Thin Line of Distinction

As the floodwaters have risen in North Viet Nam's Red River, so has the burgeoning controversy over whether the U.S. is deliberately bombing the ancient, intricate, 2,500-mile network of earthen dikes in the delta, where 15 million North Vietnamese peasants live. The U.S. has admitted that some dikes near military targets have been damaged accidentally, but insists that the dikes themselves were never targets for American bombs. Last week the debate took a new twist, raising the question of whether U.S. bombers are dropping delayed-action bombs, which would have the effect of hindering repairs. The answer from Washington: no--and yes.

A forceful witness was Swedish Journalist Sven Oeste, foreign editor of Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm's largest morning newspaper. During a visit to North Viet Nam, he charged that the U.S. was using such bombs as "a new method of inflicting terror on the population back of the dikes." The magnetic bombs prevented workers from using machines to fill in craters from earlier explosions, said Oeste, and some of the bombs were capable of burying themselves deep below the surface.

Near a village in Nam Ha province, said Oeste, he visited a dike where 16 bombs fell--twelve of them delayed-action. One direct hit tore a hole in a dike that protects an area in which 400,000 people live. No military objectives were in sight, said Oeste, not even a road. His conclusion: Washington was attempting to pass off the dike attacks to the U.S. public as "accidents" and "mistakes," while "at the same time making sure that Hanoi knows the attacks against the dams are a deliberate effort to force the Hanoi government to give way at the conference table."

In response to such charges, a State Department spokesman last week accused the North Vietnamese of a "monstrous lie campaign," and a White House staffer described the Swedish journalists involved in the controversy as "the conscious tools of Hanoi." The dikes are not being "targeted," Administration officials repeated, though they admitted as before that a few bombs have dropped on dikes near military targets. Some reconnaissance photographs, for instance, showed roads atop dikes that were filled with supply convoys; others showed a stretch of dike with three 37-mm. antiaircraft gun emplacements on it. The State Department at first denied Swedish reports that U.S. planes are bombing dikes with delayed-action bombs and then reversed itself.

Department of Defense sources have confirmed to TIME'S Pentagon Correspondent John Mulliken that U.S. planes are in fact dropping the Mark 36 delayed-action bomb on North Viet Nam. The magnetic Mark 36, which has extended tail fins to keep it from sinking too deeply in water or mud, is dropped on rivers and canals in an effort to stop the flow of barges carrying military supplies. The same type of bomb, with its fins retracted to effect a sharper landing, is dropped on road junctions. With its retracted fins, it sinks deep into the earth. In addition to the magnetic versions of the Mark 36, there is a nonmagnetic type equipped with a time fuse.

Thus the Administration seemed to be saying that the rivers and canals that run alongside the dikes are being targeted with delayed-action bombs. Inevitably, the matter was becoming a partisan political issue in the U.S. "It doesn't take a Philadelphia lawyer," charged Senator Edward Kennedy, "to label this policy for what it is--a policy of deliberately bombing dikes."

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