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# Speed and Politics
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Immediate penetration, or penetration that is approaching immediacy, becomes identified with the instantaneous destruction of environmental conditions , since after space-distance, we now lack time-distance in the increasing acceleration of vehicular performances (precision, distance, speed) .
From this point on, the binomial fire-movement exists only to designate a double movement of implosion and explosion; the power of implosion revives the old subsonic vehicles' (means of transportation, proj ectiles) power to penetrate, and the power of explosion revives the destructive power of classical molecular explosives. In this paradoxical obj ect, simultaneously explosive and implosive, the new war machine combines a double disappearance: the disappearance of matter in nuclear disintegration and the disappearance of places in vehicular extermination.
Nonetheless, we should note that the disintegration of matter is constantly deferred in the deterrent equilibrium of peaceful coexistence, but not so the extermination of distances. In less than half a century, geographical spaces have kept shrinking as speed has increased. And if at the beginning of the 1 940s we still had to count the speed of naval "strike power"-the maj or destructive power of the time-in knots, by the beginning of the 1 960s this rapidity was measured in machs, in other words in thousands of kilometers per hour. And it is likely that current high energy research will soon allow us to reach the speed of light with laser weapons .
If, as Lenin claimed, "strategy means choosing which points we apply force to," we must admit that these "points , " today, are no longer geostrategic strongpoints, since from any given spot we can now reach any other, no matter where it may be, in record time and within several meters . . .
1 50 I Speed and Politics
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We have to recognize that geographic localization seems to have definitively lost its strategic value and, inversely, that this same value is attributed to the delocalization of the vector, of a vector in permanent movement-no matter if this movement is aerial, spatial, underwater or underground. All that counts is the speed of the moving body and the undetectability of its path.
From the war of movement of mechanized forces, we reach the strategy of Brownian movements, a kind of chronological and pendular war that revives ancient popular and geographic warfare by a geostrategic homogenization of the globe. This homogenization was already announced in the nineteenth century, notably by the Englishman Mackinder in his theory of the "World-Island, " in which Europe, Asia and Africa would compose a single continent to the detriment of the Americas-a theory that seems to have come to fruition today with the disqualification of localizations. But we should note that the indiferentiation of geostrategic positions is not the only efect of vectorial performances, for after the homogenization sought and finally acquired by naval and aerial imperialism, strategic spatial miniaturization is now the order of the day.
In 1 9 5 5 General Chassin stated, "The fact that the earth is round has not been sufficiently studied from the military point of view. " No sooner said than done. But in the b allistic progress of weapons, the curvature of the earth has not stopped shrinking. It is no longer the continents that become agglomerated, but the totality of the planet that is diminished, depending on the progress of the arms "race . " The continental translation that, curiously enough, we find both in the geophysician Wegener, with the drift of land masses , and in Mackinder, with the geopolitical amalgam of lands, has given way to a world wide phenomenon of terrestrial and technological contraction that today makes us penetrate into an artificial topological universe: the direct encoun�er of every surface on the globe.
The State of Emergency
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The ancient inter-city duel, war between nations, the permanent conflict between naval empires and continental powers have all suddenly disappeared, giving way to an unheard of opposition: the juxtaposition of every locality, all matter. The planetary mass becomes no more than a "critical mass," a precipitate resulting from the extreme reduction of contact time, a fearsome friction of places and elements that only yesterday were still distinct and separated by a bufer of distances, which have suddenly become anachronistic. In The Origin of Continents and Oceans, published in 1 9 1 5 , Alfred Wegener writes that in the beginning the earth can only have had but one face, which seems likely, given the capacities for interconnection. In the future the earth will have but one interface . . .
If speed thus appears as the essential fall out of styles of conflicts and cataclysms, the current "arms race" is in fact only " the arming of the race " toward the end of the world as distance, in other words as a field of action.
The term "deterrence" points to the ambiguity of this situation, in which the weapon replaces the protection of armor, in which the possibilities of ofense and ofensive ensure in and of themselves the defense, the entire defensive against the "explosive" dimension of s trategic arms, but not at all against the "implosive" dimension of the vectors' performances, since on the contrary the maintenance of a credible "strike power" requires the constant refining of the engines' power, in other words of their ability to reduce geographic space to nothing or almost nothing.
