While Bethmann Hollweg intensified his efforts to come to an agreement with Britain, the Kaiser and Tirpitz insisted on a massive acceleration of the battleship-building programme, despite the danger that the British would respond with a preventive strike to sink the German fleet. Even Tirpitz acknowledged that, as yet, his fleet would hardly stand a chance in a battle with the Royal Navy. The present moment was ‘as unfavourable as possible’, he conceded; every additional year would be advantageous. He listed the measures that would have to be taken to improve the situation: ‘Heligoland, [Kaiser Wilhelm] Canal, Dreadnoughts, U-Boats etc.’ Inside the Admiralty, as distinct from the Reich Navy Office, which Tirpitz controlled, influential voices advocated delaying the confrontation with the British Empire at least until the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal (now Kiel Canal) linking the Baltic and North Seas was navigable for big battleships of the Dreadnought class – that is to say, until the autumn of 1914. Yet Wilhelm II categorically insisted that three battleships and three large cruisers should be built per annum, whatever it cost. The expansion of the fleet he demanded was ‘not merely a matter of life and death for the future development of the Navy, but for the future foreign policy of the Reich’. Paradoxically, the aim of this highly risky naval policy was not to bring about a war with Britain but, on the contrary, to achieve the breakthrough to world power without war. Indeed, to force Britain into an alliance that would permanently guarantee German supremacy in Europe and overseas would be, as one of Tirpitz’s closest associates put it, ‘the keystone of our naval policy’.