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I remember being shocked at the rather forthright statement I heard at the end of World War II to the effect that the forces of population pressure, land mass, and the current of world events would see Russia and the United States allies, bent on containing an expanding China. I recalled it during the period when the cold war's ruthless expansion of Russian ideology began to affect Western satellite territories. Among the churning peoples of Southeast Asia everywhere we were in open, though perhaps cold, opposition to Soviet forces. We shifted from a kind of relaxed superiority built on the illusion of monopoly of the "bomb" into a state of near panic as we saw Russia catch up in technological as well as basic scientific activities. Soon it became clear that in research and development on spacecraft anyhow we had lost whatever advantage we might have thought we had. A