First missile, Let me say a word first about speed. first At the beginning there will have been speed. missive. We are speaking of stakes that are apparently limitless for what is still now and then called humanity. People find it easy to say that in nuclear war" humanity" runs the risk of its self-destruction, with nothing left over, no remainder. There is a lot that could be said about that rumor. But whatever credence we give it, we have to recognize that these stakes appear in the experience of a race, or more precisely of a competition, a rivalry between two rates of speed. It's what we call in French a course de vitesse, a speed race. Whether it is the arms race or orders given to start a war that is itself dominated by that economy of speed throughout all the zones of its technology, a gap of a few seconds may decide, irreversibly, the fate of what is still now and then called humanity-plus the fate of a few other species. As no doubt we all know, no single instant, no atom of our life (of our relation to the world and to being) is not marked today, directly or indirectly, by that speed race. And by the whole strategic debate about" no use,"" no first use," or" first use" of nuclear weaponry. Is this new? Is it the first time" in history"? Is it an invention, and can we still say" in history" in order to speak about it? The most classical wars were also speed races, in their preparation and in the actual pursuit of the hostilities. Are we having, today, another, a different experience of speed? Is our relation to time and to motion qualitatively different? Or must we speak prudently of an extraor-dinary-although qualitatively homogeneous-acceleration of the same experience? And what temporality do we have in mind when we put the question that way? Can we take the question seriously without re-elaborating all the problematics of time and motion, from Aristotle to Heidegger by way of Augustine, Kant, Husserl, Einstein, Bergson, and so on? So my first formulation of the ques-tion of speed was simplistic. It opposed quantity and quality as if a quantitative transformation-the crossing of certain thresholds of acceleration within the general machinery of a culture, with all its techniques for handling, recording, and storing information-could not induce qualitative mutations, as if every invention were not the invention of a process of acceleration or, at the very least, a new experience of speed. Or as if the concept of speed, linked to some quantification of objective velocity, remained within a homogeneous relation to every experience of time-for the human subject or for a mode of temporaliza-tion that the human subject-as such-would have himself covered up. Why have I slowed down my introduction this way by dragging in such a naive question? No doubt for several reasons.... Reason number one. Let us consider the form of the question itself: is the war of (over, for) speed (with all that it entails) an irreducibly new phenomenon, an invention linked to a set of inventions of the so-called nuclear age, or is it