World War II led to the massive mobilization of all the people and resources nations could bring to bear. This was total war on a global scale, producing a new sense among nations that their fates were interconnected. New technologies of war, such as heavy bombers and long-range missiles like the V-2 rocket, reduced distances of time and space.
In recognition of this new state of affairs, in 1942 the U.S. Army chief of staff, George Marshall, sent identical 50-inch, 750-pound globes to British prime minister Winston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt as Christmas presents.
The sheer scale of the war and the complex administrative and strategic systems required to manage these global operations led to, during the Cold War that followed, the growing interdependency of a network of institutions, attitudes, and ways of working.
Fueled by the development of satellites and intercontinental nuclear missiles that further shrank the size of the planet, the Cold War redrew geopolitical notions of time, space, and scale. Huge nuclear arsenals made it necessary to consider both the instantaneous and the endless: the decisive moment when mutually assured destruction is potentially set in motion, the frozen stalemate of the superpower stand-off, and the long catastrophe of a post-nuclear future.
The power of an individual decision was now outrageously amplified—the finger on the nuclear button—yet, at the same time, radically diminished in the face of unfathomable forces, in which human agency seemed to have been ceded to computers and weapons systems. The world had become too complex and too dangerous: Systems were at once the threat and the solution.
