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Thus, the diferent strategic nuclear forces (American and Soviet) will no longer need to patrol the area in the target continents; they can henceforth retreat within their territorial limits. This is confirmation that they are abandoning a form of geostrategic conflict. After the reciprocal renunciation of geodesic war, we will possibly see the abandonment of advanced bases, extending to America's extraordinary abandonment of its sovereignty over the Panama Canal . . . A sign of the times, of the time of the war of time.

Nonetheless, we must note that this strategic retreat no longer has anything in common with the retreat that allowed conventional armies to "gain time by losing ground. " In the retreat due to the extended reach of the ballistic vectors, we in fact gain time by losing the space of the (stationary or mobile) advanced bases, but this time is gained at the expense of our own farces, of the performances of our own engines, and not at the enemy's expense, since, symmetrically, the latter accompanies this geostrategic disengagement. Everything suddenly happens as if each protagonist's own arsenal became his (internal) enemy, by advancing too quickly. Like the recoil of a firearm, the implosive movement of the ballistic performances diminishes the field of strategic forces . In fact, if the adversary/partners didn't pull b ack their means of communicating destruction while lengthening their reach, the higher speed of these means would already have reduced the time of decision about their use to nothing. Just as in 1 972, in Moscow, the partners in this game abandoned plans for an anti-missile missile defense, so five years later they wasted the advantage of swiftness for the very temporary benefit of a greater extension of their interco ntinental missiles . B oth seem to fear-all the while seeking-the multiplying efect of speed, of that speed activiry so dear to all armies sine� the Revolution.

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In the face of this curious contemporary regression of stragetic arms limitation agreements , it is wise to return to the very principle of deterrence. The essential aim of throwing ancient weapons or of shooting of new ones has never been to kill the enemy or destroy his means, but to deter him, in other words, to force him to interrupt his movement. Regardless of whether this physical movement is one that allows the assailed to contain the assailant or one of invasion, "the aptitude for war is the ap titude for movement, " which a Chinese strategist expressed in these words: ''An army is always strong enough when it can come and go, spread out and regroup, as it wishes and when it wishes. "

For the last several years, however, this freedom of movement has been hindered not by the enemy's capacity for resistance or reaction, but by the refinement of the vectors used. Deterrence seems to have passed suddenly from the fire stage, in other words the explosive stage, to that of the movement of vectors, as if a final degree of nuclear deterrence had appeared, still poorly mastered by the actors in the global strategic game. Here again, we must return to the strategic and tactical realities of weaponry in order to grasp the present logistical reality. As Sun Tzu said, "Weapons are tools of ill omen." They are first feared and fearsome as threats, long before being used. Their ommous " character can be split into three components :

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The threat of their performance at the moment of their invention, of their production;

The threat of their use against the enemy;

The efect of their use, which is fatal for persons and destructive for their goods.

If these last two components are unfortunately known, and have long been experimented with, the first, on the other hand, the (logistical) il omen of the invention of their performance, is less commonly recognized. Nonetheless, it is at this level that the question of deterrence is raised. Can we deter an enemy from inventing new weapons, or from perfecting their performances? Absolutely not.

We thus find ourselves facing this dilemma:

The threat of use (the second component) of the nuclear arm prohibits the terror of actual use (the third component) . But fo r this threat to remain and allow the strategy of deterrence, we are forced to develop the threatening system that characterizes the first component: the il omen of the appearance of new performances for the means of communicating destruction. Stated plainly, this is the perpetual sophistication of combat means and the replacement of the geostrategic breakthrough by the technological breakthrough, the great logistical maneuvers.

We must face the facts: if ancient weapons deterred us from interrupting movement, the new weapons deter us from interrupting the arms race. Moreover, they require in their technological (dromological) logic the exponential development, not of the number of destructive machines, since their power has increased (simply compare the millions of projectiles in the two World Wars to the several thousands of rockets in contemporary arsenals) , but of their global performances. Destructive capabilities having reached the very limits of possibility with thermonuclear arms, the enemy's "logistical strategies" are once more oriented toward power of penetration and flexibility of use.

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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.

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The suggestive j uxtaposition of the terms deterrence and automation allows us to understand better the structural axis of contemporary military-political events, as H . Wheeler specifies : "Technologically possible, centralization has become politically necess ary. " This shortcut recalls that of Saint-Jus t's famous dictum: "When a people can be oppressed, it will be"-the difference being that this techno-logistical oppression no longer concerns only the "people," but the "deciders" as well. If only yesterday the freedom of maneuver (that aptitude fo r movement which has been equated with the aptitude for war) occasionally required delegations of power up to the secondary echelons, the reduction of the margin of maneuver due to the progress of the means of communicating destruction causes an extreme concentration of resp onsibilities fo r the solitary decision-maker that the Chief of State has become. This contraction is, however, far from being complete; it continues according to the arms race, at the speed of the new capacities of the vectors, until one day it will dispossess this last man . In fact, the movement is the same that restrains the number of projectiles and that reduces to nothing or almost nothing the decision of an individual deprived of counsel. The maneuver is the same as the one that today leads us to abandon territories and advanced bases, and as the one that will one day lead us to renounce solitary human decision in favor of the absolute miniaturization of the political field which is automation.

