even the Soviet Union, Cairo’s principal military patron, remained reluctant to see Egypt acquire capabilities beyond Moscow’s control. At the center of these competing interests stood a group of German scientists and engineers whose expertise transformed a national development project into an international political crisis. More than 60 years later, the questions raised by Egypt’s missile program remain remarkably familiar. Who gets to master the technologies of the future? And who claims the authority to decide? A postcolonial quest for technological sovereignty Egypt’s missile ambitions grew out of military defeat. The Nakba of 1948 exposed the weaknesses of Arab armies, while the 1956 Suez Crisis reinforced Egypt’s dependence on technologically superior powers. Although Nasser emerged politically strengthened from Suez, the conflict underscored that military independence remained constrained by technological dependence. His ambitions, therefore, extended beyond acquiring better weapons. Across the postcolonial world, newly independent states invested in dams, factories, universities, laboratories and industry, not only to accelerate development, but also to reduce dependence on former colonial powers. Egypt’s missile program belonged to this broader effort. Developing an indigenous missile capability promised military advantages, but it also symbolized the belief that advanced scientific knowledge need not remain the monopoly of the industrialized world. Yet ambition alone could not overcome structural constraints. Egypt lacked the industrial base, the scientific infrastructure and the specialized personnel needed to build advanced missile systems. Purchasing weapons abroad offered one solution, but dependence on foreign suppliers inevitably limited Egyptian autonomy. Even the Soviet Union, despite its close partnership with Cairo, remained unwilling to transfer every technology Egypt sought. Great powers, regardless of ideology, were reluctant to relinquish control over the knowledge underpinning strategic superiority. Egyptian policymakers, therefore, pursued a different strategy. Rather than importing weapons alone, they sought to import expertise by recruiting foreign scientists and engineers capable of establishing an indigenous missile industry. West Germany became a particularly attractive source of that expertise. Scientists and engineers with wartime and postwar experience in rocketry and aerospace found limited opportunities to pursue ambitious projects at home, while Egypt offered them something increasingly scarce in postwar Europe: the opportunity to build. Dozens eventually accepted contracts connected to Egyptian aviation and missile projects, transforming an ambitious national development project into an international geopolitical crisis. The German scientists who became a crisis For Israel, the presence of German scientists in Egypt carried historical and strategic significance that was impossible to separate. German experts were helping an Arab government develop missiles that Israeli leaders feared could eventually threaten the country’s cities. Whatever the technical limitations of Egypt’s program in the early 1960s, its political and psychological significance was profound. The controversy, however, was never simply about missiles. It was about who was permitted to acquire advanced technological capabilities. Egypt viewed foreign expertise as essential to reducing its technological dependence and strengthening its sovereignty. Israel, by contrast, regarded an indigenous Egyptian missile industry as an unacceptable strategic challenge. The struggle was therefore as much about preserving a regional technological advantage as it was about countering an immediate military threat. Israeli intelligence closely monitored the German scientists and the network of European front companies, suppliers and intermediaries that procured equipment and materials for the Egyptian missile program, before launching a covert campaign to disrupt it. As part of Israel’s Operation Damocles, letter bombs wounded staff at the Egyptian missile program’s procurement offices in Europe. Likewise, rocket specialist Heinz Krug disappeared in Munich in 1962, widely believed to have been abducted and killed by the Mossad. Rather than targeting missiles alone, Israeli operations targeted the people who possessed the expertise Egypt sought to acquire. The campaign demonstrated a broader reality that continues to shape international politics: restricting the movement of knowledge can prove as strategically important as restricting the movement of weapons. The episode also unfolded within a broader history of Arab-German relations that is often overlooked when reduced to another chapter of the Arab-Israeli conflict. For many Arab governments, West Germany had become an increasingly attractive economic and technological partner. It possessed advanced industrial expertise and, unlike Britain and France, was not directly associated with the region’s recent colonial rule. For Bonn, the Arab world offered expanding markets and another arena in its Cold War rivalry with East Germany. Egypt’s recruitment of German scientists emerged from these wider political, economic and scientific relationships. The missile program, nevertheless, became a diplomatic crisis. Bonn sought to preserve its expanding economic and diplomatic ties with Arab governments, while responding to mounting Israeli pressure rooted in West Germany’s postwar commitment to reconciliation with Israel and its broader reckoning with the Holocaust. Yet it possessed only limited legal authority to prevent private citizens from accepting employment abroad. Washington, meanwhile, viewed Egypt’s ambitions through the language of regional stability, proliferation and alliance management, reflecting not only genuine security concerns, but