Slate Magazine has an online set of “shots from nuclear graveyards and old rocket launch sites” taken from the collection of the Magnum photography agency.
The pictures, which date from the 1960s to the present, show the after effects of nuclear detonation and accident on the landscape; effects that range from post industrial ruin to tourist attraction.
He's listening...
In the early 1960s, the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, established in 1963 and responsible for developing technologies for use in intelligence gathering operations (think Q from James Bond), began work on a project to surgically implant listening devices into cats and use them to eavesdrop on Soviet conversations. One unlucky cat was selected as the test subject.
According to Victor Marchetti, former Special Assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA, CIA scientists “slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that.”
After training the cat (are cats trainable?), the project was ready for its first field test. The feline cyborg-spy was driven to a park near the Soviet embassy in Washington DC and released. According to Marchetti, “They took it out to a park and put him out of the van, and a taxi comes and runs him over. There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead.” To prevent the Soviets from getting listening technology, CIA operatives returned to the site and collected the cat’s remains.
The project took several years and cost over 15 million dollars. An internal CIA memo from 1967, declassified years later, assessed the program and concluded:
“Our final examination of trained cats for [redacted] for use in the [redacted] convinced us that the program would not lend itself to our highly specialized needs.”
The Directorate of Science and Technology also developed a mechanical, laser steered, listening device carrying dragonfly and a “a 24-inch-long rubber robot catfish named ‘Charlie’ capable of swimming inconspicuously among other fish and whose mission remains secret.”
Making the heavens glow
On July 9th, 1962, for a nuclear test called “Starfish Prime,” the United States detonated a 1.4 megaton hydrogen bomb in outer space. The explosion occurred 250 miles above the US military’s Johnston Atoll test site in the Pacific Ocean. Stories have it that, the night of the test, some Hawaiian hotels hosted “rainbow bomb parties” to for guests to watch the effects of the blast in space, which appeared similar to the northern lights. According to one scientist who saw the detonation from Canton Island “A brilliant white flash erased the darkness like a photoflash. Then the entire sky turned light green for about a second. In several more seconds, a deep red aurora, several moon diameters in size, formed where the blast had been. A white plasma jet came slowly out of the top of the red aurora (over Johnston Island) and painted a white stripe across the sky from north to south in about one minute. A deep red aurora appeared over Samoa at the south end of the white plasma jet. This visual display lasted for perhaps ten minutes before slowly fading. There was no sound at all.”
The Starfish Prime test was part of the larger “Operation Dominic” series of nuclear test detonations carried out by the US in 1962 and 1963 in the Pacific Ocean and Nevada. Starfish Prime was part of a sub-set of Dominic tests called “Operation Fishbowl”, which explored the effects of detonating nuclear warheads at very high altitudes. The purpose of the Fishbowl tests was to evaluate whether US nuclear tipped missiles could be used to shoot down incoming Soviet nuclear warheads in space, before they could reach their targets in the US. The electromagnetic pulse (EMP) caused by the blast knocked out electronics, including hundreds of streetlights, in Hawaii, over 930 miles away. This effect, which had been unexpected, helped to awaken US nuclear planners to the use/danger of EMP pulses in warfare.
Today, Johnson Atoll is a wildlife refuge, home to many species of birds.
Anderson Platoon, filmed over six weeks in 1966, was an acclaimed French documentary following the platoon of 24 year old American Lieutenant Joseph B. Anderson in the days leading up to Operation Irving. The film, which shows the experiences of Anderson’s platoon in strikingly human terms, went on to win the 1967 academy award for best documentary film.
Vietnam was one of the major conflict spots of the Cold War, site of wars fought by both the Americans and the French. And the producer of Anderson Platoon, Pierre Schoendoerffer, had been involved in both. In 1954, Schoendoerffer, then a military cameraman with the French army, filmed the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Following the French defeat, which led to France’s exit from Vietnam, Schoendoerffer spent four months imprisoned in a Vietnamese prison camp. After his release, he became a journalist and film-maker.
