WWII

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Japan

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is representative of a decisive transition in the history of military space in that the aim is no longer to win a war purely by capturing territory, but to win the war by destroying urban and industrial infrastructure through aerial bombardment.

For Virilio the Second World War represents a decisive transition in the history of military planning and the dialectic of attack and defence which underpins it. This is because of the systematic introduction of aerial bombardment and the targeting of civilian populations and industrial or urban sites. This opening up in a more general way of a third front (after those of the land and the sea) radically transforms military strategy and in so doing transforms the nature of military space. If the aim is no longer to win a war purely by capturing territory, but to win the war by destroying urban and industrial infrastructure through aerial bombardment, then fortifications whose function is to block movement across land cease to have any primary value. Aerial bombardment itself dates back to the First World War. The Third Reich pioneered the technique of bombing urban centres, first during the Spanish Civil War with the destruction of Guernica, and then early in the Second World War with the Blitzkrieg offensive over London. Later in the war the bombing and destruction of a wide range of cities becomes a central or systematic plank of the military strategy adopted by the Allies. The impact of such a strategy upon the defensive value of concrete bunkers is highlighted by Virilio as a decisive moment: 'the destruction of the great European cities completely broke down the shielding effect of littoral and frontier fortification' (Virilio 1994a: 47). p.75

is not over, for logic of total war (the threat of nuclear weapons) which it gave birth to made the state of war limitless.

Perhaps one of the most startling conclusions that Virilio draws from his analysis in Bunker Archeology, one upon which he builds in subsequent works, is that the Second World War did not come to an end (Virilio 1994a: 58). The logic of total war is such that the state of war itself becomes limitless. Virilio draws this conclusion because he sees an essential continuity between the aerial bombing of European and Japanese cities and the threat of extermination posed to civilian populations by nuclear weapons in the post-war period. If the redundancy of frontier fortifications signals the advent of total war, then the advent of the nuclear bomb and the threat of extermination it implies inaugurates a period of what Virilio terms 'Total Peace'. p.77

WWII, n.Definitions

WWII