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The Communist tactics confront the allies with a major dilemma. There are simply not enough troops to prevent small-scale infiltration and rocketing. Allied officers estimate that more or less permanent deployment of forces along the rocket ring would tie down as many as eight divisions or, counting support troops, some 100,000 men. Even then, they concede, the enemy could still get through the capital's defenses with sporadic rocket rounds and small ground incursions.
Serious Consequences. At the eighth session of the U.S.-North Vietnamese negotiations in Paris last week, Ambassador Averell Harriman delivered a blistering condemnation of the Communists' strikes on Saigon. The assaults, he charged, had been planned by North Vietnamese generals, had so far taken a toll of over 100 civilians killed, and could not have been intended to do military damage. "I want to be sure you understand that this is a situation that could have the most serious consequences for these talks," he told Xuan Thuy and Le Due Tho, Hanoi's negotiators. Harriman got his reply—not in Paris but in South Viet Nam. The Viet Cong's Liberation Radio warned Saigon residents to abandon the capital or prepare for a 100-round-per-day rocket barrage that would last for 100 days. If the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong are able to carry out their threat, the attacks might very well serve to stiffen both U.S. and South Vietnamese determination to resist. And that would be precisely the opposite of what Hanoi has set out to achieve.