Writing as long ago as 1922, Dr Vilhjalmur Stefansson commented: “There are few nowadays who do not agree that the world is round, but there are almost equally few who apply the principle of the world's roundness consistently when they think about going from place to place.” Twenty-three years later, he returned to the same question, with a statement that, far from sounding prophetic, was all too obvious. “If you shoot robot bombs (as Heaven preserve us from ever doing), they will cross the Arctic on their way from London to Seattle, from Peiping to New York, from San Francisco to. Moscow. That is the way the bombers will fly, if we ever permit them to.”