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With his famous other hand, Johnson signaled that the U.S. was not going to accept the North Korean action meekly. Accordingly, he called up 14,787 Air Force and Navy Reservists, mobilized 372 inactive aircraft, hinted that some ground troops might follow, and thus released hundreds of operational war planes for service in Japan and South Korea. Ironically, the Korean crisis thus gave Johnson an unsought dividend by enabling him to activate reserve units—a move he had seriously contemplated to alleviate serious shortages in Viet Nam but had rejected as too risky politically.
Act of War. Johnson's mobilization order, as every U.S. call-up has invariably done, proved of immense concern to the Russians. Almost immediately, Tass was on the air denouncing it as "a threatening act." More significantly, the move was greeted with some concern by Kosygin and his entourage, who were in New Delhi for the 18th anniversary of India's independence. In the wake of the U.S. call-up, Kosygin let it be known that the Kremlin's top leadership is more interested in a settlement than its underlings had let on. Kosygin's aides even hinted that perhaps the best way off the hook would be for the U.S. to pay a fat fine for its supposed violation of North Korean waters—as Russian trawlers had to do after being nabbed within U.S. territorial limits off Alaska last March.
The Kremlin has yet to encourage any diplomatic cooperation between the Big Two on the Pueblo affair, and just how much can be achieved without it is questionable. In any event, U.S. officials are determined to square accounts. Describing the hijacking as "an act of war," Secretary of State Dean Rusk declared grimly: "My strong advice to North Korea is to cool it. There have been enough of these incidents."
Risky Options. If Pyongyang decides not to cool it, however, the options open to the U.S. all involve serious risks. One is to storm Yonghung Bay and either retrieve Pueblo from Wonsan or destroy it—though a commando-style raid of the sort might involve heavy casualties. Seizing a North Korean ship or two would hardly be worth the effort inasmuch as the biggest, most attractive vessels Pyongyang has afloat are two 500-ton Russian-built mine sweepers. A blockade of Wonsan would mean cutting the Soviet submarine fleet off from one of its principal Far Eastern ports. Nabbing a Soviet trawler would be punishing the wrong party—though not necessarily an entirely innocent one.
Whatever the decision, it is unlikely to be a violent one until all diplomatic channels have been thoroughly explored. "We are not going to shoot from the hip." Lyndon Johnson firmly warned his advisers last week. The President wants to avoid at all events any clash that might debilitate the nation's military strength and imperil his own political stance as a man of restraint. Yet as his critics are bound to point out, the all-encompassing eye that Johnson trains on domestic affairs should have been applied as closely to military and intelligence procedures before the Pueblo embarrassment. Though —after the event—the President took great care not to get into something he cannot finish, the nation has nonetheless been confronted with an impasse from which it can expect no cheap or graceful exit.