Absolute weapon speed erases the distinctions that made rational political decision possible.

Evidence

But what about the acceleration of transportation, communication, and production? As I have already indicated, the geostrategic logic of the defense and potential conquest of closed territories reached a decisive limit in the development of atomic long-distance rockets at the highpoint of the cold war. When weapons of mass destruction can reach any place on earth in minutes if not seconds, geostrategical military planning that rests on the basic distinctions between territories to be protected and (potentially) to be conquered, between frontline and interior, between soldiers and civilians, and between near and far, loses its meaning: “the technological break-through, the last form of the war of movement, ends up, with deterrence, at the dissolution of what separated but also distinguished, and this non-distinction corresponds for us to a political blindness.” As Virilio repeatedly emphasizes, the destruction threatened by such weapons is so fast and so total that it undermines the possibility of rational political decision because in the moment of existential danger there is no more time for a properly political mode of decision making, i.e., through common discussion and deliberation. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 541

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader claims about acceleration eroding political self-steering capacity in earlier chapters, and foreshadows the democratic-desynchronization argument of chapter 11. — connects to: Absolute military speed inverts modern war into premodern guerrilla tactics. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 542