In Maryland, just a few miles north of Washington, DC, the National Security Agency had intercepted the coded texts from both sides and with the greatest urgency possible notified President Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of their contents. The Sino–Soviet War had hit a phase that had been postulated to be possible but was not believed to be plausible. Yet it was here, now—a true major thermonuclear exchange was about to take place. The war had reached a point that could not be ignored. The next stage would involve unthinkable death tolls in China and around the world. The madness was about to spread beyond the theater of operations of a couple of communist thugs to their neighbors and bystanders and even to the self-focused United States. The information was instantly communicated on secure channels to the NATO leadership and emergency staffs met deep in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, to develop contingency war plans, while President Johnson met with his National Security staff to open the hot line to Moscow. The Soviets must be convinced to stop their war and any further nuclear detonations at all costs.
The collective judgment of the free world leaders was that the Sino– Soviet War was past any hope of containment or settlement between the parties. The UN had been impotent to direct a solution and the situation had developed very rapidly to an exceptionally dangerous state. India and Pakistan had gone to full mobilization, as had the Republic of China in Taiwan and North and South Korea. Japan was in desperate straits, as it was in the path of the majority of the downwind radioactive products and was already suffering its first casualties. Japan was requesting more US troops for its defense and the Diet was meeting to consider suspension of its constitution in order to assemble powerful Japanese armed forces once again. Europe was mobilizing, too, as the communist powers increased their levels of alert. The direct equivalency between the major powers had apparently nullified the threat of a major nuclear exchange, but it seemed that no one had seriously considered the possibility of a conflict between putative allies evolving into a general nuclear war. Nonetheless, it was a fact and it was the situation that threatened the world in the late summer of 1968.
It was clear to Johnson and the NATO leaders that the Chinese and the Russians were not going to slow down on their own and that all of the diplomatic pressure from the United Nations was not going to affect a thing. LBJ had called Brezhnev on the hot line but was told, in effect, to mind his own business. The collective wisdom of his cabinet and the key members of Congress amounted to scaling up the US and NATO Defense Condition (DEFCON) readiness alert levels to prepare for potential threats against the US or Europe or the West’s Asian allies. That made a certain sense, since the elevation of the alert status would put the major defense forces in the proper positions for an adequate response if one was required but, more importantly, it sent a signal to both sides that the US and its allies were ready to get moving if the dangers began to head in their direction. This situation had the White House working late, seven days a week and rankled LBJ because he should by all rights be campaigning for his reelection right now. The Republicans had nominated Richard Nixon and he never underestimated the political skills of Tricky Dick. It did not feel like the right thing to do, but he followed his advisors’ recommendations and issued the orders to bring the NATO alliance to DEFCON 2,8 War Alert.
The news that the Americans and their allies had mobilized their military forces to high alert ran through the Soviet nomenklatura like an electric shock. The Soviets never trusted the West—and this was a perfect example of Western perfidy. The Soviet Union was in an important and difficult struggle with China and the West was showing its true colors by threatening war. Well, so be it. If the capitalist world was ready to risk fighting the combined might of the socialist powers, they would get what they deserved. The Soviet Union had withstood the most modern and capable enemy in history, fascist Germany. It had withstood the worst that the Nazis could deliver and it could withstand the worst that the capitalists could send, too. Sergei Efremovich Ivanov was summoned to the Kremlin late that evening to explain how this turn of events could happen, given his predictions a few short months before. In the meantime, the lights in the major cities of the Soviet Union were out and the atomic shelters were stocked and exercised as the Soviet government and the long-suffering Soviet people prepared for the worst. To match the actions of the capitalists, the Kremlin issued orders to raise the readiness of Strategic Rocket Forces that were dedicated to American and European targets and to ensure that the long-range Tupolev 95 squadrons were at their highest state of preparedness. Remaining Soviet naval forces had sortied from Murmansk, the Baltic, Petropavlovsk, and of course, from the Vietnamese ports in preparation for the worst.
Confrontation
“Our enemies have always made the same mistake. In my lifetime—in depression and in war—they have awaited our defeat. Each time, from the secret places of the American heart, came forth the faith they could not see or that they could not even imagine. It brought us victory. And it will again.”
President Lyndon Johnson, Inaugural Address, 20 January 19659
The intelligence agencies of all the major powers listened in awe as the situation rapidly escalated. As soon as President Johnson was notified of the latest series of escalations, he reluctantly matched the movements of the Soviets with his own. The Atlantic Fleet sailed from Norfolk and Charleston and Mayport and the Pacific Fleet sailed from San Diego and Pearl Harbor and Subic Bay and the Strategic Air Command kept its fully-armed B-52s just minutes away from their fail-safe points. Carrier battle groups approached the Western Pacific and no one had any illusions that this mobilization would end up well.
