TIME Magazine, Monday, Aug. 04, 1941 Britain's experts on economic warfare, gauging the size of the gun which Franklin Roosevelt pointed at Japan last week (see col. 1), came out with a startling estimate: total economic blockade by Washington and London would cripple Japanese industry within six months. The Japanese Islands (where 98,000,000 people live in 260,770 square miles) are almost barren of the raw materials of modern industry, must import or die. The Tokyo stockmarket collapsed in a near-panic this week. But Finance Minister Masatsune Ogura betrayed no alarm. He said that Japan's answer to the democratic gun would be to "push ahead" with its plans for imperial self-sufficiency in Asia-or, as he called it, a "Greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere." Theoretically, the conquest of the South China Sea would give Japan almost all the raw materials she needs. But actually, it would not. Oil is Japan's most obvious lack. She produces only 10% of her peacetime needs. She depends for the rest on the U.S., the Netherlands East Indies, British Borneo, Latin America. Under the State Department policy designed to keep Japan from moving into the East Indies, the U.S. sent Japan 16,086,000 bbl. of petroleum and petroleum products in 1939, 11,529,000 bbl. last year, about 1,150,000 bbl. a month this year. Until this week, Japan also got 1,800,000 tons (around 14,000,000 bbl.) a year from the East Indies under a contract with the Dutch. That contract is now suspended. For its steel industry, Japan is 88% dependent on imports of iron ore, pig iron, scrap. In 1936 (last year Japan printed statistics on metals) she imported 6,000,000 tons from the U.S., Britain, the Philippines, Malaya, China. Copper is available in Japan in amounts barely sufficient for peacetime needs. Last year Japan imported 130,356 tons of refined copper and scrap from the U.S., other large supplies from Latin America (now partly cut off by U.S. pre-emptive buying programs below the border). Other basic materials of which Japan is short include coal (barely enough for peacetime requirements), zinc (50% of peacetime needs), tin (20% of peacetime needs), aluminum, lead, mercury and phosphorus (almost none), rubber (none). Of such important alloy metals as antimony, chrome, nickel, manganese and tungsten, Japan produces scarcely any at all. Of the raw cotton on which its great textile industry depends, Japan must get all her supplies from India, the U.S., Brazil, Peru, China. Wool must be 99% imported from Australia, the Union of South Africa, England. Continued Import or Die, page 2