Late modern time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 160

Figure 4.10 Number of nuclear weapons held by U.S. and USSR, 1945-2005.

for re ection or debate. Similarly, what Janelle (1973) calls the “30-minute

world” refers to the maximum time needed for missiles to reach their destin-
ations. Luke and Ó Tuathail (2000:368) conclude “As nuclear war becomes
an increasingly electronic decision, there has been a loss in the duration of
politics. Politics is reduced to the instance of launch code authentication.”
During the cold war, the speed with which ICBMs could be launched minim-
ized the ability to detect false alarms, for policy makers to change their minds,
or to stop the accidental launch of weapons. Thus, Virilio (1986) argues that
when the temporal distance from total annihilation is measured in seconds,
and the time for diplomacy shrinks to zero, geopolitics, or power over space,
is eclipsed by chronopolitics, the power over time.
Superpower rivalry extended national politics into outer space as the U.S.
and USSR sought to develop military capacities there, including space-based
satellites, espionage, and, of course, the race to the moon. As Cosgrove (1994,
2001) points out, the real impacts of the Apollo space missions were not a
new understanding of the Moon as much as a new understanding of the
Earth, generating a vision of the world that lacked a clear center or periphery.
Far from comprising politically neutral representations, space photography
legitimated and sustained a discourse of “one earth” e

fl

ectively embraced
and encompassed by one nation, the U.S. The Apollo images of the earth
o

ff

ected
the globalization and worldwide ecumene that late modern capitalism had
constructed. This view enhanced the long-standing Western ocularcentrism,
for global perspectives are visual rather than experiential.
Within the global spaces secured by the Pax Americana, the growth of trans-
national corporations (TNCs) after World War II represented a signi

ff ered a perspective of humanity from the “outside,” a view that re fl

cant
scalar jump in the spatial organization of capitalism, as many companies
invested heavily in several continents simultaneously. Central to the emergence

fi