Are we afraid of war? Has the advancement of military technology created a mindset of invincibility on the battlefield? In War X, Tim Blackmore argues that the technology of warfare has essentially erased the human body from battlespace. The result is a physical and psychological distance between humanity and bloodshed. As the machinery of war develops, and as advances are made in the biological sciences, war becomes increasingly palatable - attractive, even - resulting in a sanitized murder culture in which war is anticipated and viewed with little anxiety.
Blackmore makes connections between human beings in battle and the very different world of weapons manufacturers, finding between the two a romance of war technology. Using popular science fiction literature and film, personal war narratives, biographies, and military imagery, he explores the human body in war, the ways in which soldiers imagine themselves superhuman - posthuman - protected by the armour of muscles and steel, tanks and helicopters, robotics and remote control.
War X is an explosive introduction to the discussion of modern warfare and a timely consideration of industrial warfare as it is unfolding even now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as it might be in the future, with new weapon development. It is also a deliberation on the startling world of new weapon development, and the indescribable future of war that beckons.
Tim Blackmore is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario.