President Johnson attended to his part of the worst world crisis in history and none of his staff could tell him what he had to do to stop this thing. He had the hawks in his NSC and the Congress telling him to “Blow the hell out of ’em, before they have a chance to do it to us.” He also had the doves from his party telling him to back off and sit this one out. He did get one idea from a professor at Harvard to approach Brezhnev at a personal and confidential level to assure him that the US and its allies did not want war. The professor even offered to help Brezhnev approach the Chinese to reach a cease-fire and to help broker a political solution between the communist powers. The reason Johnson paid any attention at all to this professor was that everyone he called said that this guy was one of the best. He had to try everything and anything, so he sent a classified message to the embassy in Moscow to expect a Doctor Kissinger within 24 hours and to do everything they could to set up a meeting between Brezhnev and this Kissinger as soon as possible. Johnson wanted to see him to meet him face to face before he left but there was no time. He wondered if Kissinger was a Democrat or a Republican.
When the Chinese and the Soviet leadership received word of the West’s escalations, their plans to conduct major nuclear strikes against each other were delayed, to watch the capitalists and to be ready. Thus the war had bogged down again as both sides dealt with massive casualties and huge areas of contaminated ground. The weapons that were supposed to decide battles were superb at killing people but formed large obstacles to movement when they were used. The persistent nerve agents had the viscosity and evaporation rate of motor oil and the areas that had been sprayed were lethal for months when anyone’s skin or lungs came in contact with the smallest part of the poisons. The really difficult part was that the presence of those poisons was not obvious and it took slow, laborious procedures to determine which areas were actually contaminated and which really were not. Both sides used prisoners of war to facilitate the decision process.
The nuclear residual danger areas were much worse. Weapon development to that point had been necessarily rapid and, while the weapons were powerfully destructive, they were also enormously inefficient. The residue of fissile material was scattered for tens of thousands of square miles and in combination with the radioactive products of the explosion itself, made the areas deadly for centuries to come.
Kissinger was conduct
ed from the embassy to the Kremlin by special convoy of limousines and was taken directly to meet Secretary Brezhnev, Premier Kosygin and the closest staff members. After courtesies were exchanged, Kissinger got to the heart of his mission. With just Brezhnev, Kosygin and the appointed interpreter, Kissinger laid out a proposal to broker a cease-fire and disengagement conducted by the NATO and SEATO representatives in complete secrecy from the rest of the world. If Brezhnev approved, they would approach the Chinese government directly and would arbitrate the issues to be resolved to effect an honorable disengagement for both sides. He also offered to get an aid package from the West approved to help restore the damage sustained by the parties. Best of all, he offered a new relationship with the Soviets, initially kept secret except to the highest levels of government, as part of this offer. Brezhnev had no reason to trust this professor or to believe that he could pull off a deal like this, yet this approach appeared to offer a chance to bring the world back from the brink of total destruction with no more losses than they had already sustained. Best of all, this deep-voiced professor grasped the Soviet need for privacy, for an under-the-table deal was the sort that they trusted the most. Time was critical; Brezhnev agreed to Kissinger’s plan and passed orders to the Strategic Forces to reduce their defense posture slightly.
The initial success of Kissinger’s mission electrified the Johnson State Department and the President himself. The go-ahead to fly to Shanghai had been obtained through trusted sources within China and, only a few short hours later, the professor was on his way to meet with Chou En Lai and the senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. The same technique worked for them and, within hours, the first cease-fire orders were issued and the armistice negotiations begun. The world did not know how it had happened, but little by little things began to return to normal. The fighting stopped and stayed stopped and the naval and air and strategic rocket forces returned to the posture of lethal vigilance that they had assumed months before. US and allied teams of experts worked with the Chinese to monitor and decontaminate the sites where the nuclear and chemical weapons were used and financial aid was quietly approved and disbursed to pay for rebuilding and rehabilitation. President Johnson did not benefit from Kissinger’s mission, however. Instead he was handily defeated in the 1968 elections when it was revealed that Kissinger had been advised by none other than Richard M. Nixon, the Republican candidate and now the President of the United States. The relationships started by that fateful mission reverberated for years to come and eventually caused the dismantling of the mechanisms that put the world on the edge of instant destruction.
In the lowest levels of the Lubyanka Prison, Sergei Efremovich Ivanov had much to contemplate. Like any other member of the Soviet leadership, he well knew how quickly one could rise to the heights and just as quickly descend to the cell he occupied now. It did not make any difference that, after all, he had been right again. The problem was that he was seen as supporting the devastatingly poor decision to attack China. All of those who had not covered their tracks well enough were designated as Traitors to the Revolution and he had not covered any tracks at all. In the quiet of that small cell, late at night, he allowed himself to admire those unpredictable Americans. It was hard to be an expert about people who did not follow a consistent path!
