"From 1936, and with reluctance, after it grew clear that Germany was rearming, the British government paid reluctant heed to expanding its armed forces. Local city and town officials were primed with providing a basic civil defence infrastructure, for it was clear that a new war would involve devastating aerial bombardment. However, many, especially those controlled by the broadly anti-war Labour Party, dragged their feet in imposing what was decried as a ‘militarization of everyday life’. The great majority of the British population did not favour war. Britain was no longer the almost limitlessly wealthy superpower it had been before 1914. The country’s continuing world-power status now relied on the maintenance of a rules-based international order, with its guarantees of the global status quo (and especially of Britain’s precious Empire). A world war would make British power vulnerable to Germany, and to Germany’s allies, Italy – in the Mediterranean and the Middle East – and Japan (in the Far East). This prompted much of the reasoning behind Neville Chamberlain’s so-called ‘policy of appeasement’."