also a preference for preserving a regional military balance favorable to Israel. The episode exposed a dilemma that remains strikingly contemporary. States can restrict the sale of equipment, impose export controls and disrupt procurement networks. Controlling expertise is far more difficult. Scientists cross borders. Knowledge circulates. Technical experience cannot be embargoed as easily as hardware. Long before governments competed over artificial intelligence, semiconductors or quantum computing, they were already competing over the people capable of producing the technologies that mattered most. Why the missiles matter less than we think Egypt’s native missile program ultimately fell short of Nasser’s ambitions. Technical obstacles persisted, particularly in guidance and control systems. The program demanded financial, industrial and human resources that Egypt struggled to sustain. Israeli covert operations, together with West German pressure that encouraged scientists to return home, further weakened the project. Egypt’s defeat in the Naksa of 1967 ultimately brought the program to an end. It is tempting to judge the project solely by the missiles it failed to produce. Doing so misses its broader significance. The international response was shaped less by what Egypt had achieved than by what it might eventually become capable of achieving. The controversy revolved around future technological possibilities, rather than existing military realities. An engineer could cross a border without carrying a single missile component and still transfer decades of accumulated knowledge in aerodynamics, guidance systems, manufacturing and program management. Expertise itself had become a strategic resource. The struggle therefore extended beyond rockets and production facilities to scientists, laboratories and the circulation of knowledge across borders. Controlling expertise became another means of determining which states could realistically aspire to technological autonomy and which would remain dependent on external suppliers. Seen in this way, Egypt was pursuing what we would now call technological sovereignty: the capacity to develop and master critical technologies without remaining permanently dependent on more powerful states. The missile program ultimately failed to achieve that objective. Yet the extraordinary international effort devoted to undermining it revealed something larger than the fate of a single weapons program. The concern was not only the missiles that Egypt might build, but the possibility that a postcolonial state could acquire scientific and industrial capabilities that reduced its long-term dependence on external powers. Such capabilities promised not only military strength, but also greater political and strategic autonomy, challenging an international order in which advanced technological knowledge remained concentrated among a small number of states. The technology wars are not new The technologies at the center of geopolitical competition have changed dramatically since Abdel Nasser’s missiles first appeared over the Egyptian desert. The politics surrounding them are remarkably familiar. Today, governments compete over artificial intelligence, nuclear technology and advanced weapons. They impose export controls, restrict technology transfers, scrutinize scientific collaborations, sanction firms and compete to attract or deny highly skilled scientists and engineers. The struggle increasingly revolves around whether access to expertise today might allow a rival to develop a capability tomorrow. The history of Egypt’s missile program places these contemporary contexts within a much longer trajectory of global technological competition. It also exposes the unequal hierarchies that continue to shape the international system. Technological ambitions are rarely judged according to technical capability alone. They are filtered through political relationships and international hierarchies in which the identity of the state pursuing them often determines whether technological development is celebrated as innovation, accepted as modernization or condemned as proliferation. This does not mean that every state’s technological ambitions are equally benign, nor that security concerns are merely rhetorical. It does suggest, however, that similar technological pursuits are rarely evaluated according to consistent standards. States closely aligned with the prevailing international order have often enjoyed greater latitude in developing advanced military technologies than postcolonial states seeking to reduce their technological dependence. The language of security has often functioned not only to address genuine threats, but also to regulate who is permitted to acquire the capabilities that define power in a given era. Nasser’s missiles never transformed Egypt into the technological power he envisioned. Yet the crisis surrounding the German scientists revealed something more enduring than the fate of a single missile program. It exposed how expertise itself became an object of geopolitical competition and how powerful states sought to regulate not only the movement of weapons, but also the movement of knowledge. More than 60 years later, the question that confronted Cairo, Bonn, Tel Aviv, Washington and Moscow remains unresolved: Who gets to master the technologies of the future? More importantly, who claims the authority to decide? Acknowledgments: This essay is part of a broader research project on the missile age and proliferation in the Arab world during the Cold War, with a particular focus on Egypt and Arab-German relations. The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA) through its Research Mobility Program, which supported the research and writing of this essay.The post When Egypt tried to build its own missile program first appeared on Mada Masr.
