Why 1969 USSR-China conflict has crucial lessons for Iran & Israel

The Print

3 days ago

Few underlying questions, though, have been resolved by the ceasefire. Experts who have studied the bomb damage to Iran's key nuclear facilities at Fordow and Isfahan have concluded the strikes left some key infrastructure untouched . Even more important, the country's stockpile of enriched uranium is intact, they claim.
The tenuous ceasefire between Iran and Israel—imposed, in part, by a verbal bunker-busting bomb dropped by President Donald Trump—has brought some calm to a region increasingly concerned by the prospect of a protracted, destabilising conflict, and a world terrified by the prospect of more economic dislocation.
Far from the ochre-red walls of his home in the Zhongnanhai, the willow-wreathed secret garden where his imperial predecessors had once begun their mornings with cold swallows-nest soup, Mao Zedong knew the hammer of the Soviet Union was rising—threatening to crack his regime open like an egg. Twenty-seven to 34 divisions of Soviet troops had collected along the border with China in the autumn of 1969, comprising some 270,000 to 290,000 men backed by tanks, artillery, helicopters and more. Missiles, armed with 500 kiloton nuclear warheads, lurked near the shores of Lake Baikal.
The United States' intelligence community assesses that Iran has not yet made the political decision to build a nuclear bomb—and is at least a year away from having the technology to develop one. But there's no telling if or when Israel might determine that its existential security justifies further attacks.
There's no telling, either, if Iran might one day decide it needs nuclear weapons. The incentives for Iran to acquire one are significant. Facing severe international sanctions since 1979, it has been denied technologies to modernise its armed forces or even protect its own airspace. A weapon capable of destroying entire cities is a persuasive argument.
In 1965, the USSR and China—one with an arsenal capable of annihilating the world, the other with a crude inventory that might not have survived an enemy first strike—considered remarkably similar issues.
Generals on both sides considered the prophecy made by Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamato, as he planned the brilliant attack that almost brought the US Navy to its knees in 1941: 'For the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.'
The end of a romance
Like Iran and Israel, which once cooperated on a guided missile programme, shared intelligence on adversaries, and established a strong diplomatic relationship, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China entered the post-Second World War era as intimate allies, with large-scale loans for development projects and engineering support. In 1957, Moscow committed to providing China with a prototype atomic weapon, as well as equipment to enrich uranium hexafluoride—the building block of weapons-grade fissile material.
This kind of cooperation was not uncommon during the Cold War: As scholar Mustafa Kibaroglu points out, the US trained a cadre of nuclear engineers in Iran, while France and Germany sold Iran uranium enrichment technologies.
Visiting Moscow in 1949, Mao called for 'ten thousand years of friendship and teamwork.' Later, in 1950, the two countries signed a treaty of friendship, alliance and mutual assistance. Although the Soviet Union declined to commit aircraft to support the People's Republic's one-million-strong army in North Korea, it proved generous in providing both industrial and military assistance.
From 1954, though, the Soviet-Chinese relationship began to experience severe strains. The dispute was, among other things, an argument between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Mao over the legacy of the tyrant Joseph Stalin. China, however, also saw that a re-industrialising USSR was seeking to repair its relationship with the West.
Then, in 1959, the Soviet Union pulled the plug on its nuclear cooperation with China, as it began negotiations on a nuclear-weapons test ban treaty. Moreover, all Soviet personnel were withdrawn from China the next year – a devastating blow to the country's nuclear and military programmes.
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Toward war
Like so many crises, the killing began over nothing, in the middle of nowhere. For over a hundred years, People's Liberation Army troops stationed in Southeast China had looked across the Ussuri River, knowing that the lands of Khabarovsk and Primorsky Krai had once been theirs. The Treaty of Peking, signed in 1860, established the eastern border of China and Imperial Russia along the Ussuri and Amur rivers, as part of a carve-up of lands imposed jointly with the United Kingdom and France. Weakened by war, Qing China had no choice but to accept iniquitous terms.