The Reality
Of course, the United States did get deeply involved in trying to stop the “National Liberation War” in Vietnam. This ended in 1975 in victory for the Vietnamese communist forces and an apparent victory for communism itself. What really happened, however was that “comfortable and sheltered” Americans spent eight long years defending an ally against the North Vietnamese and the combined efforts of the Soviets and the Chinese and all of their allies and, in doing so, lost 56,000 of their best young men in the process. This message was not lost on the communists or the rest of the world; it said that Americans were tougher than they looked; it said that Americans were willing to expend their children in a prolonged, miserable fight to protect an ally. Most importantly it told the communists that these National Liberation Wars—externally supported civil wars—were expensive and inconclusive and not worth pursuing in the future. There were no more after Vietnam. There were proxy wars, such as in Angola with Cuban mercenaries, and there was even a direct intervention in Afghanistan but no more National Liberation Wars. In the end, it was the determination of American fighting men in Vietnam that stayed in the appraisals of the will of the United States and when Presidents Nixon and Ford and Reagan kept up the diplomatic pressure on the Soviets and the communist world, it was the image of the courage of those young Americans that stayed in view.
That, in the end, is how a major power should show itself to the world.
Bibliography
Erickson, John, Soviet Military Power, Royal United Services Institute, London, 1971.
Garthoff, Raymond I., Soviet Military Policy, A Historical Analysis, Praeger, New York, 1966.
Griffith, William E., Sino–Soviet Relations 1964–1965, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1966.
Hazard, John N., The Soviet System of Government, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1964.
Hinton, Harold C., The Bear at the Gate, Chinese Policymaking Under Soviet Pressure, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, DC, 1971. Hudson, G.F., Lowenthal, Richard, and MacFarquhar, Roderick, The Sino–Soviet Dispute, Praeger, New York, 1961.
Jackson, WA. Douglas, The Russo–Chinese Borderlands, Zone of Peaceful Contact or Potential Conflict?, Van Nostrand, Princeton, NJ, 1962.
Pretty, R.T., and Archer, D.H.R., Jane’s Weapon Systems, London, 1968.
Tanner, Henry, “Moscow is Quiet,” New York Times, October 16, 1964.
Notes
1. Hinton, Harold C., The Bear at the Gate.
2. A top-quality Soviet limousine that was only available to top Party leaders, available in black, black or black.
3. Estimated as 150 million men of fighting age available for call up, 3 million men under arms as of 1967. Source: Jane’s Weapon Systems 1967.
4. Hinton, Harold C., The Bear at the Gate.
*5. There are unconfirmed intelligence reports that the Republic of China’s Navy took advantage of this confusion to settle scores with a number of escaping Chinese vessels.
6. Free Rocket Over Ground, an effective but indifferently accurate truck-transported artillery rocket with chemical or nuclear or conventional warheads. The ‘accurate’ part is probably not all that important with the nuclear warhead.
*7. Estimated yields, based on DOE seismic station data. US Department of Energy Report, Radionuclide Contamination of Soil Samples, Northwestern China, Washington DC, 1971.
8. DEFCON from DEFense CONdition. The various levels are as follows: DEFCON 5 is normal peacetime operations; DEFCON 4 is heightened intelligence and security readiness; DEFCON 3 is increased force readiness; DEFCON 2 further increase in readiness, but less than maximum; DEFCON 1 is maximum readiness. See www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/c3i/defcon.htm
9. Source: Bartleby.com at www.bartleby.com/124/pres57.html
7
TO GO BOLDLY IN AMONGST THEM
The Invasion of North Vietnam
Kevin F. Kiley
“Take what your enemy holds dear and he will be amenable to your will.”
Sun Tzu Wu
“The sense of duty makes the victor.”
Vegetius
“In order to smash, it is necessary to act suddenly.”
Napoleon
“Gentlemen, the enemy stands behind his entrenchment, armed to the teeth. We must attack him and win, or else perish. Nobody must think of getting through any other way. If you don’t like this, you may resign and go home.”
Frederick the Great before the Battle of Leuthen: December 5, 1757
Somewhere over Laos: January 21, 1970
Colonel Arthur “Bull” Simons sat in the back of the HH-53 helicopter going over the mission in his head, wondering what had gone wrong. The
troops, pilots, and the air support had been magnificent. Everyone had done his job. The only screwup had been his. His helicopter had landed in the wrong compound, a look-alike, 400 yards from the actual target. That error was quickly rectified by immediately taking off and landing in the correct compound, after “conducting business” where they first landed. That the prisoners had been moved without American intelligence assets finding out had not been the mission commander’s fault.
Almost immediately after landing in the lookalike compound, Simons and his support group found themselves in the middle of a mass of enemy troops, over 200 of them, running around the compound wondering what had landed in the middle of it. Not wasting time, the American raiders had opened fire, with small arms and miniguns from the helicopter, shooting down or scattering all of the bad guys in moments. When little or no return fire was taken, the bird had immediately lifted off and continued the mission. They had landed and deployed in the correct target area within minutes.
Cold War Hot: Alternate Decisions of the Cold War Page 20