War Against the Center

tags

Centre and Periphery

Notes

1. Dispersion

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Our vision of the late twentieth century: an urban geography of Deleuzian rhizomes burrowing every which way

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an end to the modernist, arboreal dream organizing all around a rooted center predicated on located cities, centered societies, and integral psyches.

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the long war that, in a certain sense, began in the 1930s, accelerated after the Nazi seizure of power, continued across the end of World War II, through the cold war, and even past the fall of the Soviet Union into the present unsettled moment.

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Where, they asked, were its nodal points, the linchpins that, when pulled, would topple the economy, forcing the Nazi war machine to a halt?

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Emphasizing protection for their factories against air raids, the Luftwaffe planners sited new plants away from frontiers, in suburban or country districts, concealing structures, deploying camouflage, separating buildings within the plants, and providing on-site air raid shelters for workers. The Reich pooled patents and structured the airframe “complex” so that spatially separated plants could stamp out replaceable segments of their completed prod- uct. It was an efficient, powerful apparatus that, as the Survey promptly conceded, continued to produce an abundance of fighters and bombers even under the years-long rain of explosives.

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studies designed to locate just those plants where destruction would cause shortages to ripple through the entire system.

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Speer, near panic, put his closest associate, Philip Kessler, in charge of protecting and dispersing the bearing industry. By August 1944, when the Allies flew an eight-hundred-plane raid against Schweinfurt, half the factory was elsewhere.

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“even in the case of a very concen- trated industry very heavy and continuous attack must be made, since otherwise the enemy, if he can survive the initial shock, will be able to take successful countermeasures.”

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Aerial warfare worked when it hit concentrated, centralized production stand- ing at a functional node, upstream of many other industries.

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2. The Bombsight Mirror

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began to speculate on how Americans might survive the kinds of attacks they themselves had just visited on the Japanese:

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Truman’s decision in January 1950: The country would, in fact, build the hydrogen bomb.

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no indus- trial area in the Nation can be considered safe from attack.”

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“Space is the one thing that really works.”

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Now you are ready to identify your region’s target zones, “those areas that contain sufficient concentrations of industry or population so as to constitute attractive atom-bomb targets.”

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use these circles to form a target out of the city as a whole by transecting the four-mile-diameter circles

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Locate all future critical industry and its associated populations past the line of safety, taking care not to create inadvertently a secondary potential A-bomb target zone.

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Bombing the Axis economy and dispersing the American one were reflections of one another.

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I call him a real expert because he was one of the men who had done bombing in the industrial arena of Germany, and cer- tainly he convinced me that 10 or 20 miles provides reasonable safety.”

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Above all, the fast-increas- ing population, office building, and industry heading into cities had to be reversed. Throughout: constant vigilance against the re-creation of new centers.

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industrial and civic leaders learned to see themselves through the reflection of a bombsight.

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blur the distinction between military force and industrial poten- tial.

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necessary moves must be made before any outbreak of hostilities. The Germans enjoyed the luxury of learning from their mistakes. It is highly doubtful whether in the atomic age any nation will have the same oppor- tunity—one mistake may well be the last.

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75 percent of American steelmaking capacity could be destroyed by a mere ten hydrogen bombs.

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Zoning would force dispersal from the center, institute bands of open space, and deliver industrial plants to hinter- lands deliberately bypassed by major radial or circumferential roads in order to avoid creating secondary concentrations.

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Canada, in the midst of a major effort to plan urban growth in 1956, also began defensive dispersal.

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Satellite towns would perch outside the ring of safety—towns that under no circumstances ought to attract more than forty thousand inhabitants.

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General Eisenhower had been astonished by the auto- bahns, taking particular note of the advantages that road system afforded as he had to move masses of men and matériel across the conquered Reich: “Germany . . . made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land.”

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“appalling inadequacies to meet the demands of catastrophe or defense, should an atomic war come.”

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3. Distributed Knowledge

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Better quanti- tative estimates of post-attack destruction together with a less emotional discussion of the alternatives may mark the end of the “what the hell—what’s the use?” era.

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If war does not mean the end of the earth in a black and white manner, then it follows that we should do those things that make the shade of gray as light as possible: to plan now to minimize potential destruction and to do all those things necessary to permit the survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstruct the economy swiftly.

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Though in the garb of nuclear survivability the grid may not appear as the redemptive Internet of our dreams, that tech- nology grew directly out of fifteen years of longing for a world still standing after thermonuclear war.

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4. We Are Become Targets

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During the years of World War II, American and British planners and analysts learned to see through a bombsight.

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One thinks here of the origins of cybernetics, launched when Norbert Wiener began to think of the enemy bomber pilot as a kind of feedback machine that could be mimicked electronically; from there, it was a short step to thinking of the Allied gunner in the same way. Then human physiology began to appear as a cybernetic system, then the human mind, then life, then even the world system as a whole. Somewhere in the midst of total war, a technocratic vision of a technical Enemy Other rose to become a vision of ourselves.

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training Americans to see themselves as targets.

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An atomic imaginary joined itself to the most mundane aspects

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