On Oct. 13, 1969, unknown to the American public, President Richard M. Nixon put the nation’s nuclear forces on high alert. For more than two weeks various unified combatant commands raised their readiness levels, while Navy surface ships and nuclear submarines stepped up activities worldwide. However, unlike the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, this Cold War military operation was shrouded in secrecy—so much so that not even the generals of the commands themselves were briefed on its exact purpose. A prominent theory among historians is that the alert was in response to a potential Soviet nuclear strike on China.
The Chinese had been openly preparing for just such a possibility. That fall Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Mao Zedong had officially placed his country on a war footing. The national economy was mobilized, factories were converted to military use and evacuated into mountains, and Beijing scrambled to construct a massive underground city to shelter from nuclear attack. On October 17 the CCP placed all People’s Liberation Army (PLA) units on emergency wartime condition—the Chinese equivalent of the Pentagon’s DEFCON 1.
Seven years after the Cuban standoff the world was once again on the verge of nuclear war. This time, however, the world’s leading communist powers were pitted against each other in a conflict that traces its origins to a border clash six months earlier on a tiny riverine island in a remote corner of northeast Asia.
(Chinese for “Rare Treasure Island”) bisects the Ussuri River, which marks the border between northeast China and the Russian Far East. The vast surrounding landscape, stretching from the Amur River north to the Stanovoy Range, is a region the Chinese traditionally referred to as Outer Manchuria. By the 19th century, as the declining Qing dynasty was beleaguered by internal rebellion and the Opium Wars, imperial Russia encouraged settlers to encroach on the region. In the 1860 Convention of Peking, at the close of the
