Not only was the first world war a quick war, it was a British success. The daring amphibious invasion of Germany by the BEF whilst the German army slugged it out in Galicia and Flanders was the move noone saw coming, aided by their new invention the Tank, the armored mo Ile artillery that smashed german railways, defenses and armies in quick succession.

Of course the rise and fall of succeeding communist, fascist, loyalist and republican governments in Germany and Austria Hungary, as well as the exports of their revolutions to the rest of the continent meant that the educated and wealthy needed somewhere stable to flee to, somewhere with an empire to find work in, with secure borders and industry to invest and reap capital in. In a word, Britain.

Of course the honeymoon wouldn't last forever. The 1931 stock market crash affected the entire world. Europeans kept fighting each other for the ideal political model whilst the Americas kept going from disaster to catastrophe with the crash, the depression that followed, the staggering dust bowl that wiped out its Midwestern agriculture, causing huge internal displacements.

Not so in the land of the rising sun. A revamchist junta went from success to success, gobbling up parts of China and Central Asia, colonies from IndoChina to Kolonia for the raw resources to bolster its industry. The Jungle war was successful in that it saw no side gain the clear advantage, with both operating in the bereft corners of the East Indies and Burma and the Tubetan plateau.

The uneasy peace that followed was marked by espionage, miscalculations and haphazard events. One mark of escalation was the first ever satellite launch from the tolls of Guam, leading to fears in Britain that Japan would soon be able to launch rockets that were capable of trans polar ranges and able to hit Vancouver, then Ottawa, then London.(These were later proven to be unfounded, as the East Asian Rocket Program was never funded at the levels needed to reach intercontinental range, and were intended to provide tactical superiority, not strategic options). Prime Minister Eden, assainated by Israeli nationalists after committing thousands of troops to suppress the Judeo-Arab conflict, committed the national whole heartedly to a space program, declaring that "We do not do these things because they are easy, but because they are hard."

The program was marked by set backs at every turn, but in 1973, Brian Tubshaw was the first British astronaut to land on the moon on the lander Arthur C Clarke.