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covers all the rest of the Pacific Ocean. Proceeding north from the Kingman Reef, which may be regarded for our purposes as the middle of the equatorial Pacific, we encounter the Hawaiian Islands over an expanse of a little more than a thousand miles of open sea. (It was this route that the early Polynesian navigators followed in their voyages from the south seas to the Hawaiian Archipelago.) From the mainland of North America the Hawaiian the Hawaiian Islands are barely more than 2000 miles. In themselves they are very highly developed and capable of any sort of military expansion. Proceeding in turn north from Hawaii a distance of about 2500 miles we encounter the Alaskan Peninsula, a part of the continent of North America. One thousand miles north brings us to the Bering Straits, separating North America from Asia, only fifty-two miles wide, with two islands, one owned by Russia and the other by the United States, standing between. These islands are six miles apart so that the territory of the United States actually touches that of Russia, and the great distance across water from America to Asia is only twenty-one miles. (Before the completion of the Atlantic telegraphic cable by Cyrus Field in 1968, the