From 1968 to 1969, former Soviet military commander Yuri Babansky later recalled, PLA troops began to intrude into the ice-covered Damansky Island, armed with axes, bats, and sometimes guns. Like on the Line of Actual Control, these skirmishes involved no gunfire.
But things escalated rapidly. The first battle deaths came in January 1968, when five PLA soldiers were killed by Soviet troops, in one of the hand-to-hand skirmishes. Then, in December 1968 and February 1969, nine separate clashes broke out, which saw warning gunshots fired for the first time.
Early on the morning of 2 March 1969, PLA troops arrived on the island and dug foxholes. Later that day, as a Soviet patrol passed by, some 300 PLA soldiers emerged from their defences and opened fire. Although the PLA was pushed back, even more severe fighting broke out on 15 March. This time, scholar Michael Gerson records, over 2,000 PLA troops were confronted by Soviet forces backed by the brand-new T62 tank, artillery and air power.
The Soviet Union's efforts to defuse the crisis were rejected. Premier Alexei Kosygin, Gerson writes, attempted to call Mao on a direct telephone line that had been set up between the former allies. The Chinese operator, however, refused to connect the call, calling Kosygin a 'revisionist element' before hanging up.
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The nuclear threat
From declassified documentation, it's clear the Soviets seriously considered settling the problem through nuclear means. At a meeting at the Beef and Bird Restaurant in Washington, DC, on 18 August 1969, Soviet diplomat Boris Davydov asked his counterpart, William Stearman, 'point blank what the US would do if the Soviet Union attacked and destroyed China's nuclear facilities.' The US, historians William Burr and Jeffrey Richelson have recorded, had made the same proposal to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1960—and hoped it might still be on the table.
Less than a week earlier, though, the eminent scholar Allen Whiting had met with President Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, and made the argument that Soviet-China tensions offered the US an opportunity to split the bloc. Whiting's paper, now declassified, led the United States to reach out to Mao through various channels, seeing if there could be a diplomatic opening.
There was, however, no consensus in the US Government at this stage. Former Central Intelligence Agency officer William Hyland, for example, argued in a top-secret paper that a limited China-Soviet war, ending with the destruction of China's nuclear weapons, would be in the best interests of the United States.
Finally, the United States chose to remain neutral in the spiralling crisis. The CIA estimated, Gerson writes, that the PLA had fewer than 10 single-stage, liquid-fueled DF-2 medium-range ballistic missiles and a handful of strategic bombers. This force, according to the CIA, could be wiped out in a Soviet first strike.
To Soviet strategists, though, there was a more complex threat. Ever since the Korean War, China had learned that its vast geographical mass and gargantuan population constituted a powerful deterrent. Even though Soviet Defence Minister Andrei Grechko argued for multi-megaton assaults on the PLA, his colleagues feared that China would absorb the losses and then attack Blagoveshchensk, Vladivostok, and Khabarovsk, as well as crucial nodes of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. That would bring war inside the Soviet Union itself.
For their part, however, China's leaders became increasingly concerned that the Soviet Union was prepared to carry out its threats. Lin Biao, the marshal of the PLA, and Mao, now authorised talks to defuse tensions. The two men, Gerson records, were terrified as Premier Alexei Kosygin's plane arrived in Beijing, fearing it might house special forces or even a nuclear weapon.
The lessons of the crisis for the Iran-Israel war are many and profound. For one, China learned that a nation with a fledgling nuclear arsenal could not hope to deter a significant power. The weapons were good for show, but little else. For its part, the Soviet Union feared becoming mired in a war without end. The annihilation of its enemy was inevitable, but would come with costs that just weren't worth paying.
For its part, the US would capitalise on the schism between China and the Soviets, with Kissinger making his now-famous secret visit to Beijing in 1971. That would unleash a series of events, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of China as a peer competitor to the US itself.
The most important lesson, though, is the simplest one: not all problems can be solved by bombing. In 1969, both China and the USSR learned they were risking catastrophic outcomes for marginal gains. That's a lesson Iran and Israel should be considering with great care.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)