Word: soviet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...offensive would be limited to a "punitive lesson," and once the punishment had been meted out, the troops would withdraw. But in capitals around the world there were shudders at the ominous global implications if the war were not contained and short-lived, if it were to provoke direct Soviet intervention or retaliation on behalf of their Vietnamese client. It was a heyday for alarmists: "I would bet that it won't happen?but we are very much in danger of a third world war. It could be starting at this moment," warned New York Senator Daniel Moynihan. Administration advisers...
...Chinese shock troops, led by General Yang Teh-chih, China's deputy field commander in the Korean War, had not tangled directly with Viet Nam's crack regular army?battle-tested by victorious successive campaigns in South Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia and equipped with the latest sophisticated Soviet hardware...
...battlefield. They issued virulent denunciations of Chinese conduct, including alleged atrocities and biological warfare. Radio Hanoi claimed that Chinese warplanes bombed factories, power plants and communications centers, inflicting "terrible" damage and civilian casualties, and that Chinese artillery fired "chemical shells" at border targets. Backing up its ally, the Soviet Union accused Chinese troops of indiscriminately burning down villages and shooting women and children. Pravda, in a dispatch from Lang Son, alleged that a Chinese unit intercepted a civilian bus on a country road and executed all the passengers...
Irate at the maltreatment of the Chinese, Peking?which had provided Hanoi with an estimated $14 billion in aid over the past two decades?abruptly cut off 21 current assistance projects. In June, as the last Chinese aid technicians went home, Hanoi yielded to longstanding Soviet blandishments and formally jumped into Moscow's economic orbit as a member of the Communist trade alliance, COMECON...
...November Moscow and Hanoi formalized their alliance in a 25-year Soviet-Vietnamese treaty of friendship, which was signed with much ceremony in Moscow by Leonid Brezhnev, Premier Aleksei Kosygin and the Vietnamese Communist Party head, Le Duan, as well as Premier Pham Van Dong. Inside the usual bouquet of trade and cultural agreements there was no mistaking the glaring military nutshell: an ambiguous degree of mutual defense, to the extent of "consultations and appropriate effective measures to ensure the peace and security of their countries." For Peking the treaty was a stinging political rebuke...