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Defense Secretary Laird warned that any Russian attempts to deliver cargo by air rather than by sea also would be stopped "by all necessary means." The U.S. promptly unleashed the most intense air interdiction drive of the war. Bombers struck targets within Haiphong and Hanoi and ranged northward to hit rail lines leading to China.
The peace overtures in Nixon's bomb-but-withdraw policy drew no immediate hopeful response. They could well be, as Nixon claimed, "the maximum of what any President of the U.S. could offer." And they might prove tempting to Hanoi—after the fate of Hué, and possibly of the entire Vietnamization program, is settled on the battlefield. At first, the Communists remained as "insolent" as Nixon had charged. The National Liberation Front's Paris negotiator, Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, scoffed: "While we are in a military situation which is favorable to our struggle, he calls for an immediate cease-fire." Celebrating the 18th anniversary of his victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu, North Viet Nam Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap defiantly declared over Hanoi radio: "We are now defeating and definitely will defeat the Nixon war—defeat completely all the adventurous and cruel escalations of the United States imperialists." But after the initial bluster, Hanoi's Le Due Tho called again for more talks in Paris.
Moscow's only formal response to the mining of the ports was an official statement charging that the U.S. was pursuing "a dangerous and slippery road" that was "fraught with serious consequences for international peace and security." The U.S.S.R. denounced the American actions as "illegal," "inadmissible" and "piratical," and demanded that U.S. disruption of air and land shipping in North Viet Nam "be canceled without delay." Peking charged that the U.S. had taken "a new grave step in escalating its war of aggression against Viet Nam." Its statement scoffed at the idea that the mining was undertaken to safeguard American soldiers. "By continuing to escalate the war in a big way," contended Peking, "the U.S. Government will only cause more American youths to lose their lives."
U.S. allies were notably cool to Nixon's action. Britain's Foreign Office called U.S. countermeasures "inevitable," but Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home noted that "we were not consulted" and said that "this is a situation of danger." In France, where some 20,000 Parisians marched to protest Nixon's action, Foreign Minister Maurice Schumann called it "a brutal worsening of the situation." The French newspaper Le Monde said that the Nixon speech, like others made by the President on the war, was "unreal—it is not an ocean which separates the California coast from Indochina but a bottomless political and cultural trench." Japan's Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, offering a rare criticism of the U.S., called the blockade "not a wise move," although he sympathized with Nixon's aims.