Mao: The Unknown Story

Over the next few years, Liu and his like-minded colleagues worked at getting the economy back into shape — while Mao planned revenge.

45. THE BOMB (1962–64 AGE 68–70)

BY LATE 1962, famine had eased. In the following years, while tolerating food levies on a scale that allowed his subjects to subsist, Mao began to resuscitate the pet projects that had been shelved as the result of the famine, such as satellites and nuclear submarines. And new projects joined them. When Mao was told about lasers, at the time seen only as a deadly weapon, and translated into Chinese as “the Light of Death,” si-guang, he instantly decided on huge investments in laser research, giving a characteristic order: “The Light of Death: get some people to devote entirely to this. Feed them and don’t let them do anything else.”

For now, the focus of Mao’s attention was the atomic bomb. In November 1962, a special committee was formed, chaired by Chou En-lai, to coordinate the several hundred thousand people involved and pool the whole country’s resources to produce a Bomb within two years. The concentration of resources was on a scale that astonished even a top echelon accustomed to totalitarian organization. Each of the numerous preparatory tests would take up nearly half of all China’s telecommunication lines, and much of the country, including factories, would recurrently find itself without electricity or transport, because power had been diverted for these tests.

How to protect the Bomb, and indeed his entire nuclear complex, was Mao’s constant preoccupation; and not without reason. At the tripartite (US — UK — USSR) Nuclear Test Ban talks in Moscow in July 1963, President Kennedy told his negotiator, Averell Harriman, to sound out Khrushchev about destroying Mao’s nuclear facilities: “try to elicit K[hrushchev]’s view of means of limiting or preventing Chinese nuclear development and his willingness either to take Soviet action or to accept U.S. action aimed in this direction.” Khrushchev rebuffed the approach. But Kennedy told a press conference on 1 August that a nuclear China — which, he emphasized, was “Stalinist,” “with a government determined on war as a means of bringing about its ultimate success”—posed “potentially a more dangerous situation than any we faced since the end of the Second [World] War … and we would like to take some steps now which would lessen that prospect …”

Kennedy seriously considered air strikes on China’s nuclear facilities. He was advised that the Lanzhou gaseous diffusion plant could be destroyed in such a way as to make it look like an accident, but that nuclear strikes might be needed to destroy the plutonium plant at Baotou.

After Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 (by an “oil king,” Mao told Albania’s defense minister) his successor, Lyndon Johnson, was soon toying with the idea of dropping Taiwan saboteurs to blow up the facilities at Lop Nor, China’s atomic test site.

Lop Nor and other nuclear sites deep in the Gobi Desert were sealed off by land, and everyone there, from top scientists to laborers, was completely isolated from their families and society for years, even decades. But the sites were exposed to America’s spy planes — and attack from the air, which Mao feared most.

In April 1964, Mao was told that the Bomb could be exploded that autumn. He moved at once on every front to minimize the danger of a strike on the nuclear facilities. He dealt with the Russian end by going public to remind Khrushchev that China was still a member of the Communist camp. On 12 April, the day after the test details were decided, he stepped in to rewrite a telegram to Khrushchev for the latter’s seventieth birthday. The original draft had reflected the acrimonious public relationship between the two states. Mao changed the text to make it ultra-friendly, adding a most unusual “Dear Comrade,” and stressing that their discord was “only temporary.” “In the event of a major world crisis,” he said, they would “undoubtedly stand together against our common enemy.” To conclude, he added a phrase evoking their past relationship: “Let the imperialists and reactionaries tremble before our unity …” The cable was given wide publicity in the Chinese media, and amazed everyone, as this was after months of fire-breathing public polemics targeting Khrushchev. On the eve of National Day that year, on 1 October, Mao stunned the Russians by greeting their delegate warmly, holding his hand, and repeating: “Everything will be fine; our peoples will be together.”