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U.S. planners are studying the options open to them should Russia push into a "grey area" country—partial or full mobilization, activation of reserve units, immediate airlifting of additional U.S. troops to Western Europe, full-alert status for strike aircraft and for troops on the frontiers of the Communist world. Such moves would be coupled with a grave new warning to Moscow, and no doubt a call on the White House-Kremlin hot line.
Any Socialist Country. The Russians seemed to go out of their way last week to demonstrate that such contingency plans might well be needed. In a speech in Warsaw, Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev defiantly reasserted the new Soviet doctrine that has come to bear his name. Russia, he said, has the duty and the right to intervene not only in Communist countries like Czechoslovakia that are within the East bloc, but also, for that matter, in "any socialist country" where the forces of imperialism and capitalism and bourgeois revisionism threaten to make a come back. In repeating the justification for taking over in Czechoslovakia, Brezhnev cited a novel new source: an unnamed U.S. magazine that had outlined "precisely what was expected" by the West in Prague had not Moscow moved.*
The Russians were equally adamant in defending the buildup of their fleet in the Mediterranean (see following story). "The Soviet Union is known to be a Black Sea and, hence, Mediterranean power," the government newspaper Izvestia proclaimed, declaring that Soviet ships were in the Mediterranean to stay. In Red Star, the organ of the Soviet Defense Ministry, Vice Admiral Nikolai Smirnov said it was "imperative for the Soviet Union, in the interests of security," to strengthen its fleet. The presence of Soviet ships in the Mediterranean, the admiral wrote, "does not allow the Sixth Fleet to carry out the Pentagon's designs with impunity and behave as unceremoniously as before."
*In the November FORTUNE, Herman Kahn, director of the Hudson Institute research organization, wrote that most experts in the West anticipated that, without Soviet intervention, Czechoslovakia would start trading with West Germany, permit the establishment of strong Western cultural influences, allow a "general atrophy" of the Communist Party and the eventual flowering of social democracy.
All of that, in turn, the experts believed, would lead to the fall of Communist Party Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka in Poland and "a likely eventual loss of the Soviet hold over East Germany."