1 52 I Speed and Politics
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In fact, without the violence of speed, that of weapons would not be so fearsome. In the current context, to disarm would thus mean first and foremost to decelerate, to defuse the race toward the end. Any treaty that does not limit the speed of this race (the speed of means of communicating destruction) will not lim it strategic arms, since from now on the essential object of strategy consists in maintaining the non-place of a general delocalization of means that alone stiH allows us to gain fractions of seconds, which gain is indispensable"to any freedom of action. As General Fuller wrote, "When the combatants threw j avelins at each other, the weapon's initial speed was such that one could see it on its traj ecto ry and parry its efects with one's shield. But when the j avelin was replaced by the bullet, the speed was so great that parry became impossible. " Impossible to move one's body out of the way, but possible if one moved out of the weapon's range; possible as well through the shelter of the trench, greater than that of the shield-possible, in other words, through space and matter.
Today, the reduction of warning time that results from the supersonic speeds of assault leav:es so little time for detection, identification and response that in the case of a surprise attack the supreme authority would have to risk abandoning his supremacy of decision by authorizing the lowest echelon of the defense system to immediately launch anti-missile missiles. The two political superpowers have thus far preferred to avoid this situation through negotiations, renouncing anti-missile defense at the same time.
Given the lack of space, an active defense requires at least the material time to intervene. But these are the "war materials" that disappear in the acceleration of the means of communicating destruction. There remains only a passive defense that consists less in reinforcing itself against the megaton powers of nuclear weapons than in a series of constant, unpredictable, aberrant movements, movements which are thus strategically efectivefor at least a little while lo nger, we hope. In fact, war now rests entirely on the deregulation of time and space. This is why the technical maneuver that consists in complexifying the vecto r by constantly imp roving its performances has now to tally supplanted tactical maneuvers on the terrain, as we have seen. General Ailleret points this out in his history of weapons by stating that the definition of arms programs has become one of the essential elements of strategy. If in ancient conventional warfare we could still talk about army maneuvers in the fields, in the cu rrent state of affairs , if this maneuver s till exists, it no longer needs a "field. " The invasion of the instant succeeds the invasion of the territory. The countdown becomes the scene of battle, the final frontier.
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The opposing sides can easily ban bacteriological, geodesic or meteorological warfare. In reality, what is currently at stake with strategic arms limitation agreements (SALT I) is no longer the explosive but the vector, the vector of nuclear deliverance, or more precisely its performances . The reason for this is simple: where the molecular or nuclear explosive's blast made a given area unfit for existence, that of the implosive (vehicles and vectors) suddenly reduces reaction time, and the time for political decision, to nothing. If over thirty years ago the nuclear explosive completed the cycle of spatial wars, at the end of this century the implosive (beyond politically and economically invaded territories) inaugurates the war of time. In full peaceful coexistence, without any declaration of hostilities, and more surely than by any other kind of conflict, rapidity delivers us from this world. We have to face the facts: today, speed is war, the last war.
1 54 I Speed and Politics
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But let's go back to 1 9 62, to the crucial events of the Cuban missile crisis. At that time, the two superpowers had fifteen minutes' warning time for war. The installation of Russian rockets on Castro's island threatened to reduce the Americans' warning to thirty seconds, which was unacceptable for President Kennedy, whatever the risks of his categorical refusal. We all know what happened: the installation of a direct line-the "hot line"-and the interconnection of the two Heads of State!
Ten years later, in 1 972, when the normal warning time was down to several minutes-ten for ballistic missiles, a mere two for satellite weapons-Nixon and Brezhnev signed the first s trategic arms limitation agreement in Moscow. In fact, this agreement aims less at the quantitative limitation of weapons (as its adversary/partners claim) than at the preservation of a properly "human" political power, since the constant progress of rapidity threatens from one day to the next to reduce the warning time for nuclear war to fess than one fatal minute-thus finally abolishing the Head of State's power of reflection and decision in favor of a pure and simple automation of defense systems. The decision for hostilities would then belong only to several strategic computer programs. After having been (because of its destructive capacities) the equivalent of total war-the nuclear missile launching submarine alone is able to destroy 5 0 0 cities-the war machine suddenly becomes (thanks to the reflexes of the strategic calculator) the very decision for war.
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What will remain, then, of the "political reasons" for deterrence? Let us recall that in 1 962, among the reasons that made General de Gaulle decide to have the populations ratify the decision to elect the President of the Republic by universal suffrage, there was the credibility of deterrence, the legitimacy of the referendum being a fundamental element of this very deterrence. What will remain of all this · in the automation of deterrence? in the automation of decision?
