Pacific : silicon chips and surfboards, coral reefs and atom bombs, brutal dictators, fading empires, and the coming collision of the world's superpowers

482 Pages·2015·4.09 MB·English

by  Winchester

DEDICATION
For Setsuko
EPIGRAPH
Look East, where whole new thousands are!
—ROBERT BROWNING, WARING
MAP
Nick Springer/Springer Cartographics LLC.
CONTENTS

Dedication
Epigraph
Map
List of Maps and Illustrations
PROLOGUE: THE LONELY SEA AND THE SKY
AUTHORS’ NOTE: ON CARBON
Chapter 1 THE GREAT THERMONUCLEAR SEA
Chapter 2 MR. IBUKA’S RADIO REVOLUTION
Chapter 3 THE ECSTASIES OF WAVE RIDING
Chapter 4 A DIRE AND DANGEROUS IRRITATION
Chapter 5 FAREWELL, ALL MY FRIENDS AND FOES
Chapter 6 ECHOES OF DISTANT THUNDER
Chapter 7 HOW GOES THE LUCKY COUNTRY?
Chapter 8 THE FIRES IN THE DEEP
Chapter 9 A FRAGILE AND UNCERTAIN SEA
Chapter 10 OF MASTERS AND COMMANDERS
EPILOGUE: THE CALL OF THE RUNNING TIDE
Acknowledgments
Note on Sources
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Also by Simon Winchester
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
Map of the Pacific—Political
The plutonium bomb Helen of Bikini
Alvin Graves
Masaru Ibuka
Movie poster for Gidget
Duke Kahanamoku
Hobart Alter
Colonel Charles Bonesteel III
The USS Pueblo
The Pueblo’s surviving crewmen, led by Captain Lloyd Bucher
Youngsters’ performance in North Korea
The RMS Queen Elizabeth, in her heyday
The RMS Queen Elizabeth, sabotaged in Hong Kong
Helicopter during the evacuation of Saigon
Hong Kong’s “retrocession”
Destruction by Cyclone Tracy in the city of Darwin
Typhoon Haiyan
Sir Gilbert Walker
Map of the Pacific—Physical
The El Niño Phenomenon
Gough Whitlam
Jørn Utzon
Alvin
The tectonic architecture of the Pacific Ocean
Black smokers
Inhabitants of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef
A Hawaiian feather cloak, an ahu’ula
The short-tailed, or Steller’s, albatross
“The Pacific Garbage Patch”
The eruption of Mount Pinatubo
The carrier USS Kitty Hawk and a Chinese Song-class diesel attack submarine
Map of the Western Pacific: U.S. and Chinese Military
The Nine-Dash Line
Chinese constructions in the South China Sea
The USNS Impeccable
Admiral Liu Huaqing
Andrew Marshall
Hokule‘a
PROLOGUE: THE LONELY SEA AND THE SKY
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging
like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
Into pale sea—look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet . . .
arched over to Asia, Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids
that never close; this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.
—ROBINSON JEFFERS, FROM “THE EYE,” 1965
United Airlines Flight 154 leaves Honolulu International Airport just after dawn
three times a week, bound ultimately for the city of Hagåtña, the capital of the
island republic of Guam. If the northeast trades are blowing at their usual steady
twelve knots, the jet will take off to the east, into the low morning sun over
Waikiki, and those passengers on the aircraft’s left side will see the wall of
skyscraper hotels along the beachfront and be able to glimpse down at Doris
Duke’s great seaside mansion, Shangri-La. Once the plane is two miles high
above the crater of the dormant Diamond Head volcano, it will begin to make a
long and lazy turn to the right.
If the morning haze is light, passengers on the right side now can sometimes
glimpse the bombers and heavy transport planes lined up on the flight line of
Hickam Field, and maybe a flotilla of sleek gray warships will be gliding slowly
through the lochs of Pearl Harbor. There will be some suburbs clustered between
the shore and the slopes; there will be a skein of rush-hour traffic crawling along
on H-1, the main thruway into Honolulu; and behind these urban images will rise
ranges of mountains, razor-sharp aiguilles dotted in places with white radar
domes.
With every one of its seats invariably filled, the plane will then clear its
throat and tilt its nose ever higher, and once at five miles high, it will set its