Book excerpt: Desert Screen is a vision of future war. Paul Virilio identifies the Gulf War as a turning point in history, the last industrial and the first information war. Virilio argues that we live in a world still exhausted from the geopolitics of the Cold War, a world in which the politics of military and media technology seem to preclude the possibility of negotiation and diplomacy. This new translation of an already classic text includes a new interview with Virilio in which he looks back at a decade of war at the speed of light.