Sino-Soviet relations on the whole continued to deteriorate. An exasperated Khrushchev withdrew the offer of nuclear assistance in 1959 and in 1960 finally withdrew altogether the Soviet experts who had been assisting in China’s development. The latter was timed to inflict maximum damage, as China was suffering from one of the greatest man-inflicted famines in history as a consequence of the Mao-inspired Great Leap Forward. Although Mao withdrew from the forefront of policy making for a while, he began to make his return in 1962, not only with renewed emphasis on radicalism and self-reliance, but also with a claim that the Soviet leader had abandoned the true path of socialism in favour of revisionism a danger that Mao was soon to make clear existed in China too, in his view. This meant in effect that in Mao’s opinion there was no room for compromise, either at home or abroad. Not all of his colleagues agreed, but Mao’s views prevailed and they were to culminate in the destructive Cultural Revolution. What had happened in the Soviet Union, according to Mao, could happen in China too. The link between domestic foes and the external threat, therefore, was even more insidious and dangerous in the Soviet case, as it reached into all sections of the Communist Party. The domestic groups that were linked to the American threat were the intellectuals and former capitalists, who by comparison were more easily dealt with as outsiders to the citadel of power. For Mao the Soviet problem went beyond the issue of its approach to the United States.