Operation Smallbridge: Chester Ronning, the Second Indochina War, and the Challenge to the United States in Asia
In 1966 Canadian diplomats and politicians sought to bring the United States and North Vietnam to the negotiating table. Canada9s secret search for peace, code-named Operation Smallbridge, was led by retired
 diplomat Chester Ronning, who twice traveled to North Vietnam. Although Ronning9s first mission convinced him that Hanoi was willing to discuss terms, U.S. escalation of the war continued. On his second
 mission, Ronning discovered that Washington9s rejection of Hanoi9s overture had hardened the official attitude in North Vietnam. Ronning may have exaggerated the breakthrough from his earlier visit, and
 his efforts may have unrealistically raised expectations for a settlement. Instead of bringing the adversaries closer together, Operation Smallbridge inadvertently made the Vietnam conflict and its belligerents
 more intractable and the prospects for a peaceful political solution more unlikely.
China and the Vietnam Wars
It is by now well known that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was deeply involved in the Vietnam wars (both the French and the American). From 1950 to 1975, Beijing provided the Vietnamese communists with substantial military, financial and other material support. In addition to delivery of a large quantity of ammunition and military equipment, high-ranking Chinese military and political advisers participated in the Viet Minh’s decision-making during the French war, and, from 1965 to 1970, Beijing despatched as many as 320 000 Chinese engineering and air defence troops to North Vietnam, significantly enhancing Hanoi’s capacities in fighting against the Americans.
APPLICATION OF THE FINITE ELEMENT METHOD TO ROTARY-WING AEROELASTICITY.
Recent research in rotary-wing aeroelasticity has indicated that all fundamental problems in this area are inherently nonlinear. The non-linearities in this problem are due to the inclusion of finite slopes, due to moderate deflections, in the structural, inertia and aerodynamic operators associated with this aeroelastic problem. In this paper the equations of motion, which are both time and space dependent, for the aeroelastic problem are first formulated in P.D.E. form. Next the equations are linearized about a suitable equilibrium position. The spatial dependence in these equations is discretized using a local Galerkin method of weighted residuals resulting in a finite element formulation of the aeroelastic problem. As an illustration the method is applied to the coupled flap-lag problem of a helicopter rotor blade in hover. Comparison of the solutions with previously published solutions establishes the convergence properties of the method. It is concluded that this formulation is a practical tool for solving rotary-wing aeroelastic stability or response problems.