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They had also followed orders. Photographs, Meyers reported, showed "very little spillover" from the Hanoi target: "I counted six bombs right on the edge, but they hit the railroad that brings the POL in there from Haiphong. They cut the line." By one U.S. official's estimate, the only North Vietnamese in the capital who could have been killed were those employed in the storage area—ten at most. By contrast, the Viet Cong and North Viet Nam regulars killed 12,000 South Vietnamese civilians in 1965 alone.
Turn of the Screw. North Viet Nam with a primitive, resilient economy, can probably meet its bare needs with whatever petroleum replenishments it can dribble in through minor ports and air-harassed rail and road routes from Red China. As for its war effort below the 17th parallel, Viet Cong and "hardhat" Northern regulars were in many cases beginning to hurt for supplies even before the latest squeeze on the pipeline.
The U.S. could squeeze a lot harder. One idea already in the contingency-planning stage is to blockade the port of Haiphong with mines timed to go off 72 hours after they are laid (to give nations that trade with North Viet Nam time to get their ships out). If worst came to worst, the U.S. could destroy the power and irrigation dams in North Viet Nam's Red River Valley, flooding millions of acres of crops.
There were those in Washington, nonetheless, who hoped that, with the latest turn of the screw, Hanoi was beginning to hurt. Nor did it appear, from the immediate reaction, that Russia or Red China would do much to escalate a largely verbal commitment to the war. With a Hanoi delegation coincidentally in Moscow last week discussing further military aid, Kremlinologists believed that Russia would probably supply North Viet Nam with more MIG-21 supersonic fighters and IL-28 medium bombers, and had further promised to step up the flow of spare parts, technicians and training advisers. But the Russians did not seem eager to send in "volunteers."
As for Peking, while claiming that it had recently rejected a secret U.S. offer to make a "token withdrawal" from South Viet Nam in order to get negotiations going, Communist China went curiously out of its way to knock down fears that the escalation in Viet Nam could lead to an extension of the war. In a Chinese news-agency dispatch, Peking denounced what it called the Soviet "nonsense that the U.S. expansion of the aggressive war against Viet Nam is fraught with the danger of an atomic war and could drag the whole world into a total war." The Russians, the statement explained, have "tried to alarm people with such sensational talk" in order to persuade the Vietnamese to give up their "struggle against U.S. imperialism." Plagued by internal difficulties, militarily no match for U.S. power, and with its embryo nuclear installations highly vulnerable to U.S. retaliation, Red China, in the view of most Sinologists, can only exhort Hanoi to keep fighting.