A SUNDAY IN DECEMBER : Pearl Harbor and the Legacy of the War in the Pacific : The Dec. 7 Attack Was a Turning Point in History That Still Has a Profound Impact on the United States and Japan.

To call the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor one of the greatest surprises in the annals of warfare is to understate its significance.

In fact, it was a turning point of history--an event that echoes half a century later in the lives of two mighty nations that today and in the future may have more influence than any others on the shape of the world in which we live.

On one side of the Pacific, the attack on Pearl Harbor awoke a sleeping giant, suddenly giving Americans a personal stake in a great war they had previously hoped to avoid. It triggered an intensive program to turn laboratory findings about nuclear fission into a fearsome atomic weapon. “The bomb,” as well as the sheer dynamism of its people, would thrust the United States into a position of political and military dominance it maintains to this day.

For the Japanese, Pearl Harbor would mark the high point of a military adventure doomed eventually to costly failure. But it would also bind victor and vanquished in an extraordinary postwar working partnership that gave birth to an economic miracle the likes of which the world had never seen.

Today, the onetime combatants of Pearl Harbor are allies and the two largest aid givers on the globe. Japanese technology and American culture increasingly mold lives on every continent.

Yet when the inevitable problems emerge between these two great powers, there, too, is the specter of Pearl Harbor.

The story of this most extraordinary relationship, and the event that so profoundly influences it, begins on Page 2.