Here we have the fearsome telescoping of elements born of the "amphibious generations" ; the extreme proximity of parties in which the immediacy of information immediately creates the crisis; the frailty of reasoning power, which is but the efect of a miniaturization of action-the latter resulting from the miniaturization of space as a field of action.
An imperceptible movement on a computer keyboard, or one made by a "skyjacker" brandishing a cookie box covered with masking tape, can lead tp a catastrophic chain of events that until recently was inconceivable. We are too willing to ignore the fact that, alongside the threat of proliferation resulting from the acquisition of nuclear explosives by irresponsible parties, there is a proliferation of the threat resulting from the vectors that cause those who own or borrow them to become j ust as irresponsible.
In the beginning of the 1 940s, Paris was a six-days' walk from the border, a three-hours' drive, and one hour by plane. Today the capital is only several minutes away from anywhere else, and anywhere else is only several minutes away from its end-so much so that the tendency, which still existed several years ago, to advance one's destructive means closer to the enemy territory (as in the Cuban missile crisis) is reversing. The present tendency is toward geographic disengagement, a movement of retreat that is 'due only to the progress of the vectors and to the extension of their reach (cf. the American submarine Trident, whose new missiles can travel 8 to 1 0 , 0 0 0 kilometers , as opposed to the Poseidon's 4 to 5 ,000) .
The State of Emergency
I 1 59