Russia's denunciation of the neutrality pact with Japan was merely an act of politics and diplomacy. But no one knows better than the Japanese that war is merely the continuation of politics by other means. As realists, the Japs could scarcely doubt that now the question is not whether, but rather where and when.
The border between Russian Siberia and Jap-held Manchuria is 2,100 miles long, much of it trackless country designed by nature for frontier incidents. Tokyo and Moscow reported some 2,500 such clashes between 1931 and 1942; any one of them would have been enough to touch off...
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