ABSTRACT
The word ‘super-power’ was defined in 1926 as the ‘systematic grouping and interconnection of existing power systems’.1 At that time, the term was applied to describe the working of an electricity grid, but it was possibly, and by no means inappropriately, at the back of the mind of W.T.R. Fox, who made the first recorded use of it in a book entitled The Super-Powers published in 1944. The subtitle of the book was ‘The United States, Britain and the Soviet Union – Their Responsibility for Peace’. In 1980, Fox wondered why he could have made what later appeared to have been the elementary mistake of including Britain along with what he had termed the other two, peripheral powers.2 The peripheral designation was one of the reasons for Fox’s error in 1944, when there was still considerable acceptance of Britain and Europe as the centre of the world. Moreover, in a sense the christening came before the birth, since one of the essential attributes of superpower, the ability to wreak global destruction through nuclear warfare, had yet to emerge. Also, in 1944 the British Empire had not seemed to be on the brink of collapse, nor was it then quite as clear as it later became that the major ideological clash would be between updated Wilsonism and Leninism.
