Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and twice as many in Antwerp (Cardwell 1995). Of course, the ultimate
weapon of mass death was the atomic bomb, used to great military e
ect
against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, annihilating 200,000 people in the
process, which foreshadowed the impending cold war. Far from being used to
force defanged Japan to surrender, the use of these weapons was done with
an eye toward the Soviet Union: the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki were not “a last shot against the Axis but a
ff
fi
first shot against the
Kremlin” (Carroll 2006:57).
The rise of air battles as a signi
ict encouraged
a dramatic geopolitical reorientation of American and European notions of
space and distance. George Renner (1944), for example, argued that geo-
political relations had so changed that the Mercator projection, which allowed
Americans to visualize themselves as protected by the Atlantic and Paci
fi
cant component of the con
fl
c
oceans, was outdated and even dangerous. In a world in which “distances are
measured in hours instead of days, he argued for polar projections that
emphasized the interconnectedness of the world's continents” (Schulten
2001:139). Distant lands such as China were now discovered to be neighbors
in the struggle against the Japanese and the Axis. Aviation eroded the last
notion of hemispheric isolation that remained in the U.S. As Malin (1944:107)
noted in this context, “space alone has no signi
fi
cance . . . it is mobility in
space that gives it meaning.” Cartographer Richard Harrison caused a public
sensation with maps that showed how “aviation had transformed the North
Pole from a barren wasteland into an arena for communication and con
fi
ict”
(Schulten 2001:215), making it a “new Mediterranean.” This view “trans-
formed the Paci
fl
c from a massive body of water protecting the United States
into a smallish lake” (ibid.: 218).
Virilio's (1999) analysis of the war's long-term impacts focused on the
architecture of “Fortress Europe”—rocket-launching sites, air defense sys-
tems, radar stations, coastal bunkers—that infused the continent's geogra-
phy with a thoroughly military overlay that persisted long after the con
fi
ict
ended (cf. Redhead 2004). The dramatic technological changes generated
by the war, such as computers and atomic bombs, represent the culmina-
tion of a century of “hyper-violence” in which military and civilian informa-
tion
fl
ectively indistinguishable. Thus, “the war of 1939-1945
was a war of radio and cinema.... On the one hand, Hitler commanded
his generals and his troops by radio-telephone, while on the other he led
his people with radio and newsreels” (Virilio 1999:109). Moreover, WWII
represented the climax of the accelerated culture of late modernity, a “dro-
mocratic society” dominated by the military-industrial complex in which
ever-increasing speed of information became normalized for vast swaths of
the world's population.
fl
ows become e
ff
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