The Dikes: Battered by Floods or Bombs?

FOR weeks a controversy has raged between Washington and Hanoi over whether U.S. planes are intentionally bombing the intricate flood-control system of North Viet Nam's Red River Delta. Hanoi charges that some dikes have been bombed; Washington admits only that a few dikes located near military targets may have been damaged.

North Viet Nam's dikes are a massive, 2,500-mile-long network of earthen dams with sluice gates, more like the flood-control system of The Netherlands than anything else in Asia. They protect not only the agricultural economy of North Viet Nam but also the lives of 15 million people who live in the Delta.

The dikes can be traced at least as far back as the 2nd century A.D. Indeed, one Southeast Asian scholar believes that the ancient need for a method of controlling the annual rampages of the Red and Thai Binh rivers was a primary cause of the development of a central government in northern Viet Nam. The people realized that a coordinated plan for flood control was necessary and gradually created a government to handle the task.

Last year's flooding, which badly damaged the network, was the worst in history. The U.S. Defense Department has insisted that far worse damage to the dikes was caused by last year's floods (see cut below) than by this year's U.S. bombing. The State Department, in a sort of pre-emptive strike against further charges by Hanoi, has added that North Viet Nam faces a "higher than normal probability" of severe flooding later this summer.

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