The danger that the pro-Western zone might become the victim of a sudden Communist attack from the north, as had been the case on the Korean Peninsula, injected another element of uncertainty into the overall situation in southern Vietnam. The conditions which settled over the area in the immediate aftermath of the Geneva settlement suggested this possibility since they were alarmingly similar to the conditions which had prevailed in Korea prior to the North Korean invasion of 1950. Like Korea, Vietnam was divided both geographically and ideologically: the North clearly within the orbit of the Soviet Union and Communist China, and the South under the influence of the Western powers. As in Korea in 1950, there also existed a very real armed threat to the weaker pro-Western southern state. Immediately after the Geneva cease-fire, the Viet Minh army regrouped north of the 17th parallel and was redesignated the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN). American intelligence reported that the PAVN, which numbered roughly 240,000 disciplined veterans, was being reorganized and re-equipped with Soviet and Chinese weapons in violation of the Geneva Agreement. At the same time Western intelligence sources estimated that the Viet Minh had intentionally left between 5,000 and 10,000 men south of the partition line following their withdrawal. Also done in violation of the cease-fire agreement, this meant that Communist guerrillas could be expected to surface throughout the South in the event of an outright invasion. A related condition heightened fears that a Korea-type invasion might occur in Vietnam. In South Korea a military vacuum had been allowed to form in 1949 when American units withdrew from the area. Apparently that vacuum, coupled with a statement by the American Secretary of State to the effect that the U.S. defensive perimeter in the Pacific did not include South Korea, had encouraged Communist aggression. Now, with the scheduled evacuation of French armies from Indochina by mid-1956, there emerged the distinct possibility that such a military vacuum would recur, this time in southern Vietnam. “Vietnam,” warned one American scholar familiar with the region, “may very soon become either a dam against aggression from the north or a bridge serving the communist block to transform the countries of the Indochinese peninsula into satellites of China.”[1-7] _The American Response_