TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 483

Netherlands in the Pacific; but this audacious Japanese act of aggression
had proved in the event to have been suicidal because the underlying
assumption had proved, this time, no longer to hold good.

By A.D. 1941 the Japanese naval authorities must have come to believe
in the possibility of the United States Navy's being able, from a base in
Hawaii, at least to threaten the eastern flank of a Japanese advance south-
ward in the Western Pacific; for there can be no other explanation of
their surprise attack on the yth December, 1941, upon the United States
Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour. Their failure, however, to follow up their
sensational success in this initial operation by attempting to occupy the
Hawaiian Islands and to proceed thence to an attack upon the Pacific
coast of the United States and Canada is presumptive evidence of an
abiding conviction in Japanese minds that it would still be beyond the
Japanese Navy's, and therefore likewise beyond the United States
Navy's, power to conduct sustained naval operations on the grand scale
across the breadth of the Pacific. It can never have entered into Japanese
calculations, when the Japanese Government were taking their fateful
decision to challenge the United States' sea-power, that the United
States Navy would be able within less than four years to bring Japan to
her knees by succeeding, as it did in A.D. 1942-5, in solving the un-
precedentedly complex and difficult logistical problem of bringing a
crushingly superior striking-power to bear upon Japan in a West Pacific
theatre of naval operations that was more than 3,000 miles distant from.
Pearl Harbour and more than 4,500 miles distant from San Francisco.1
Admiral Nimitz's achievement in dealing Japan a knock-out blow across
the Pacific in A.D. 1945 was, indeed, as epoch-making an event in the
history of the West and of the World as Magellan's achievement of
making his way across the Pacific to the Philippines in AJD. 1521. The
American seaman was, in effect, translating on to the far more exacting
strategic plane the feat performed by his Portuguese forerunner on the
relatively facile explorations! plane 424 years earlier.

The capitulation of Japan on the i5th August, 1945, under the Trans-
pacific pressure of United States sea-power signified the consummation
of the revolutionary metamorphosis of a flat and finite Oikoumen$ into
a round one. After having been transformed from the shape of a card
into the shape of an armlet when in A.D. 1884 its two selvages had been
sewn together in a suture along the International Date-Line, the Oikou-
men£ had now been transformed again by the conversion of a sewn-up
armlet into a welded ring; and tins saturnine steel ring of unbroken
strategic conductivity that had thus been clamped round the circum-
ference of the globe in A.D. 1941-5 was threatening in AJX 1952 to put
the Oikoumen& through yet another metamorphosis by expanding into
the shape of a great helm pulled down over the face of the globe from
the North Pole to the southern edge of the Southern Temperate Zone,
In A.D, 1952 the problem of making direct flights, at least for warlike
purposes, across the Arctic Circle was reported to be on the way to being
solved, and this approaching fresh triumph of Western technology

1 The distance to Yokohama was 3,445 miles from Hawaii and 4,750 miles, from San
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