Yellow Magic , not Yellowcake , marked the shift from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana

I argue that Pax Britannica lingered on into the end of WWII , but as soft culturally-economic power, not hard military- economic power.

The British brand had a lot of strength against the America brand - it still had a lot of moral capital.

Not the least because Britain had stood all alone defending the world's Four Freedoms while isolationist America had yawned like a bored bystander watching a schoolyard bully beat up a pre-schooler.

Winston Churchill had led that fight but in the Fall of 1942 - unknown to most - his party, the Tories, had thrown away most of the global good will , all in an instant.

Everyone agrees the British had first discovered and first developed penicillin.

It had given a life-giving boon , not a death-dealing Bomb , to all humanity.

It should have/could have worked that beat for all it was worth.

British penicillin pioneers Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming could have/should have suggested to the top British leadership, that for the price of a few bomber squadrons, Britain could/should make tons of the stuff.

 And that wartime Britain should posthaste start shipping it all over the world, gratis, in British bombers to save the dying in Allied, Neutral and nay even Axis countries alike.

Win the moral war, and let Russian tanks and American bombs win the sordid military war.

And at the very least , hereby secure British postwar soft power , as a reward for Britain spending all of itself to defend civilization all alone for years.

But that Fall , Fleming and Florey lacked both imagination and moral integrity : they advocated the exact opposite : that Britain should keep penicillin to itself, an Allied military secret and to only make enough, during wartime, to secure lightly wounded Allied frontline troops back to the front quickly.

Even Allied severely wounded too unfit to ever fight again would be denied it - as would Allied POWs, let alone Allied, Neutral and Axis civilians.

The British Tories - determined to fight off the universally-oriented Beveridge report, being finalized at the same time as that historical Penicillin meeting - were in no mood to view access to life-saving penicillin as some sort of universal right.

But another penicillin pioneer, Canadian-born American Henry Dawson, felt totally differently.

He had long argued that the government should step in , over Big Pharma if need be , and mass produce the stuff and give it to all needing it , war or not.

Now , thanks to his former patients Floyd Odlum and Dante Colitti , America's New Deal-oriented WPB (War Production Board) had bought into his vision and the rest was history.

Soon American bombers were in all the world's newspapers, flying across the globe to deliver abundant American penicillin to the world's dying.

America generosity was visible to all , long before the Marshall Plan , in this little remembered period during WWII.

American selfish atomic secrecy ("Yellowcake") turned off any hopes of a Pax Americana but American selfless agape penicillin ("Yellow Magic") turned it back on again .

The three British Tories (Churchill, Fleming and Florey) could only watch in silent fury as the New-Dealing  Yanks quietly stole their marches ...