Little Hawk, as ever I salute your energy, patience and resilience. If you get just one or two of us here at Mudcat to see things slightly differently, you'll have done your bit for a better world.

If Yankee Gal is more than about three, she should know the US went to war because half their navy got bombed. There had been plenty of opportunity to get into the fight earlier, if the issue had been that other stuff she mentioned.

Toadfrog's idea that Germany and Japan were in partnership is a bit wide of the mark. Pearl Harbour was the last thing Hitler wanted, for exactly the same reason that Churchill probably prayed for it.

The Big Red and mcgarvey arguments seem to me to depend on an assumption that "We are good; they are bad." A narrow view at the best of times.

The test of Little Hawk's thesis is to consider a war - any war - and think through what might have happened if the guns had stayed in the cabinet.

I've been chewing over WW2 in this way for some months now. I soon had to ditch my first assumption, that without the war, the UK would have been over-run by Hitler. If the UK had just looked the other way (again) while Poland was invaded, Germany and the UK could have co-existed uneasily together, much as the US and USSR actually did for 40 years. Taking on the UK had never been in Hitler's game plan anyway. Without WW2, the Soviet Union would have been the natural enemy much sooner than actually happened. If it had come to war on that front, Stalin would have been up against the colossal might of the German and British navies, and Germany of course would not have been fighting on another front. The Soviet Union could have been quickly overwhelmed without anything like the staggering - utterly staggering - losses incurred in Barbarossa, etc. Europe's Jews would have been packed off to Madagascar (Hitler's original plan) but at least they would have been alive. The mistake that is now Israel would almost certainly not have happened, and the US would not be the superpower that it now is, if only because German brainpower would have stayed in Germany.

But try this with any war - Vietnam, Falklands, Peninsula, Crimea, whatever. You might come up with surprising scenarios. Would there still be institutionalised slavery in the US now, if the Civil War had somehow been averted? I don't think so.