BEIJING: The US saved China from a possible Soviet nuclear attack in 1969 by making a direct threat of nuclear retaliation, a Chinese state-run magazine said Thursday.
Soviet leader Loenid Brezhnev was told by Alexey Kosygin, the state premier, Oct 15, 1969, that the US had devised "detailed plans" for nuclear war with the Soviet Union if it attacked China, the Literary History Reference said in a report on its website.
Kosygin was quoted as telling Brezhnev that the US had "clearly indicated that China's interests are closely related to theirs and they have mapped out detailed plans for nuclear war against us."
The same day, Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, told Brezhnev that he had just met Henry Kissinger, the national security adviser to US president Richard Nixon.
"He clearly indicated that President Nixon considers China's interests closely related to US interests," Dobrynin was quoted as saying of the meeting with Kissinger.
"If China suffers a nuclear attack, they will deem it as the start of the third world war," the magazine quoted him as saying.
The magazine gave no source for the quotes by Kosygin and Dobrynin or other material in its report, which was presented as a history of the five times China had come under threat of nuclear attack.
The magazine is part of a publishing group under the People's Daily, the official newspaper of China's ruling Communist Party.
US politicians and historians have previously reported that the US expressed its opposition to Soviet plans for conventional or limited nuclear attacks against China in 1969.
The US was on a secret nuclear alert in October 1969 but had intended to intimidate the Soviet Union by deliberately flying nuclear-armed bombers close to Soviet territory, security analysts have said.
But most analysts said the US nuclear alert was mainly aimed at trying to force the Soviet Union to compromise over its role in Vietnam rather than its border dispute with China.
According to US national security archives, Soviet diplomats in Washington had aired the possibility of an attack on China with US officials.
Kissinger and Dobrynin met regularly in Washington in 1969 and were credited with opening channels for formal negotiations between the two sides.
Both men wrote extensive memoirs of their Cold War diplomacy, but neither of them appeared to have referred to any statement of direct nuclear threat by the United States in 1969.
According to an official Chinese government account, the tension between the Soviet Union and China eased after Kosygin travelled to Beijing to discuss the border dispute with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai Sep 11, 1969.