Firecracker No. 2

A swarm of mosquitoes may create a noise like thunder.

--Old Chinese Saying

It had been predicted for nearly three months, and for the past two weeks U.S. seismologists had kept their ears to the ground in hopes of catching the faint tremor. High-flying U-2 reconnaissance jets, mounted with fallout-collecting air scoops, stood ready along the shores of Asia to fly at a moment's notice. Then, sure enough, another mushroom cloud rose slowly into the skies over Lop Nor in China's harsh Takla Makan Desert.

Hardly a Surprise. Peking's second nuclear explosion was a bit bigger than its first of seven months ago. It came on with at least 20 kilotons or, roughly, the same amount of destructive power carried by the Hiroshima bomb*--but it would be days before an analysis of its slowly spreading fallout would tell if the Chinese had advanced the state of their nuclear art. In any event, the blast was hardly a surprise--or a new reason for fear. Said Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin: "I do not see a direct threat of nuclear war now."

His guest in the Kremlin, India's Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri, was cooler still. "We were expecting it even earlier," Shastri remarked.

Even before the explosion, Peking had continued its increasingly aggressive stance over the "imperialist threat" in Viet Nam. In a Red Flag editorial that scored the U.S. and Russia with equal ferocity, Army Chief of Staff Lo Juiching described Lyndon Johnson as ''more insidious and deadly than Hitler" and stomped with his other foot at the Soviets for their reluctance to engage in full involvement in Southeast Asia. "Whoever wants to satisfy his greed at the expense of others," wrote Lo, "is lifting a rock that will inevitably fall on his own toes."

"No Real Risks." To back up Lo's bluster, Red China passed the word that its 200 million-man (and woman) militia had gone into serious training. The mainland press reported shrilly that units on the Yunnan border were engaged in intensive bayonet and machine-gun drill; men and women in blue boiler suits marched briskly through Peking streets with rifles slung.

One Peking factory even altered its assembly line to produce Chinese lantern slides branding the U.S. as the "aggressor." And word filtered out that rail traffic between Peking, Shanghai and Canton had been disrupted--perhaps due to troop or supply movements to the Southeast Asian border.

Or perhaps due to Chinese design. As well as anyone in the West, Peking knows the value of psychological warfare. But the Chinese would be foolish to commit themselves to a major ground war against the U.S. at this time. Said one Asia expert: "The benefits to China would be nil; they are now getting all of the advantages [from Viet Nam] with no real risks." And, since it will be at least five years before even the primitive 20-kiloton package exploded at Lop Nor can be delivered onto global targets, it seemed likely that the current Chinese thunder is being generated by nothing more than a swarm of anxious mosquitoes.

* Box score for the five members of the Nuclear Club: U.S., 341 blasts; Soviet Union, 127; Britain, 24; France, 5; Red China, 2.

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