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.

Scarce British penicillin , 1943 -1944 -1945 : a CHOICE or a failure ?

Churchill's electoral defeat in July 1945 was ensured in late September 1942.

To prove that it really did reject the soon to be released Beveridge Report, the British (Conservative Party-dominated) government's all-powerful Ministry of Supply (MOS), together with representatives of the academic-military-civil servant medical science establishment, met on that date to set the British Commonwealth's production levels for penicillin for the remainder of the war.

(And first let us remind ourselves, because today's English academics - save only David Edgerton  - never do , that the civilian and military populations of the 1940s British Commonwealth cum Empire were larger than those of America.)