The weak can be rash. The powerful must be restrained.
SO said William Rogers last week after North Korean MIGs shot down a Navy EC-121 reconnaissance plane. The Secretary of State's observation was precisely to the point. The attack was the second atrocity perpetrated by North Korea in 15 months. Again the U.S. found it prudent not to strike back, and this time 31 Americans were dead. There was anger and embarrassment in the Pentagon at this new humiliation. On Capitol Hill, Mendel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, proclaimed: "There can be only one answer for America—retaliation, retaliation, retaliation!" But the predominant reaction in Congress and across the U.S. was to smother outrage with common-sense restraint. In this, the nation took its cue from Richard Nixon.
Range of Risks. For three days after the U.S. aircraft was officially declared missing, the President went ahead with business as usual at the White House. The matter did not even come up at a Cabinet meeting the morning of the announcement; it scarcely could have, because the Cabinet wives had been invited to sit in for the first time.
As with the Pueblo incident 15 months ago, the U.S. found its alternatives severely limited. The EC-121 flights over the Sea of Japan were suspended briefly as Nixon and his advisers weighed the possibilities. Because Viet Nam has first claim on U.S. resources in the Far East, and because more than 500,000 U.S. troops are still committed there, the U.S. could hardly open a second front in Asia without massive mobilization, which no one wants. Even an air strike against North Korea's MIG bases might well have provoked a new invasion of South Korea and created a range of risks including war with China and deterioration of relations with Moscow. The deliberations in Washington were not made any easier by widespread bafflement about North Korean intentions (see THE WORLD). Pyongyang could have been trying to help Hanoi by diverting U.S. forces from Viet Nam. The North Koreans could have been hoping to provoke retaliation, thus providing an excuse to renew ground war against South Korea. The most likely explanation is that they resented U.S. intelligence operations, feared that the Americans were learning too much and saw an easy way to discourage the flights while scoring a propaganda coup.
The diplomatic possibilities seemed no more attractive or useful than military ones. An appeal to the U.N. might force the Soviet Union to side with the North Koreans and lead to a Security Council deadlock. The U.S. went through the motion of protest at a Panmunjom meeting, but after it was lodged, North Korea's representative, Major General Ri Choon Sun, simply inquired: "Whom does the aircraft belong to?"
Jumpy and Pugnacious. In the end, Nixon chose a course between backing down by discontinuing the flights permanently, thus conceding the field to the North Koreans, and plunging into a military contest that the U.S. might not be willing to sustain. He announced that the flights would resume. "They will be protected," he pledged. While he refused to divulge details, it later appeared that fighter plane cover would be made available if needed—either from land bases in South Korea or from a naval task force that was being assembled, which will include several aircraft carriers.