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If in Frederick the Great's time to win was to advance, for the supporters of deterrence it is to retreat, to leave places, peoples and the individual where they are-to the point where dromological p rogress closely resembles the j et engine's reaction propulsion, caused by the ej ection of a certain quantity of movement (the product of a mass times a velocity) in the direction opposite to the one we wish to take.

In this war of recession between East and West-contemporary not with the illusory limitation of strategic arms, but with _the _limitation _of _strategy _itself-the power of thermonuclear explosion serves as an artificial horizon for a race that is increasing the power of the vehicular implosion. The impossibility of interrupting the progress of the power of penetration, other than by an act of faith in the eneriy, leads us to deny strategy as prior knowledge. The automatic nature not only of arms and means, but also of the command, is the same as denying our ability to reason: Nicbt raisonniren! Frederick the Second's order is perfected by a deterrence that leads us to reduce our freedom not only of action and decision, but also of conception. The logic of arms systems is eluding the military framework more and more, and moving toward the engineer responsible for research and development-in expectation, of course, of the system's self sufficiency. Two years ago Alexandre Sanguinetti wrote, "It is becoming less and less conceivable to build attack planes, which with their spare parts cost several million dollars each, to transport bombs able to destroy a country railroad station. It is simply not cost-efective. " This logic of practical war, in which the operating costs of the (aerial) vector automatically entail the heightening of its destructive capability because of the requirements of transporting a tactical nuclear weapon, is not limited to attack planes; it is also becoming the logic of the State apparatus . This backwardness is the logistical consequence of producing means to communicate destruction. The danger of the nuclear weapon, and of the arms system it implies, is thus not so much that it wil explode, but that it exists and is imploding in our minds.

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Let us summarize this phenomenon:

\- Two bombs interrupt the war in the Pacific, and several dozen nuclear submarines are enough to ensure peaceful coexistence . . .

This is its numerical aspect.

\- With the appearance of the multiple thermonuclear warhead and the rapid development of tactical nuclear arms, we see the miniaturization of explosive charges . . .

This is its volu metric aspect.

\- After having cleared the planet surface of a cumbersome defensive apparatus by reducing undersea and underground strategic arms, they renounce world expanse by reducing the trouble spots and advanced bases . . .

This is its geographical aspect.

\- Once responsible for the operations, the old chiefs of war, strategists and generals, find themselves demoted and restricted to simple maintenance operations, for the sole benefit of the Chief of State . . .

This is its political aspect.

But this quantitative and qualitative s carcity doesn't stop. Time itself is no longer enough:

\- · Constantly heightened, the vectors' already quasi-supersonic capacities are superseded by the high enegies that enable us to approach the speed of light . . .

This is its spatio-temporal aspect.

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After the time of the State's political relativity as no nconducting medium, we are faced with the no time of the politics of relativity. The ful discharge feared by Clausewitz has come about with the State of Emergency. The violence of speed has become both the location and the law, the world's destiny and its destinatio n .

\- September 1 977

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Notes

Part I. The Dromocratic Revolution

1 . From Street Fight to State Right

1 . The Parisian press popularized the term following an attack on a city vehicle by a band of hoodlums whose mastermind ^was the famous " Golden Helmet."

1. Kampf um Berlin, published rwo years before the national socialists took power in 1 93 1 , and dedicated by Joseph Goebbels "to the Party's old guard in Berlin."

1. Dromomaniacs. Name given to deserters under the ancien regime, and in psychiatry to compulsive walkers.

1. Marineti, with commentary by Giovanni Lista. "Poetes d'Aujourd'hui" series, Paris.

5 . "Circulation Habitable," Architecture Principe, no. 3, April 1 966.

1. Cf. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York, 1 96 1 ) , et al.

1. Ibid. The presence of land was considered sufficient in and of itself before the advent of speculation.

1. Paul Virilio, L'insecurite du Territoire (Paris, 1 976) ; p. 77f

1. Course in permanent fortification at the School for the Application of Engineering and Artillery, 1 88 8 . Quoted by Vauban.

1 0 , Ibid.

1 1 . Ibid. Here again the military remarks rejoin the schema of the urban fortress. From the outset, the city is where the problems of health and evacuation of "waste" are posed. Already in the fourteenth century, the problem of pollution preoccupied the British parliament.

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