Filming a Nuclear State the USAF’S Lookout Mountain Laboratory

8 Filming a Nuclear State The USAF’s Lookout Mountain Laboratory

Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman

The film The Right Stuff (1983; Philip Kaufman), the now classic Hollywood tale of the Mercury astronauts, is punctuated by a repeated interlude in which the president and other top government officials are seen sitting in a conference room, lights out, watching newly produced movies bearing the latest stories and images of America’s space highlights and mishaps. More than a narrative device, these scenes in The Right Stuff reflect the actual practice of presidents, government elites, and military leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. Before official written reports on state‐sponsored science‐and‐technology efforts were even completed, state officials were often sent specially made, and typically secret, “film reports” from government film studios documenting in narrative, visual, aural, and graphic form the latest news from the brave new world of “big science” (Weinberg, 1961, pp. 161–164).1 Narrative film played a vital role in the official political culture of Cold War science and technology, beginning with the most spectacular big science venture, the nuclear weapons program. Indeed, in the 1950s the technological developments, strategic promise, explosive power, and Cold War perils of nuclear weaponry were almost always first presented to top officials, whether civilian or military, through classified motion pictures. As a result, the government participated in a curious and complex form of cinematic “self‐talk,” wherein the successes and failures alike of the nuclear weapons development program were met with positive rhetorical reinforcement in filmic “first reports” from the agencies—the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)—responsible for the fate of nuclear America. Beginning in the 1990s an important and unique selection of these films was declassified: films portraying nuclear tests shot and produced by what was known officially as the 1352nd Photographic Group of the United States Air Force (USAF). Branded as “Lookout Mountain Laboratory” after its hilltop location in Hollywood, California, during its two‐ decade history (1947–1969), the Air Force film unit was responsible, so far as we have been

A Companion to the War Film, First Edition. Edited by Douglas A. Cunningham and John C. Nelson. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 130 Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman able to determine, for producing at least 600 films about America’s nuclear weapons program and many other films on other topics. For Lookout Mountain Laboratory (LML) was the film studio of choice for the DOD and AEC’s joint effort to document and report on America’s above‐ground nuclear test programs. And in the Air Force, LML was a hub for a cadre of USAF film groups used to document, report on, and promote its Cold War activities, from the construction of new missile silos and testing of pilot ejection seats to the monitoring of atmospheric effects from remote Pacific islands and the graduation of the new Air Force Academy’s first cadets. LML’s work fell into a few regular formats that guided the process of commission, production, and archiving. The most ambitious, known as “Special Film Projects,” narrated particular nuclear events or concepts, providing scripted and often scored documentary overviews of new techniques and technologies or of particular military operations. “Film Training Aids,” which could range from edited montages of existing footage to location shoots with paid actors, functioned as curricular instruments on topics ranging from nuclear flash protection for pilots to survival skills for downed crews. Finally, “Film Reports” provided an edited, often narrated, montage of documentary footage without much additional context or background, typically aimed at providing particular audiences—especially those in leadership—with an overview of how military efforts were advancing. Films in these and other categories emerged from short and long production cycles at LML, sometimes shot and edited within mere weeks, and other times finessed over years of cooperation with multiple entities. All told, the history of Lookout Mountain Laboratory confirms the claim of this volume that the scope of the war film extends well beyond documenting battles between armies or narrating the lives of soldiers. As a film studio created for the purpose of “cold war” in a nuclear age, LML was part propagandistic agency, part chronicler of institutional evolution, part instructional and training aid, part inter‐office communication medium, part scientific and historical witness to the grand experiments of nuclear‐weapons‐related science, and part producer of therapeutic cinema meant to reassure government officials that everything was under control. In this chapter we offer an overview of LML’s work and output, beginning broadly but progressively narrowing our inquiry to the point of examining a single project. As we proceed with our overview, we will also reflect on the particular historiographical and critical problems we, as scholars and citizens, have confronted as we have attempted to understand LML’s complex history. Thus, as we begin with a broad consideration of LML’s history, we wrestle with the fact that many of what would constitute LML’s available archives are either classified or have been lost. Then, as we proceed to a more focused consideration of the character of LML’s work, we suggest that what we know about the unit indicates that it is best understood not as a “studio” or “film unit,” but, as its name attested, a laboratory. We will argue, therefore, for the usefulness of “laboratory studies” in Science, Technology, and Society Studies (better known simply as STS) for the study of this particular film operation, as well as for the usefulness, more generally, of important recent developments in the study of industrial film. Finally, in the third and final portion of this essay we bring together these historical and critical‐theoretical perspectives by taking a closer look at a particular LML film project, Operation Ivy (1953), which documented and narrated the world’s first ever detonation of a hydrogen or thermonuclear device. Filming a Nuclear State 131

Figure 8.1 Lookout Mountain Laboratory, still hidden in California’s Laurel Canyon, and now a private residence. (photograph, Kevin Hamilton)

