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The next major crisis I witnessed came in early March 1969, and that one I did observe from New York. Fedorenko's successor Yakov Malik and I were in his office when the code cable operator gave Malik a dispatch from Moscow marked VERY URGENT. A Chinese army unit had invaded Damansky Island, in the Ussuri River on the Soviet-Chinese border, killing and wounding several dozen Soviet soldiers. This was the latest--and worst--of a series of border incidents over several years. Malik turned pale. I had seen him angry many times, but this was a level of fury I had never witnessed in him.
"Now those squint-eyed bastards will get a lesson they'll never forget," he screamed. "Who do they think they are? We'll kill those yellow sons of bitches." He raved on, calling the Chinese all the names he could think of, names in which the Russian language is rich.
The pre-eminent Soviet expert on Asia, and China in particular, was Mikhail Kapitsa. Erudite and capable, gregarious and jovial, Kapitsa would undoubtedly have moved faster if he had not received a black mark in his dossier and a deep scar on his head when, as Ambassador to Pakistan in 1961, he took up with his driver's wife. The chauffeur discovered the liaison. Rushing into the Ambassador's office, where Kapitsa was using his couch as a bed, the infuriated husband clouted the diplomat on the head with a crowbar. He might have killed Kapitsa if aides had not come to his rescue. But the incident was forgiven because Kapitsa's expertise was needed.
I later asked Kapitsa how it could have happened that more than 30 of our frontier guards had been killed on Damansky Island and why they had been so obviously unprepared to respond effectively. "The Chinese completely surprised us," he answered. "The Politburo, despite all the tensions in our relations with Peking, had no idea they would do anything like that." According to Kapitsa, the events on Damansky had had the effect of an electric shock on Moscow. The Politburo was terrified that the Chinese might make a large-scale intrusion into Soviet territory that China claimed. A nightmare vision of invasion by millions of Chinese made the Soviet leaders almost frantic. Despite our overwhelming superiority in weaponry, it would not be easy to cope with an assault of such magnitude.
Kapitsa also said the Soviet leadership had come close to using nuclear arms on China. He had been at the Politburo discussion. He said that Marshal Andrei Grechko, the Defense Minister, actively advocated a plan "once and for all to get rid of the Chinese threat." Grechko, a dim-witted martinet replaced by Dimitri Ustinov in 1976, called for unrestricted use of the multimegaton bomb known in the West as the "blockbuster." The bomb would release enormous amounts of radioactive fallout, not only killing millions of Chinese but threatening Soviet citizens in the Far East and people in other countries bordering China.
Fortunately, not many military men shared Grechko's mad, bellicose stance. In 1970 I talked with Nikolai Ogarkov, a well-educated, sophisticated and intelligent officer. Later named First Deputy Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff, he has since been demoted. Ogarkov took a more realistic view of the prospect of war with China. He felt that the Soviet Union could not attack China with a nuclear barrage because it would inevitably mean world war.