Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
world-system formed both an alternative to capitalism as well as a major
obstacle to its ambitions (Chase-Dunn 1982). As Smith (2003:21) observes,
“The binary geographies of the cold war frustrated U.S. global ambitions.
The ideology of the American Century survived by ignoring the fact that a
good half of the world was distinctively un-American or at least strove to be
uncapitalist.” The cold war assumed several simultaneous rhetorical and
ideological dimensions, i.e., as a con
ict between capitalism and communism,
democracy and totalitarianism, and religious freedom and atheism. Geo-
politically, the bifurcation that lay at the heart of the Truman Doctrine of
Containment was manifested spatially in a ring of bases and localized con-
fl
fl
flicts through which the U.S. attempted to “contain” its Soviet counterpart
(Nijman 1992). In demonizing the Other, the cold war imported colonial
notions of Orientalism into the twentieth century, adapting the concept to
the highly compressed times and spaces of nuclear Armaggedon.
Central to superpower rivalry, and to the acute reorientation of time and
space to be found within it, was the nuclear arms race. The introduction of
nuclear weapons radically transformed the geopolitics of world order, threat-
ening death in the tens of millions, if not billions, to societies that dared to
use them. Strategically, the atomic, then hydrogen, bomb obliterated trad-
itional distinctions between the front line and rear echelons much as it wiped
out the di
erence between military defeat and mass annihilation. While
bombers were the only e
ff
ective delivery mechanism in the 1950s, by the 1960s
intercontinental ballistic missiles fundamentally undermined the secure bor-
ders that were an essential part of the Westphalian state system. “The nuclear
age in this sense removed one of the key aspects of the territorial state: its
ability, under any circumstances, to defend itself alone. Distance was not
just shrunk but eroded forever as an overriding factor in strategic defense”
(Horsman and Marshall 1995:48). Although several powers developed nuclear
weapons during this era, the overwhelming majority—98 percent or more—
of nuclear missiles were controlled by the two superpowers, the U.S. and the
Soviet Union, which were locked together by the threat of Mutual Assured
Destruction (MAD), or deterrence generated by fears of shared instantaneous
annihilation. By the early 1990s, the two states combined held more than
24,000 thermonuclear bombs (Figure 4.10), although this number declined
somewhat following arms limitations treaties. Many missiles were equipped
with multiple, independently targeted re-entry vehicles, or MIRVed, greatly
multiplying their destructive potential. Whereas most Soviet weapons were
land-based, American ones tended to reside at sea: the
ff
first nuclear sub-
marine, the U.S.S.
Nautilus
, was launched in 1957, and became famous for its
historic voyage under the polar ice cap in 1958, an event that markedly
changed the world's strategic map. By extending the ability to project mass
death anywhere, ICBMs ended the prospect of prolonged military campaigns
as a means of resolving superpower disputes.
This state of a
fi
airs lent weight to Virilio's (1986) pessimistic vision that
time-space compression is, at its core, driven by the military, leaving little time
ff
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