Lookout Mountain: An Inquiry

Nestled in Laurel Canyon in the hills of Hollywood sits a 15 000‐square‐foot building. Seen from above, the structure, enclosed by a high fence, folds out into the hillside, revealing an architectural history of expansions that, in turn, suggests an extensive functional history. But the building’s fences and façades offer no dead giveaways. Like Wallace Stevens’s Tennessee jar, the building stands there “gray and bare” (Stevens, 1982). It was, until 1969, the headquarters of Lookout Mountain Laboratory, and its present‐day facelessness is indeed indicative of what is perhaps the most remarkable fact about LML: Its history has until recently gone almost entirely unnoticed. This is true despite the fact in the 1950s and 1960s the preponderance of “first reports” on nuclear weapons tests presented to military brass, congressional officials, and the president himself came not in written form, but as documentary‐style movies produced by LML. LML thus participated in the more subtle translations of the language and routines of nuclear state‐science into new strategic, political, and national goals (Latour 1987; 1993; 1994). Ultimately, the laboratory’s films, seen and discussed by numerous elite state officials, were integral to the construction to what Gary Wills has termed “Bomb power” in America: a new political identity that, in Wills’s words, “redefined the government as a National Security State” (Wills, 2011, p. 1). But, if this monumental state history is not enough, we can also point to LML’s remarkable legacy in popular culture. It was LML more than any other single film unit that solidified 132 Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman the image of the mushroom cloud as the great icon of American Cold War power. Certain famous frames from its corpus have long circulated, first in civil defense films and then as stock footage in studio features like The House in the Middle or Dr. Strangelove. Indeed, the great majority of the images of mushroom clouds that today circulate in popular media originated from, or imitate, the work of LML cameras. Non‐theatrical films connected to LML also circulate today, in part due to the hard work of archivists and collectors of “orphan films.” Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, Rick Prelinger, Craig Baldwin, and others rescued these Cold War artifacts from the trash bin for public projection, distribution, and remix—first through mail‐order VHS, then later in digital form through such sites as the Internet Archive. More recently, restored versions of several LML films have made their way into public circulation through the work of Peter Kuran, a filmmaker and special‐ effects artist who has produced, in cooperation with the Departments of Energy and Defense, five documentary films on nuclear weapons research based largely on LML‐produced footage. That these films devote more time to footage of explosions than other LML material is of special note, given Kuran’s significant contributions as an effects artist to the turn towards spectacular optical effects in 1980s blockbuster cinema (Turnock, 2014). Yet the history of LML has to be discovered, pieced together, reconstructed, and otherwise imaginatively reconceived. Our own discovery of the unit is instructive here. We first learned of LML in 2007 when one of us (Ned O’Gorman) was working on another project at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and came across a memo that described President Eisenhower’s strong reaction news about “Ivy Mike,” the first thermonuclear device ever det- onated. Eisenhower, the memo indicated, was able to view the detonation as it was pr esented to him in a top‐secret film, titled Operation Ivy, shown to him at the White House in 1953. Curious about the incident and the film, we were able to locate a digitized version of Operation Ivy on the Internet in the Prelinger Archives’ online collection. We watched and rewatched the film, noting that a unit called “Lookout Mountain Laboratory” had produced it. Searching the Internet, we turned up a two‐page Department of Energy “fact sheet” about LML, a few other digitized films shot by the unit, and references to Kuran, who had made a documentary about LML and was seemingly the only one actively engaged in learning the unit’s history. For the next two years periodic digging around turned up bits of further information about LML here and there—in government memos, in some oral histories, in a conversation with an archivist, and so on—but the history continued to be elusive. Indeed, if we had tried to learn about LML in the 1980s rather than the 2000s, the task would have been far more difficult, for much of what we were learning and seeing was available only because of the Department of Energy’s “Openness Initiative” in the 1990s. That initiative, an effort of the Clinton administration, sought to declassify documents, photographs, and films having to do with nuclear and other Cold War secrets. It was a slow process, requiring expert personnel to thoroughly review all materials, redacting sensitive information, before releasing them to the public. And, as things turned out, the events of September 11, 2001 quickly halted whatever momentum there was, putting a firm end to the declassifying efforts of the Openness Initiative. But our efforts, as events turned out, were not in vain. In the summer of 2010, about two years into our work on LML, we finally found what we were looking for. Our discovery began with the nondescript building in the hills of Hollywood that had been LML’s headquarters. We wrote a letter to the owner at the time, asking if he might show us the site. We were told to be at the gate of the facility at a precise time, and that the gate would only open Filming a Nuclear State 133 momentarily. Arriving at the appointed time (albeit barely), we were able to walk through the building. We saw former film vaults, viewing rooms, processing rooms, animation studios, and the soundstage. In that hour, we were able to finally get a concrete sense of just how extensive the unit’s work had been, as well as come to grips with the innovative and experimental nature of much of that work. And just as importantly, to our great surprise, before we left the owner handed us a small set of microfilm reels: on them, it turns out, were semi‐annual reports documenting LML’s activities across many years of its history. Those reports, together with all the other materials we have managed to gather, do indeed suggest a remarkable history.