With his past experiences, Schoendoerffer was in a good position to capture the Vietnam War in film. And his film portrays the war in very human terms. As the Feb. 17, 1967, issue of Time Magazine wrote: “The U.S. war in Viet Nam is a helicopter crashing at takeoff. It is soldiers wolfing food in the drenching rain, a Viet Cong guerrilla surrendering. War is the American foot soldier splurging his pay on Saigon girls, the monotony of patrols, death in a field…. All these human vignettes, and many more, are part of a remarkable new 80-minute Viet Nam documentary… ‘Politics don’t interest me,’ says Producer Pierre Schoendoerffer. ‘I didn’t want to modify anybody’s opinion about the war, but only to show them how it was being fought.’ U.S. TV officials who have seen it consider The Anderson Platoon the best documentary of the war to date.”
Hammer time: Apple's 1984 commercial
In 1984, during Superbowl XVIII, Apple computer debuted their famous “1984” ad. This ad, directed by Ridely Scott and one of the most expensive ads ever made, featured a young woman, pursued by jack-booted riot police, throwing a hammer into a large tv screen that had been brain-washing masses of similarly dressed people. “On January 24” the ad tells us, “Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” While it was only ever shown once, Apple’s 1984 was enormously influential. It was named “Commercial of the Decade” for the 1980s by Advertising Age magazine, the “Greatest Commercial of all Time” by TV Guide, and has even spawned a LEGO playset.
The imagery in this commercial was based on George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four: the masses of brain washed “proles”, the dark industrial aesthetic, the glowering Big Brother on the TV screen. For his part, Orwell based much of Nineteen Eighty-Four on the Stalinist Soviet Union, making it one of the major cultural texts of the Cold War, and certainly a central text that shaped how people in the West imagined life in the USSR. Indeed, as historian Daniel Johnson has written, “George Orwell seems to have coined the phrase ‘cold war’ in 1945, in a newspaper article written while he was at work on ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ the novel that defined the era more than any other.”
So Apple’s ad was loosely based on prevailing popular culture views of the Soviet Union. And 1984 was the perfect time to make such a comparison, given the extent to which Cold War tensions had heated up during the early 1980s.
Next post: how the 1980s “where’s the beef lady” actually was a metaphor for Margaret Thatcher’s relations with NATO…
A couple of weeks ago, Slate.com published a very interesting article on “the Letter of Last Resort“, a letter contained inside a safe inside a second safe in the control room of nuclear armed British SSBNs. This letter, hand written by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, contains instructions for the submarine’s commander on what to do in the event the British government is obliterated in a nuclear attack.
The article raises some interesting points about Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the Cold War idea that one nuclear power would not attack another for fear of a retaliatory strike. Nuclear weapons systems were set up in a way that made it difficult/impossible for one power to destroy a rival’s capability to retaliate (think nuclear armed submarines hidden in the ocean depths, or nuclear bombers ready to fly at a moment’s notice). The threat always was: nuke us, and we’ll nuke you back. The letter of last resort is a relic of that idea; even if London was destroyed, the Prime Minister could order a counter-strike.
But would he/she? One particularly interesting point discussed by the article concerns the ethics of MAD: would leaders, knowing that their own country was about to be destroyed in a nuclear attack, be able to order a retaliation? And would doing so be ethical? A former British defence secretary is quoted as saying “I realized I would find it very, very difficult indeed to agree to use a nuclear weapon—and I think most people would.” After all, if a nuclear strike was incoming, MAD had already failed… would killing millions more people have a point?
Another interesting point addressed by the article concerns Christian and Jewish thinking on nuclear retaliation. Generally, both feel that threatening rivals with nuclear destruction as a means of preventing a nuclear attack is permissible; actually acting on that threat is not.
The paradox of MAD.
Cold War History 
