Surely no one now doubts that, as the logical outcome of such possibilities, a third world war can hardly end in anything but the annihilation of the loser. We are already so in the thrall of total war that we can scarcely imagine a war between Russia and America in which the American Constitution or the current Russian regime would survive defeat. But that means that a future war will not be about a gain or loss of power, about borders, export markets, or Lebensraum, that is, about things that can also be achieved by means of political discussion and without the use of force. It means that war has now ceased to be the ultima ratio of negotiations, whereby the goals of a war were determined at the point where negotiations broke off, so that all ensuing military actions really were nothing but a continuation of politics by other means. What is now at stake is something that could, of course, never be a matter for negotiation: the sheer existence of a nation and its people. It is at this point – when war no longer presumes the coexistence of hostile parties as a given and no longer seeks simply to put an end to the conflict between them by force – that war first truly ceases to be a means of politics and, as a war of annihilation, begins to overstep the bounds set by politics and to annihilate politics itself.