Lookout Mountain: A Brief History

LML, it is apparent, was a major hub in a global network of institutions organized around the development and production of nuclear weapons at the height of the Cold War. It shot, developed, catalogued, stored, and distributed hundreds of thousands of feet of film footage and photographs, and offered in its secret hilltop location a site for numerous meetings among nuclear‐related military, political, scientific, and technical personnel attempting to steer a course for nuclear weapons development. Specializing in representations of the nuclear tests, a critical component of both the science and strategy of nuclear weapons development, LML was the site of ambitious experiments in film and other technologies of visual representation. According to the Department of Energy, the then newly independent Department of the Air Force established LML as a self‐contained film production, development, and storage unit in 1947 at a former radar station in Laurel Canyon, just up the hill from the center of Hollywood.2 This Laurel Canyon facility became the headquarters for the 1352nd Squadron of the Air Force and, in the late 1950s, began to take up a significant share of audiovisual needs for the Air Force and other agencies. LML quickly recruited a wide array of expertise into its work, ranging from Hollywood veterans to scientific experts to military professionals. LML drew especially from a ready civilian labor pool in Hollywood. Building on the Army’s earlier wartime successes with Hollywood collaborations, it drew to its work animators, sound engineers, musicians, prop builders, scriptwriters, and many others (Cunningham, 2005). Routine function of the facility required a staff that hovered for many years around 150 civilian and military personnel, who, in response to requests from multiple governmental agencies, produced everything from high‐speed scientific film documentation, to training films for missile operators, to journalistic coverage of minor Air Force events, to fully scored and acted feature‐length films. Subject matter included not only nuclear weapons testing but experimental aircraft, flight safety, diplomatic missions, and propaganda for civil defense. Biannual reports, gleaned first from the microfilm lent to us on our first visit to the former facility, and later from the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base, reveal yet more detail. Technical innovations at LML included new film storage and archiving techniques, high‐speed camera and film technologies for capturing detonations, three‐dimensional photography, and experimental camera‐mounts for filming from a variety of airborne platforms. Custom‐mounted LML cameras peered out of bombers into atomic clouds, tracked missiles and later manned rockets into space, and recorded sorties from the bellies of planes over Vietnam. Where other units made 16mm 134 Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman their mainstay for routine training and educational purposes, LML made heavy use of 35mm and even 70mm stock—they even helped test Cinemascope and Cinerama technologies. Through the Air Force’s film distribution network, the library of films stored at LML circulated through all levels of publicity and secrecy, from elementary school science classes to the Pentagon. Additionally, LML’s work included creating, compiling, and storing data. The laboratory produced and stored thousands upon thousands of feet of raw footage captured outside of planned scripts or features. Contracted by various government agencies as the only potential “witnesses” to nuclear experiments who possessed both the skill and the security clearance necessary for the task, LML constantly struggled to balance the demand for labor‐ intensive, highly produced documentaries with the equal and sometimes unpredictable demand for ready‐at‐hand film crews at multiple points around the globe. The group also provided extensive still photographic services, as well as the design and animation of charts, graphs, and other visual illustrations (the latter provided by animators who had worked on Fantasia, Dumbo, and other Disney features). Formal recognition for LML films included a 1962 “Oscar” nomination from the Academy for Motion Arts and Sciences in the Documentary (Short Subject) category. The work also earned patents, recognition, and publication in technical journals for sound recording and scientific photography. NASA counted on LML‐invented technology for records of its launches for years; Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara counted on LML camera crews for film used in the metrication of military action in Vietnam; and Hollywood producers depended on LML for stock footage of Air Force jets and bombers for films like Strategic Air Command (1955) and A Gathering of Eagles (1963). Of all USAF photographic units, LML was closest in proximity to Continental and Pacific atomic testing grounds, and eventually to significant strategic facilities such as Vandenberg Air Force Base, on the central California coast, and the Headquarters of the Strategic Air Command at Offutt Air Force Base, in eastern Nebraska. These factors, and its organizational location within the Air Force’s globally networked Military Air Transport Service, combined to keep the facility operating at maximum capacity for 20 years, with its most active years devoted to nuclear weapons development in the 1950s and 1960s. The facility closed in 1969, five years after Secretary of Defense McNamara included it among a long list of bases and properties to be closed for budgetary reasons. The unit’s personnel and programs migrated to Norton Air Force Base in nearby San Bernardino, where a new effort known as the Aerospace Audio Visual Service consolidated the work of many units into one organization. Certainly LML’s closure came as a relief to many in Laurel Canyon, where lumbering trucks traveling up narrow residential streets toward mysterious work conducted behind armed gates met with regular complaints. The decommissioned base was sold to private owners in 1969 and the work of the 1352nd relegated elsewhere for a short time, before the unit was discontinued and its voluminous archives dumped in an Air Force warehouse. Some of these archives were eventually transferred to Maxwell Air Force Base; other items were sent to the National Archives and Records Administration; others taken to a dump. Finally, a cache of items—especially film reels—were eventually recovered by an official with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency Information Analysis Center (DTRIAC) and brought to a DTRIAC facility at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, NM, where they now sit, alas, almost all under “classified” status. Filming a Nuclear State 135

Lookout Mountain: A Laboratory of (Cold) War Film

And so, having begun to piece together the powerful but elusive history of LML, we come to an argument about the nature of its work: Far more than a streamlined film production unit, it was, as its name suggests, a laboratory. Karin Knorr Cetina, a sociologist specializing in laboratory studies, argues that laboratories are far more than rooms or buildings set up for scientific experimentation. They are specialized, cultural sites of knowledge production, where knowledge is technically, politically, and symbolically construed. They consist of “differentiated social and technical forms,” whether mechanisms, routines, methods, or ideas (Knorr Cetina, 1999, p. 26; 1995). LML, we argue, was in this more sophisticated sense a laboratory, indeed a nuclear weapons laboratory. The laboratory, of course, is integral to histories of nuclear weapons. A number of important scholarly accounts have focused on scientific, military, and political personalities exploring in both theory and experiment the “mysteries of nature” behind nuclear power (see Herken, 2003; Rhodes, 1996; 2008; 2012; Baggot, 2009; Younger, 2009). Here laboratories serve as backdrops to the human drama of nuclear weapons development. However, these histories have largely been written as if the material instruments of nuclear weapons development, apart from the immediate components of the weapons themselves, played only a supporting role to brilliant scientists and ambitious generals. Scholars in STS strongly suggest that material instruments should not be so relegated. They have brought new theoretical understandings and empirical studies of scientific knowledge production to the materiality of scientific work, showing that the material instruments of science are not merely instrumental, but in important respects constitutive of scientific knowledge (see Appadurai, 1988; Haraway, 1991; Pels et al., 2002; Latour, 1983; Pels, 2003). In their book Instruments and the Imagination, for example, Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman show how an instrument‐oriented approach to science studies productively complicates the boundaries between the domains of science, art, and popular culture, as the instruments they study—from the sunflower clock to the stereoscope—are shown to have “moved easily” among these domains (Hankins, 1995, p. 5). Similarly, Knorr Cetina has argued that following the material instruments of the laboratory “reveals the fragmentation of contemporary science” in a way that a focus on the role of theory in science cannot (Knorr Cetina, 1999, p. 3). In other words, by following the instruments of science work, and not just the personalities and theories, we gain new insights into the province and nature of science. In the abstract, the “nuclear weapons laboratory” is typically identified with places like Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Lawrence Livermore, associated with personalities like Robert Oppenheimer or Enrico Fermi, and seen as home to the theoretical exploration of the complex physical and chemical laws that undergird nuclear ballistics. But if we follow the instruments of nuclear weapons experimentation, in our case the camera and related instruments, we find ourselves in an altogether different sort of nuclear weapons laboratory, one both centralized at a local geographic site and manifestly mobile, diffuse, and fragmented. This laboratory can be thought of as a layer within the larger strata of nuclear weapons laboratories, but it is justly approached nevertheless as its own distinct sort of nuclear weapons laboratory. Without it, or one like it, nuclear weapons development in the United States would not have taken the course it did. 136 Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman

