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if we fail will be infinitely greater. And the longer we wait, the harder it will be to catch up. Every day lost increases the danger.
    In 1934, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons, “To urge the preparation of defense is not to assert the imminence of war. On the contrary, if war was imminent preparation for defense would be too late . . . but it is very difficult to resist the conclusion that if we do not begin forthwith to put ourselves in a position of security, it will soon be beyond our power to do so.” In the 1930s Britain had what in effect was a “strategic reserve”—the vast industrial power of the United States, which, with the luxury of time, could be mobilized after war broke out in order to save the allied nations; and this “reserve” ultimately saved Britain from its own unpreparedness. The United States has no such reserve to fall back on.
    It was shortly before the outbreak of World War II that General Douglas MacArthur observed, “The history of failure in war can be summed up in two words: Too Late.” MacArthur, then in the Philippines, had seen the war clouds on the horizon; he had been frustrated in his efforts to win support for a strengthening of forces in the Philippines. He warned of the danger, but too many said, “So what?”
    When he made that statement the atomic bomb had not yet burst on Hiroshima, forever changing the potential nature of war and the consequences of a surprise attack. The United States had time to recover from a naval Pearl Harbor, and it had ample warning of impending war. We could have less than thirty minutes’ warning of a nuclear Pearl Harbor, from which we would have no time to recover. The time to prevent that from happening is now. There is no time to lose.

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World War III
    The first characteristic of the Soviet Union is that it always adopts the attitude of bullying the soft and fearing the strong. The second characteristic of the Soviet Union is that it will go in and grab at every opportunity.
    â€”Deng Xiaoping
    For more than twenty-five years the countries of the Western Alliance have been preparing themselves against the dread possibility of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. This war, which the strategists have called . . . the Third World War—has never come, and may never come. Meanwhile, the real Third World War has been fought and is being fought under our noses, and few people have noticed what was going on.
    â€”Brian Crozier
    World War III began before World War II ended. Even as Allied armies battled Nazi forces to the death in Europe, Stalin had his eye clearly fixed on his postwar objectives. In April 1945, as American and Russian soldiers were embracing at the Elbe River in Germany, Stalin was spelling out his blueprint for a divided postwar world.“This war is not as in the past,” he said; “whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”
    By then, the blacksmith who would later forge the Iron Curtain had already shown how cynically he would ensure that his “social system” prevailed. One of the most heroic chapters of World War II was written by the resistance movement in German-occupied Poland, and in particular by the Polish Home Army. Its members provided intelligence information, conducted sabotage, disrupted rail communications behind the German lines, carried out reprisals for acts of Nazi repression by executing German officials; they even staged pitched battles with German troops. They were Polish patriots, determined to restore and preserve Polish independence.
    On August 1, 1944, Polish freedom fighters rose up against the Nazi occupiers in Warsaw as the Soviet army approached, just as French partisans had done when American and British forces neared Paris. But instead of aiding the liberation of the city, the Soviet forces