The balance of terror is thus a mere illusion in the industrial stage of war, in which reigns a perpetual imbalance, a constantly raised bid, able to invent new means of destruction without end. We have proven ourselves, on the other hand, not only quite incapable of destroying those we've already produced (the "waste products" of the military industry being as hard to recycle as those of the nuclear industry) , but especially incapable of avoiding the threat of their appearance.
War has thus moved from the action stage to the conception stage that, as we know, characterizes automation. Unable to control the emergence of new means of destruction, deterrence, for us, is tantamount to setting in place a series o f automatisms, reactionary industrial and scientific procedures from which all political choice is absent. By becoming "strategic, " in other words, by combining ofense and defense, the new weapons deter us from interrupting the movement of the arms race, and the "logistical strategy" of their production becomes the inevitable production of destructive means as an obligatory factor of non-war-a vicious circle in which the inevitability of production replaces that of destruction. The war machine is now not only all of war, but also becomes the adversary/partners' principal enemy by depriving them of their freedom of movement.3 Dragged unwillingly into the "servitude without honor" of deterrence, the protagonists henceforth practice the "politics of the worst," or more precisely, the "apolitics of the worst," which necessarily leads to the war machine one day becoming the very decision for war-thus accomplishing the perfection of its selfsufficiency, the automation of deterrence.
The State of Emergency
I 1 63