Indeed, motion picture cameras were, along with mechanical and later digital computers, the most important “new” information technology in America’s rise to nuclear power in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (MacKenzie 1993; 1998; Edwards 1997). Motion picture cameras were scientifically crucial, as they could be rigged to record the otherwise indiscernible visual facets of nuclear detonations, especially those phe- nomena that computers failed to model, and thus which scientists could not anticipate. In addition, as seen in the films of LML, motion pictures were vital, because they brought ready‐at‐hand rhetorics as yet unheard of in computing, including editing, mise‐en‐scène, and narrative. Consequently, cameras and their operators accompanied scientists and soldiers to every corner of the planet where the new weapons were tested or deployed, and the resulting films were carefully dispersed through the scientific, military, governmental, and sometimes public channels of the nation and the world. To suggest that this history was ancillary to nuclear weapons development in America, as the sum of histories does by virtue of their neglect, is a profound misapprehension of nuclear weapons history. Faced with the typically complex and even contradictory demands of a laboratory setting, workers at LML organized and synthesized their own routines and methods in the process of problem solving and knowledge production. Far from incidental to the process of nuclear weapons research and development, these local efforts were integral to the work of the other AEC‐managed nuclear weapons laboratories and Department of Defense efforts with which LML cooperated in the constitution of what can be envisioned as “bomb knowledge.” Moreover, LML’s efforts were not strictly “local.” Their cameras and crews were mobile, helping make plausible the construction of massive outdoor laboratories also known as “test sites.” Indeed, without cameras capable of capturing on film the nuclear detonation, the tests would have been far less useful for nuclear weapons development. Knorr Cetina has emphasized that laboratories allow researchers to approach a natural object or process other than it is (whether in partial versions or in representations), other than where it is, and other than when it happens (Knorr Cetina, 1999, p. 27). Indeed, field tests of nuclear devices or weapons required such laboratory environ- ments, as scientists, engineers, and military representatives could not adequately observe the detonation itself in the moment at the field site. To be sure, they could and did witness great flashes of light and a series of dramatic after‐effects, but these eyewitness observations had limited scientific and technical payoff. Instead, recording instruments, above all cameras, collected volumes of data of the “shot” for later analysis. And this data, especially in the case of film, had not only to be retrieved, processed, and priori- tized; the instruments for its collection together with corresponding socio‐technical regimes and routines had to be produced and reviewed. All of this latter work fell within the purview of LML, and, as such, its cameras helped produce the necessary material conditions for bomb knowledge. At the same time as approaching LML as a laboratory, we would like to broaden the con- ception of the “war film” by drawing on the work of scholars of what is sometimes referred to as “industrial film.” Film scholarship has recently seen a strong new body of work on nontheatrical, scientific, and industrial films, including careful attention to the material processes that constitute their conditions of production and use (Acland and Wasson, 2011; Filming a Nuclear State 137

Hediger and Vonderau, 2009; Orgeron et al., 2012; Boon, 2008; Reagan et al., 2008; Bellows and McDougall, 2001; Slide, 1992). LML films in many respects fit the category of industrial film. In an important work on industrial film, Films that Work, Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau describe what they call the “Three R’s” of industrial film: film as record, rhetoric, and rationalization. In the opening essay of their volume, the authors describe industrial film as performing this tripartite function with respect to their organizational contexts: record refers to the ways in which film serves institutional memory; rhetoric to strategies of inducing audience cooperation and consent; and rationalization to the ways in which films are used to “improve organizational performance” (Hediger and Vonderau, 2009, p. 40). Hediger and Vonderau thus suggest that an “industrial film,” far from being the mere product of various technologies, can itself be approached as a technology, a materialization of knowledge. The films of LML fulfilled each of the “Three R’s”: They were crucial to the AEC, DOD, and larger governmental institutional memories, both in the strong material sense of storing scientific data crucial to weapons development, and in the more ephemeral sense of institutional and national legacies and ideologies. At the same time, LML films represented far more than reels of memory. They were actively produced to get things done, especially in the way of support for continued nuclear weapons development, and they got this done through the production of cinematic rhetorics. Finally, LML films were means of simply maintaining and sometimes enhancing the vast machinery that made up America’s nuclear weapons complex in the first decades of the Cold War. Training films, “first reports,” and documentaries helped ensure adequate institutional performance. LML’s war films can thus be approached as technologies of Cold War emerging from a laboratory environment aimed at producing the material of bomb knowledge. Yet LML’s work in this regard was far from smooth going. Indeed, this simultaneous work of film as record, rhetoric, and rationalization presented problems to solve. When should a film open with a musical score and animated titles? When are paid civilian actors needed to accurately portray military personnel? How can a single script result in three or more integrated final edits for differing security clearances among the audience? And what character arcs and motivations should drive the narrative of a particular film “report,” given the differing ways in which a story of technological progress, success, or failure might be told? And after the “report” has been made, what artifacts need to be retained for the future, and who will have access? Such problems were taken up in the laboratory context of LML. That is to say, they were not, as we will show, simply resolved through a top‐down chain of command. On the con- trary, a differentiated team of workers at LML addressed them on a case‐by‐case basis, sometimes by referring to precedent, sometimes improvisationally, and sometimes provisionally and experimentally. The results were technologies, films, used for a variety of institutional and epistemic purposes. In the next‐to‐last section of this essay, we will consider further what STS studies might teach us with respect to the processes that gave rise to these technologies. But before we do, we want to turn to one such technology, or set of technologies, an LML film project known as Operation Ivy. The story of Operation Ivy is indicative of the “disunity” of LML’s work. By following the film’s various materializations, we can get a better sense of the provisional, contingent nature of the tensions and dilemmas of generating Cold War technologies. 138 Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman

Operation Ivy

The decision by President Truman to proceed with the testing of a thermonuclear device was fraught with tension. The Soviet test of an atomic device in the early fall of 1949 was the immediate occasion for his fateful resolution. In their test, the Soviets showed that they were not content to let the United States remain the only nuclear‐armed power and, as a consequence, frightened much of Europe, the presumed target of a Soviet atomic attack. The Soviet test raised the immediate question as to whether the United States should pursue, in turn, a hydrogen bomb, an issue on which the Truman administration was split between AEC opposition and DOD advocacy. AEC, propelled by the advocacy of Robert Oppenheimer, argued in strategic and moral terms against pursuit of the so‐called “super” (Thorpe 2008, 193–195). Meanwhile, the DOD was, as always, preparing for the next world war, and saw the hydrogen bomb as integral to such preparations. The State Department, which represented the “swing vote,” suggested a temporary compromise: the development of a “super” would be authorized, but its actual production would be deferred until State and Defense came up with a comprehensive security approach by which to judge the advan- tages and disadvantages of accelerating America’s commitment to a hydrogen‐based nuclear arsenal (Nitze et al., 1990, p. 90). Truman concurred. Given the world political occasion for Truman’s decision, and given its strained and provisional character, it would not be wholly clear to those preparing for the test under the leadership of Joint Task Force 132, the cross‐agency organization charged with conducting

Figure 8.2 Actor Reed Hadley (center) and others prepare to observe the world’s first thermonuclear explosion during the filming of Operation Ivy. (photograph, Defense Threat Reduction Information Analysis Center) Filming a Nuclear State 139 the test, what, precisely, the purposes of the test were. Clearly, there was scientific payoff to be gained. At the same time, the test would be what was then called a “psychological” move in the ongoing tit‐for‐tat between the United States and the USSR. That is to say, Operation Ivy, as the series of tests in late 1952 would be called, was caught between science and propaganda, and thus the means and ends of its execution were riddled with tensions. Perhaps more than any other unit involved, LML’s work on Operation Ivy captured these tensions. On the one hand, they were commissioned to document a scientific event, to the point that they were, for the first time, put under the direct command of a civilian scientist rather than a military leader. LML head, Lieutenant Colonel James L. Gaylord, was told to report to the scientific division of the Joint Task Force, and his immediate superior became Los Alamos researcher Stanley Burriss.3 At the very same time, however, Gaylord and LML—and indeed Burriss—were fully aware of both the world historical character of their venture and of the profound implications it would have for world politics. Therefore, “mere” documentation did not seem adequate to the task. Added to these dilemmas was the problem of secrecy. Ivy represented a monumental state secret. Even so, Ivy also represented a crucial demonstration of American technological power. The question of its visibility before the world thus became a vexed one. And in the government circles of the Cold War, this question of visibility was taken up as a question of secrecy, specifically, relative levels of secrecy. Given these issues, it is not surprising that the production and distribution history of Operation Ivy was itself fraught with complications. Initially, LML prepared to create a series of films, each shot and edited for different levels of security clearance. This is what they had done for previous atomic tests. Yet, as deployment to the Pacific began in preparation for a 1 November 1952 detonation, LML was told not to shoot any footage at all for lower security clearances. AEC, no doubt nervous about the test (since they had opposed it in the first place), had decided in late September of 1952 that the protocol for publicity about this first thermonuclear detonation would be different than for previous tests. They worried that “the outcome of the thermonuclear experiment will exert greater impact upon U.S. Foreign Relations and Domestic Opinion (sic) than the results of previous tests.” Indeed, they told LML that they did not anticipate any release of Ivy still shots or motion pictures to the general public.4 Remarkably, LML seems to have ignored the AEC protocol, proceeding with their original production plans, and indeed in a more audience‐aware manner than ever before. They decided to incorporate into their film productions of the Ivy test an on‐screen narrator, employing actor Reed Hadley to perform the part. Hadley was an interesting choice. He had been the voice in the early 1940s of radio’s heroic cowboy, Red Ryder. He had served as well as the narrator in the 1943 documentary‐like war film Guadalcanal Diary. Subsequently in the 1940s, he worked in a host of films, often portraying cowboys or law enforcement figures. In fact, as Operation Ivy was being filmed, Hadley was starring in a television crime show, Racket Squad (1951–1953). Each week, Racket Squad told a story of one citizen’s plight with a scam artist, foiled by a fictional police captain played by Hadley. Racket Squad served, among other things, as a kind of warning against real‐world crime; at the beginning and end of each episode, Hadley, in character, would speak to the television audience about the dangers of scam artists.5 The choice of Hadley suggested LML wanted to move Operation Ivy in a popular, genre‐ oriented direction. We will return to this choice in the next section of this chapter, trying to account more fully for it, but for now we simply want to stress the tension‐riddled character 140 Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman

Figure 8.3 Actor Reed Hadley introducing an episode of Racket Squad. (screen capture by Kevin Hamilton)

Figure 8.4 Reed Hadley narrating Operation Ivy. (screen capture by Kevin Hamilton) Filming a Nuclear State 141 of the production process LML initiated. On the one hand, they were charged with scientifically oriented documentation; on the other, they seemed intent on producing a feature film in a much more popular style. The distribution history of Operation Ivy ended up being nearly as jarring. The first iteration of Operation Ivy was kept tightly under wraps. Only three prints of the film were made, and only officials with the highest security clearances were allowed to view it. Operation Ivy was here a “first report,” intended for the eyes only of top‐level decision makers. The version screened for the first time to the AEC and JCS in May of 1953, about six months after the test. President Eisenhower and his cabinet saw it a month later.6 Yet it is important to note that even this tightly guarded, classified film bore all the char- acteristics of a well‐crafted genre piece. After a brief introduction from Joint Task Force Commander Major General P.W. Clarkson, sitting at his desk outside the film’s primary diegetical space, from a vantage set after the test’s successful operation, Operation Ivy opens with a view over dark waves in the pre‐dawn hours before the historic test. A symphonic score and animated titles give way to a brief montage to set the stage aboard the USS Estes, where we overhear a loudspeaker announcing that just one hour remains until detonation. The remainder of the film plays out (at least in its original, unsanitized form) in dramatic “real time,” as Hadley walks us through each facet of the operation while we wait for the countdown. Key figures in the operation fall across Hadley’s path in his walk around the ship, and they chat over tea or tobacco about the test’s technologies and systems. In theatrical