The transition from the state of siege of wars of space to the state of emergency of the war of time only took several decades, during which the political era of the statesman was replaced by the apolitical era of the State apparatus. Facing the advent of such a regime, we would do well to wonder about what is much more than a temporal phenomenon.
At the close of our century, the time of the finite world is coming to an end; we live in the beginnings of a paradoxical miniaturization of action, which others prefer to baptize automation. Andrew Stratton �rites, "We commonly believe that automation suppresses the p ossib ility of human error. In fact, it transfers that possibility from the action stage to the conception stage. We are now reaching the point where the possibilities of an accident during the critical minutes of a plane landing, if guided automatically, are fewer than if a p ilot is controlling it. We m ight wonder if we will ever reach the stage of automatically controlled nuclear weapons, in which the margin of error would be less than with human decision. B ut the possib ility of this progress threatens to reduce to little or nothing the time for human decision to intervene in the system . "
This i s brillia�t. Contraction i n time, the disappearance o f the territorial space, after that of the fortified city and armor, leads to a situation in which the notions of "before" and "after" designate only the future and the past in a form of war that causes the "present" to disappear in the instantaneousness of decision.
1 56 I Speed and Politics
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The final power would thus be less one of imagination than of anticipation, so much so that to govern would be no more than to foresee, simulate, memorize the simulations; that the present "Research Institute" could appear to be the blueprint of this final power, the power of utopia.
The loss of material space leads to the government of nothing but time. The Ministry of Time sketched in each vector will finally be accomplished following the dimensfons of the biggest vehicle there is, the State-vector. The whole geographic history of the distribution of land and countries would stop in favor of a single regrouping of time, power no longer being comparable to anything but a "meteorology. " In this precarious fiction speed would suddenly become a destiny, a form of progress, in other words a "civilization" in which each speed would be something of a "region" of time.
As Mackinder said, forces of pressure are always exerted in the same direction . Now, this single direction of geopolitics is that which leads to the immediate commutation of things and places. War is not, as Foch claimed, harboring illusions on the future of chemical explosives, "a worksite of fire." War has always been a worksite of movement, a speed-factory. The technological breakthrough, the last form of the war of movement, ends up, with deterrence, at the dissolution of what separated but also distinguished, and this non-distinction corresponds for us to a political blindness.
We can verify it with General de Gaulle's decree of January 7, 1 9 5 9 , suppressing the distinction between peacetime and wartime. Furthermore, during this same period, and despite the Vietnamese exception that proves the rule, war has shrunk from several years to several days, even to several hours.
Tile State of Emergency
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In the 1 960s a mutation occurs: the passage from wartime to the war of peacetime, to that total peace that others still call "peaceful coexistence." The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geopolitical servitude, but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action. We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints of the railway, airway or highway infrastructures to see the fatal impulse: the more speed increases, the faster freedom decreases.
The apparatus' self-propulsion finally entails the self-suficiency of automation. What happens in the example of the racecar driver, who is no more than a worried lookout for the catastrophic probabilities of his movement, is reproduced on the political level as soon as conditions require an action in real time.2
Let us take, for example, a crisis situation: " From the very beginning of the Six Days' War in 1 967, President Johnson took control of the White House, one hand guiding the Sixth Fleet, the other on the hot line. The necessity of the link between the two became dearly apparent as soon as an Israeli attack against the American reconnaissance ship Liberty provoked the intervention of one of the fleet's aircraft carriers. Moscow examined every blip on the radar screens as attentively as Washington did: would the Russians interpret the air planes' change of course and their convergence as an act of aggression? This is where the hot line came in: Washington immediately explained the reasons for this operation and Moscow was reassured" (Harvey Wheeler) .
In this example of strategic political action in real time, the Chief of State is in fact a " Great Helmsman . " But the prestigious nature of the people's historical guide gives way to the more prosaic and rather banal one of a "test pilot" trying to maneuver his machine in a very narrow margin. Ten years have passed since this "crisis state, " and the arms race has caused the margin of p olitical security to narrow still further, bringing us closer to the critical threshold where the possibilities for properly human political action will disappear in a " State of Emergency;" where telephone communication between statesmen will stop, probably in favor of an interconnection of computer systems, modern calculators of strategy and, consequently, of politics. (Let us recall that the computers' first task was to solve simultaneously a series of complex equations aimed at causing the trajectory of the antiaircraft proj ectile and that of the airplane to meet.)
1 58 I Speed and Politics
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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) .
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