Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers by Simon Winchester (review)

In Pacific, Simon Winchester crafts an image of the world’s oldest and largest ocean as a pelagic soothsayer and bellwether, a source of clues and portents about future trends in earth systems and human affairs. In Winchester’s framing, many of the planet’s most significant unfolding stories—global warming, ENSO, the rattling behavior of North Korea and China’s territorial expansion, among others—are Pacific stories. The frame is more than a clever authorial conceit and structuring device. As Winchester emphasizes throughout, the Pacific not only links the stories but plays an increasingly central role in the world they foreshadow. Thus, he writes, if the Mediterranean was in some sense the “inland sea” of the Ancient World, and the Atlantic that of the Modern World, then the Pacific has arrived to play the part in “Tomorrow’s World” (22). The Ocean is a map of the future.

Given his take on the Pacific’s significance, the author faced a daunting task in “reading” the 64-million-square-mile map and narrating his findings. Initially overwhelmed, as he recounts in his prologue, Winchester experienced a “Eureka!” moment when reading Austrian-born writer Stefan Zweig’s 1927 Shooting Stars, about ocean explorers Vasco Nunez de Balboa and Ferdinand Magellan. Zweig hadn’t written comprehensively or encyclopedically, but had sorted historical archives to find a limited number of crucial moments that “seemed to betoken some greater trend” (24). While acknowledging the subjectivity of this method, Winchester could think of no better way to approach his subject.

The chapters of Pacific, then, zero in on seemingly isolated events, then trace what they reveal about broader patterns and trends. “Echoes of Distant Thunder” (chapter 6), for example, begins with the 1974 destruction of Darwin, a charismatically crusty town of 40,000 in northern Australia, by Cyclone Tracy. The event, though dramatic in itself, was mainly significant as a “harbinger” of bigger storms to come as a result of changes to the planet’s atmospheric circulation patterns due to global warming. The chapter contains fascinating accounts of 2013’s Typhoon Haiyan (the fiercest storm to make landfall in recorded history); four-star U.S. Admiral Samuel Locklear III, who conducted his own studies of climate and then stunned Washington, D.C., by pronouncing global warming the greatest of all security risks to the U.S. in the Pacific region; Peruvian anchovy fishermen grappling with El Niño; Sir Gilbert Walker’s groundbreaking discovery of a set of interconnected transpacific weather patterns; and Earth Simulator 2, Japan’s weather-forecasting supercomputer that calculates at a rate of “122 teraFLOPS (122 trillion floating-point operations per second)” (259). (If the terminology remains sometimes inscrutable, it all crunches satisfactorily in the mouth.)

Winchester’s final chapter, “Of Masters and Commanders,” is the book’s best. The chapter begins by isolating two seemingly discrete moments—the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, and the 2006 sighting of a Chinese (“Song-class diesel attack”) submarine near an American carrier group in the Philippine Sea (378). The two events initiate the story of China’s expansionist ambitions in the Pacific. Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption caused the closure of two of the U.S.’s largest foreign military bases (Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Base), the operation of which had been deemed essential for maintaining the security of the sea lanes of ASEAN nations. China promptly filled the vacuum left by the closures, and has since claimed territory ever farther Hawai‘i-ward. Its aim is to overturn five hundred years of Western hegemony in the region—whether its neighbors desire this or not. The U.S. has begun to shift its core military strategy away from Europe and the Middle East and to countering China in the Pacific—whether it...