Figure 8.5 Four views of narrator Reed Hadley on a tour of the USS Estes in scenes from Operation Ivy. (screen captures by Kevin Hamilton) 142 Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman form, viewers are brought into the story and the space as eyewitnesses, and provided as well with occasional flashbacks to witness the (restaged) scientific insights and processes that led to the monumental operation. Of course, this path eventually leads to a dramatic montage of the detonation itself, followed by analysis and reflection on the test’s impact on the world’s political and military future. The theatricality of Operation Ivy suggested its screening to a much broader audience than a small cadre of government elite with high‐level security clearances. Indeed, it appears that, shortly after finishing the first version of Operation Ivy, LML, at Gaylord’s behest, went to work on an unclassified version of the film, long before one was requested. It was as if LML worked under the assumption that, despite AEC objections and indeed orders, Operation Ivy was destined for publicity. As things turned out, after seeing the first iteration of the film, Eisenhower called for a new version for a slightly broader government audience—those with “L” clearances who could view documents rated as Secret Restricted Data. Yet when this next version was ready for display to the Federal Civil Defense Administration in September of 1953, AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss informed Civil Defense Director Val Peterson that no one would be allowed to view the film without a higher “Q” clearance.7 Subsequently, multiple parties requested a third, unclassified cut of Operation Ivy, one for the general public. The Civil Defense Administration specifically cited the need for such a film to aid in the development of “new concepts of civilian defense” in light of megaton weaponry.8 LML completed the unclassified version by November 1953, screening it at the White House Mayor’s Conference in December. In January of 1954, Peterson of Civil Defense recorded an introduction to the film at the LML studio in Hollywood, under the direction of MGM’s George Sidney. Members of congress eventually saw this version in early February of 1954. Yet still the film was not made public. In late February, Elmer Staats, the Executive Officer of Eisenhower’s Operations Coordinating Board (OCB, an Eisenhower outfit charged with overseeing Cold War propaganda and other “public information” initiatives) decided, in concert with Strauss, that even the unclassified version of the film should be kept under wraps, at least until diplomatic negotiations coming out of the January–February 1954 Berlin “Four Powers” conference were completed. Importantly, Staats and Strauss feared not the disclosure of state secrets, but rather the potential uses, or misuses, of Operation Ivy’s affective power. As Staats wrote Strauss, “Soviet propaganda will probably play up this film abroad as evidence of U.S. war‐mongering and as support for the Soviet proposal to outlaw atomic‐ weapons, and [we] agreed that the OCB should develop in advance an information program to counter such a line of propaganda in the event it is decided to show the film publicly.”9 The unclassified cut of the film finally screened to the public in April 1954, both on television and in movie theaters. It included some technological and scientific matters that had seemed sensitive to some before, like the yield of the explosion and the fact that the “device” was not yet weaponized. In a somewhat anticlimactic conclusion to this nearly two‐year story of Operation Ivy, the New York Times reviewed the film negatively on 2 April 1954. Reviewer Jack Gould described the film as overly theatrical and emotional, and its explana- tion of the complex installation of the device in the Pacific as “bewildering.” “The truly effective part of Operation Ivy,” he concluded, “came in those few moments when the scope and size of the destruction wrought by the explosion were explained by maps, pictures and charts” (Gould, 1954, p. 35). Here the reviewer seemed to want more attention devoted to the destructive power of the weapon itself, even in a technical manner, and less on drama. Filming a Nuclear State 143

Figure 8.6 Reed Hadley surveys the damage post‐detonation on Eniwetok during the filming of Operation Ivy. (photograph, Defense Threat Reduction Information Analysis Center)

At the same time, one wonders how many audience members sat through the film waiting impatiently for the “money shot” of Ivy Mike’s towering mushroom cloud. Operation Ivy, therefore, was at one and the same time a film project fraught with ten sions and a successful franchise. From its very beginning, LML sought to juggle the demands of Cold War “science” and “propaganda,” demands that were, in fact, not so much contradictory as in tension. It is clear that LML, under the leadership of Burriss and Gaylord, decided early on that a popular, genre‐oriented style would allow them more, rather than less, flexi- bility in juggling these tensions. In the next section, we draw on STS scholarship to consider why this may have been the case.

Co‐Production and Mutual Orientation at Lookout Mountain

In the story of Operation Ivy, we see how the various versions of the film that were produced were products neither of a wholly premeditated process nor of the planned eye of an editor or censor after the fact. Rather, LML worked under multiple demands from multiple sources, offering versions of the film as provisional solutions. Thus, while LML was orga- nizationally located within a strong chain of command, that chain of command alone does not fully account for its particular and sometimes peculiar processes and products. 144 Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman

