A Sino-Soviet Shooting Script

The last hour before another chilly Siberian dawn has arrived, and the Soviet sentries on the snow-covered Ussuri River island of Damansky are nodding slightly. Suddenly, with a blare of bugles and raucous shouts of "Mao Tse-tung!" white-cloaked Chinese Communist troops hurl themselves across the ice toward the Russian positions. Mortars and heavy artillery pour flaming metal onto the defenders. The Russians fight back bravely, but they are quickly overwhelmed. Within an hour, the Chinese occupy the island they call Chen Pao.

From the permanent Soviet border post at Nizhne-Mikhailovka, four miles distant, word of the attack flashes to Far Eastern military headquarters at Khabarovsk and on to Moscow. Soviet casualties have been heavy, and hard-liners among the Kremlin leadership persuade other Politburo members that Mao must be crushed now, before China becomes a nuclear superpower. Fast-moving, heavily equipped Russian armored columns stab across the Amur and Ussuri rivers into Manchuria, brushing aside China's infantry. A Soviet armored division knifes into Manchuria from the west, across the Mongolian border. Fleets of Ilyushin bombers pound Chinese airfields, troop concentrations and industrial centers across the entire northeast. China's outnumbered jets are swept from the skies, and within a week the major Manchurian cities of Shenyang and Harbin have fallen to the Soviet pincers. Linking up, the Russian columns race south toward Peking, then halt 50 miles away.

Radio Moscow beams an ultimatum: Either Mao and his clique step down, or Peking will be seized. To reinforce the warning, Soviet heavy bombers destroy China's nuclear-testing-and-development centers at Lop Nor and Lanchow. Stubbornly, Mao decides to fight on. Peking falls, and to the west, Soviet divisions surge into Sinkiang, to be received without conspicuous resentment by the tribal peoples of the area, long oppressed by the Chinese. The Russians move no farther south. Aware of Chinese skills at guerrilla warfare, Moscow orders that a new frontier be set up roughly along the 38th parallel. China is to be left to wither, stripped of its nuclear potential, shorn of its most important industrial complex, spiritually returned to the caves of Yenan.

It has not happened; it may never happen. But the two recent battles over Damansky Island have raised the specter of such an all-out war between the two giant Communist nations, and something like the above scenario must be haunting the generals in Moscow and Peking. Communist China's acting Chief of Mission in Geneva, Pi Hsien-Sheng, summed up China's view of Soviet policy last week by asking: "Yesterday Czechoslovakia, now Chen Pao. Who knows what country tomorrow?" For the moment, both countries have tightly controlled their responses to border clashes, and both have capitalized on the incidents. China is using the battles to spur national unity in preparation for the forthcoming ninth party congress. Russia is citing Maoist intransigence as a reason for wavering East European allies to rally to the Kremlin's side at the next world conference of Communist parties. Neither nation, however, has proved wholly predictable in the past, and the comparative restraint that both have displayed thus far could vanish quickly.

Steps Toward War. As Western analysts see it, several intermediate steps are possible well before the point of full-scale war. The present local clashes, for instance, might be expanded into sudden over-the-border raids aimed at small military or agricultural installations.

Guerrilla warfare might be instigated by one side or the other, particularly by the Russians, since the Uigurs and Kazakhs who live along China's side of the Sinkiang border have been susceptible to Soviet pressures in the past. Hit-and-run air strikes, first at minor targets, then at more vital areas, would prove less costly than ground incursions in terms of men and materiel. All-out air strikes, however, would almost certainly provoke a declaration of war.

The most recent border clash, on March 15, fell far short of being a decisive incident. Details being released gradually in Moscow, however, assert that the Chinese force involved was the equivalent of a regiment--about 3,000 men. It is in the Soviet interest to portray China's belligerence in lurid terms. Moscow's reports were strongly phrased and probably exaggerated. The Chinese employed their Korea-proven "human wave" attacks--and Moscow claims that Russian casualities were heavy, although exact totals have not been released so far. A Soviet counterattack, using armored cars, reportedly cleared the island. Soviet Colonel Demokrat V. Leonov was killed, and the scale of fighting indicates that both sides probably suffered substantially.

That Yellow Gang. Echoes of the clash reached Eastern Europe last week. In Budapest, at the first full-dress Warsaw Pact meeting since the invasion of Czechoslovakia, a high-powered Soviet delegation led by Premier Aleksei Kosygin and Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev pressed their allies to sign an already prepared document condemning the Chinese. Rumanian President Nicolae Ceausescu refused, standing his ground in the face of Brezhnev's charges that he was "taking the side of that yellow gang." The meeting's official session, in fact, lasted only two hours, the shortest on record. In the end, it produced only a declaration calling for a Europe-wide consultative meeting on "questions of security and cooperation," hardly a new point. Clearly, the East Europeans felt that the trouble in Asia was a problem for Peking and Moscow to settle between themselves.

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