The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

JUST MOMENTS BEFORE 2:00 P.M. on October 6, 1973—on what, by that year’s calendar, was Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays—222 Egyptian jets roared into the sky. Their targets were Israeli command posts and positions on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal and in the Sinai. Minutes later, more than 3,000 field guns opened fire along the entire front. At almost exactly the same time, Syrian aircraft launched an attack on Israel’s northern border, followed immediately by a barrage from 700 pieces of artillery. Thus began the October War, the fourth of the Arab-Israeli wars—the most destructive and intense of all of them, and the one with the most far-reaching consequences. The armaments on both sides of the conflict had been supplied by the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. But one of the most potent weapons was unique to the Middle East. It was the oil weapon, wielded in the form of an embargo—production cutbacks and restrictions on exports—that, in the words of Henry Kissinger, “altered irrevocably the world as it had grown up in the postwar period.” The embargo, like the war itself, came as a surprise and a shock. Yet the pathway to both in retrospect seemed in some ways unmistakable. By 1973, oil had become the lifeblood of the world’s industrial economies, and it was being pumped and circulated with very little to spare. Never before in the entire post-war period had the supply-demand equation been so tight, while the relationships between the oi...