Operation Ivy’s production and reproduction was an outgrowth of scientific and military management, domestic political deliberations, international diplomacy, as well as interven- tions from the chain of command. Negotiating a conflicted and contested environment, LML worked through a combination of applied expertise, guesswork about institutional processes, and direct orders to create a combination of products. In thinking further about the networked, tension‐riddled nature of LML’s work, we are well served by two critical frames lent from STS. Sheila Jasanoff’s notion of “co‐production” helps us to approach the question of how LML’s workers, supervisors, and clients arrived at “solutions” to the challenges they faced. Studies of co‐production are especially focused on how particular ways of knowing, working, deliberating, and planning emerge from the collaboration of multiple heterogeneous approaches (Jasanoff, 2004). In addition, Paul Edwards’s concept of “mutual orientation” helps us to approach the question of why or why not such “solutions” were functionally effective, especially as we consider how one laboratory’s decisions and structures interacted with larger debates at organizational, national, and even international scales (Edwards 1997). Jasanoff (2004, p. 3) has offered co‐production as what she calls an “idiom” by which to think about the interdependent and co‐constructive relationships among purportedly auton- omous realms of knowledge production: realms like nature and culture, knowledge and power, science and the state. Co‐production encourages us to push against such binaries and instead look for the contingent but substantive “interanimations” of knowledge production, the ways in which different domains of knowledge emerge simultaneously in relation to each other. The concept of co‐production, as Jasanoff (ibid., p. 38) writes, is particularly helpful for thinking about how the products of science and technology emerge and stabilize, how con- troversies in technoscience are resolved, how new knowledges and instruments are made “intelligible and portable,” and how scientific norms and practices respond to institutional, political, and social exigencies and contexts—as each of these “hows” entails the complex interaction among various agents and agencies. Such developments, Jasanoff further argues (ibid.), tend to take shape in makings or productions: not only the making of artifacts, but also the making of identities, institutions, discourses, and representations. In the case of LML, we see the emergence of particular artifacts, identities, discourses, and representations, one that at times seem quite peculiar. The materials left behind by LML—whether internal reports, charts, or full‐length films—often raise difficult and obvious questions about “why?” Here Edwards’ notion of “mutual orientation” is of particular help. In Edwards’s account, through a process of mutual orientation, small and large parties at multiple stages of authority, from the smallest organizational level to the larger state sphere, may find their way to the same or similar solutions for very different reasons (Edwards, 1997, pp. 81–82). Mutual orientation accounts for the ways in which different parties, operating at different levels of authority and interests, coalesce around a common approach to solve what are in fact substantially different problems. LML projects always involved multiple human agents and various institutional agencies, operating at vastly different levels in the chain of command, and with different professional and even political orientations: A single project might involve a conglomeration of Air Force officers, private engineering contractors, studio personnel, AEC officials, and academics. There were also multiple instruments involved, having their own sort of agency, deter- mining “what is possible,” and thus what can be thought and done in these collaborations Filming a Nuclear State 145

(Hankins, 1995, p. 5). Mutual orientation thus helps us as a heuristic concept, inviting us to approach the “solutions” to tensions, dilemmas, and problems inherent in LML’s work as satisfactory or dissatisfactory to different agents for different reasons. We can return again to Operation Ivy to reflect on the processes of co‐production and mutual orientation at LML. Specifically, we can reflect on the choice of Reed Hadley as an on‐site narrator within the film. Based on Lt. Col. Gaylord’s final report on Documentary Photography in Operation Ivy, LML received very detailed orders for many aspects of their charge as part of Joint Task Force 132. These orders, however, make no mention of the use of a known Hollywood actor, nor any detail about cinematic style.10 Decisions about the film’s style and format seem to have to been made wholly within LML, in consultation with the AEC and others on site and in process. Moreover, while prior Army films, like those shot by the Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit during World War II, employed genre actors in training or propaganda films, and while there was a similar precedent for employing an actor to introduce a film from a stage set or narrate it off screen, as far as we have been able to determine there was in 1952 no precedent for using a genre actor both on screen and on site. Operation Ivy’s innovation can be taken as just that: a novel diegetic device. But an examination of the choice in the context of both LML’s larger body of work and the studio’s particular struggles during this episode suggest that the innovation was a solution to a set of problems the studio faced in filming Ivy Mike. Pursuing a thermonuclear device presented two immediate problems, one informational in nature and the other affective. While scientists and engineers, led by Edward Teller, had finally arrived at a feasible design for a fusion weapon—testing it in its basic form in a fission device at Operation Greenhouse in 1951—much about the fusion bomb’s effects, which would be far more massive and powerful than anything a fission bomb had produced, remained unknown (Miller, 1986, pp. 113–115). Moreover, as it was expected to be far more destructive than anything anyone had ever seen, designing a test‐site apparatus was itself a massive technical challenge. At the same time, it was apparent to all involved that, whatever the test’s results, it would have enormous reverberations in the world of public opinion, both in the United States and abroad. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the 1949 Soviet detonation of an atomic device, together with the series of US tests in the Pacific in the late 1940s and early 1950s, had made it all too apparent that the Bomb was much more than a potential weapon of war; it was an effective and affective technology of “cold war.” Given this context, Hadley’s role as an on‐site narrator in Operation Ivy starts to look like a particularly poignant production choice. As a narrator, he could walk audiences through the elaborate apparatus that constituted the test site, and explain the effects of the detonation. But, as an on‐site narrator, he could provide for audiences an authoritative affective register with which to identify. For Hadley—the man who shifted between por- trayals of brave cowboys and investigators extraordinaire—would have been associated by many with a man who “gets the job done,” and gets it done well. Indeed, his presence in Operation Ivy is one of heightened suspense, curiosity, and seriousness of emotion. In his other work as a narrator of true‐crime dramas, Hadley often introduced suspenseful stories from the perspective of having already seen them to the end. His voice typically registered authority not only through its gendered pitch and timber, but through its position in relation to action already completed from his perspective. Now on screen for Operation Ivy, Hadley brought the secure and safe sound of omniscience, but also the “look” of just 146 Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman another sweaty body, exposed to the bomb’s possible effects. This interanimation of con trol and vulnerability appropriately reflected the precariousness of the test, and also afforded the filmmakers a high degree of control over tone and style. The narrator, now part of the story, addresses us directly, guides us explicitly through how we should feel about the impending detonation. Here Operation Ivy begins to appear itself as a technology, both an information technology and, perhaps more importantly given the wildly delicate nature of the Ivy Mike test in the world of both official and public opinion, an affective technology. If we look back on LML’s initial work on atomic tests at Operations Sandstone and Greenhouse we can surmise that LML learned that the atomic test itself was a kind of affective technology, as much productive of “shock and awe” as of scientific data, and that narrative film, with its extensive history in the techniques of cinematic rhetoric, could capture and control this affective power even more effectively than the event itself. LML thus participated within a larger Cold War social and political project in America that sociologist Guy Oakes has termed one of “emotion management” aimed at overcoming “irrational terror” in favor of, from the perspective of government leaders, a “more pragmatic nuclear fear,” one that could be used to mobilize publics on behalf of national security (Oakes, 1994, p. 33). That Operation Ivy enjoyed a rich if fraught iterative history suggests that LML’s co‐pr oduction of the film, or films, as an affective technology was indeed a solution, if a provisional one, to a set of substantially different problems around which various parties could coalesce. We can imagine Eisenhower and his advisors finding in Operation Ivy reason to believe that indeed the affective power of the “super” could be harnessed and used on behalf of US interests. We can imagine nervous congressmen and other government officials finding in the film reason to believe in American technological and military supremacy. We can imagine mayors and other members of local governments finding in Operation Ivy reason to take very seriously the federal government’s repeated calls to get busy with civil defense planning. And we can imagine everyday American citizens finding in Operation Ivy reason to hold together that curious Cold War combination of fear of and pride in their country. Thus, while each type of audience came to the film with distinct concerns, the film offered itself as a flexible technology of emotion management.

