In both cases, however, war is distinguished by its unlimited, and potentially interminable, nature. The former depicts modern warfare as omnipresent, unrestrained violence, whereas the latter presents us with the constant menace of imagined violence, a possibility that can never be permitted to become a reality. 2ДЄt first glance, these two models of 'all-pervasive' conflict appear to be diametrically opposed. Characterized by the efforts of its central protagonists to avoid a full-blown confrontation, this new form of permanent strife impacted every sector of society yet it was a war based not on sustained hostilities, but on the mutual ability of the US and the USSR to maintain the threat of a nuclear exchange that neither could survive. Heralded as the original industrialized slaughter in which the boundary between the military and the civilian was all but completely dissolved, the 'Great War' has also been accorded enormous cultural significance as 'the moment in which the new sensibility of English-and international-modernism comes fully into existence.' 1 For different reasons, the Cold War has come to be viewed as uniquely formative, as well. In these discussions, the First World War has consistently enjoyed paradigmatic status as a world-historical event of unparalleled consequences.

Nor has a consensus emerged as to what is at stake ideologically in treating modern conflicts as inherently more devastating than earlier ones. Although the past two hundred years have witnessed a host of efforts to conceptualize the extraordinary intensity and scale of military operations in the post-Napoleonic era, no agreement has been reached about whether the distinctiveness of modern warfare should primarily be regarded as a product of economic, political, or technological change.

The great war mod total war