Conclusion

A serial analysis of the LML corpus, one well beyond the scope of this chapter, would reveal that dilemmas like the ones LML faced with Operation Ivy were the norm rather than the exception. As the Laboratory served a variety of purposes, various pressures, dilemmas, and problems were a regular aspect of its work methods and aims. That is, tensions were inherent to the unit and central to its culture. Moreover, LML’s imperfect and provisional processes of addressing tensions and problem‐solving carried implications at multiple levels within the US government and military, and across an array of big and small institutions—from Hollywood‐based subcontractors to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Just as LML did not operate autonomously in addressing the myriad dilemmas they faced, so the implications of their decisions were not easily contained. As we have seen with Operation Ivy, they worked within a larger complex network. Filming a Nuclear State 147

As scholars of industrial film have pointed out, the study of a corpus as large and organi- zationally situated as that of LML’s films requires great attention to seriality. Comparative analysis over many films of an apparently related function is called for in order to understand, in its most basic terms, the functions of visuality within an organization like Joint Task Force 132 or the United States Air Force. Borrowing from STS, we have also attempted to demonstrate how the study of a series of films—reports from a series of tests, or different reports from the same test—might bring to light the more complex and unstable interanimations at work in any effort at producing bomb knowledge. In the case of America’s network of nuclear labs, stretched across the globe, film played as significant a role as any other instrument this production. If, as organizational scholars have argued, institutional memory is bound up in “a range of ‘storage’ locations” extending from official records to the personal memories of staff, we are confronted with the uncoordinated dispersion of LML records (most, it seems, are lost for good; those that remain are scattered among DOD and DOE archives) and the death of most of its staff (not least due to the consequences of working with radioactive materials) (Pollitt, 2009, p. 202). This institutional memory loss, we would argue, is not simply a barrier to research—it is a productive problematic, as it is part of LML’s story, part of its history, indeed a vital part, as this memory loss reflects both bureaucratic neglect and a will to forget. It is, therefore, neither a great surprise nor a source of profound consternation for us that LML’s history is a difficult one to learn. The war films of LML may have once shared a common space of origination, debate, and deliberation, but they have not shared a single home since the unit’s dissolution. We have struggled to even compile a complete bibliog- raphy of its products and certainly cannot account for all films mentioned. Some films still remain classified (even some that were not created under such status); others emerge shelved in odd places. Beyond presenting a challenge to study, the shape of the archive produced by the work of LML itself tells a continuing story of the complexities of state memory and history, especially a nuclear state.

Notes

1 The term “big science” was introduced to the literature in 1961 by Alvin Weinberg in his influ- ential article “Impact of Large‐Scale Science on the United States” (Weinberg, 1961). There he approached the term in an ironic more than an analytic manner. Later scholars have used the term in a more analytical fashion, examining a diversified set of institutions and practices under the rubric, each sharing the quality of large scale. See Galison, 1992. 2 Department of Energy, “Hollywood’s Secret Film Studio: Lookout Mountain Laboratory,” www.nv.doe.gov/library/factsheets/DOENV_1142.pdf (accessed 6 November 2015). 3 Stanley W. Burris, “Operation Ivy, Report of Commander, Task Group 132.1,” November 1952, available at https://www.osti.gov/opennet/detail.jsp?osti_id=16071768 (accessed 8 November 2015). 4 Roy B. Snapp and P.W. Clarkson, “Note by the Secretary, Subject: Information Plan For Operation Ivy,” October 24, 1952, available at https://www.osti.gov/opennet/detail.jsp?osti_id=16382349 (accessed 8 November 2015). 5 It is interesting that Racket Squad was filmed in the same Culver City studios where Hadley once narrated wartime films such as The Last Bomb for the Army’s First Motion Picture Unit, LML’s predecessor. 148 Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman

6 Information on the production history of Operation Ivy in this section is drawn from LML’s two semi‐annual reports for 1953, “History of 1352d Motion Picture Squadron, Lookout Mountain Laboratory.” The authors acquired these reports in 2010 from the then owner of the private facility in Hollywood that had been the headquarters of LML. 7 Louis Strauss to Val Peterson, September 29, 1953, available at https://www.osti.gov/opennet/ detail.jsp?osti_id=16382286 (accessed 8 November 2015). 8 Roy B. Snapp, Val Peterson, Lewis Strauss, “Note by the Secretary, Subject: Film on Operation Ivy (Enclosed Report Re the Same),” December 8, 1953, https://www.osti.gov/opennet/detail. jsp?osti_id=16382280 (accessed 8 November 2015). 9 E.O. Elmer Staats to Lewis Strauss, February 26, 1954, available at https://www.osti.gov/opennet/ detail.jsp?osti_id=16001331&query_id=0 (accessed 8 November 2015). 10 James L. Gaylord, “Operation Ivy, Report to the Scientific Director: Documentary Photography,” February 1, 1953, available at https://www.osti.gov/opennet/detail.jsp?osti_id=16071445&query_ id=2 (accessed 8 November 2015).

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