Micromeritics - Fundamental and Derived Properties of Powders
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Atomic Screen Test
1. Atomic Screen Test
Jennifer Fay
Modernism/modernity, Volume 23, Number 3, September 2016, pp. 611-630
(Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
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https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2016.0054
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/631484
3. M O D E R N I S M / modernity
612 Networks were flooded with complaints after the fact. TV set owners, presuming
the problem was a matter of fine tuning, attended more to the technology than the
content of the broadcast itself, frantically changing channels and manipulating the hori-
zontal and vertical hold knobs on their receivers. For such tinkerers, Gould speculates,
âthe atomic bomb meant geometric swirls, diagonal bars and their own large-screen
traumaâ (âRadio and Television,â 35). In Los Angeles, viewers could either look at
the heavens or watch their TV sets. According to the Los Angeles Times, both options
were disappointing. Gazing skyward at H-hour, one saw nothing but the âSouthland
morning hazeâ; on the tube, âa big black circle, and in the center a small white flash.
Then slowly, like a giant rising from the earth, the fantastic mushroom cloudâa jagged
lollipop on a narrow stick.â3
One hears in these descriptions the diminution of atomic
expectation. Television, that centerpiece of the American living room, was a technology
of counter-sublime abstraction, or worse, perhaps, domesticating the forces of nuclear-
ism into cartoon figures of big donuts, jagged lollipops, and conventional white puffs of
cotton. The Times assured readers that all stations would soon broadcast the extensive
newsreel footage, for only emulsified film could translate televisionâs black blobs and
squiggly lines into the event of nuclear detonation. But it could do so only belatedly.4
The problem of atomic disappointment predated this televisual blunder. According
to Bob Mielke, the US Signal Corps deemed as only adequate the film coverage of the
Trinity test, but âthere was less satisfactionâ with the bombing footage from Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.5
In comparison to the eviscerating effects of the bomb on the ground,
the image of the explosion itself was distant, brief, and shaky.6
To compensate for the
paucity of this visual archive, the United States government amassed one and half mil-
lion feet of film to document the 1946 tests, Operation Crossroads, at Bikini Atoll in
the Marshall Islands, leading to a worldwide shortage of film stock and producing the
most stunning images of mass destruction (Mielke, âRhetoric and Ideology,â 29). Here,
too the military was wracked by nuclear performance anxiety. The stated purpose of
Operation Crossroads was to measure the impact of atomic explosions on naval vessels.
Quoted in the New York Times, one scientist cautioned that, however spectacular the
explosion, âdamage to a large fleet spread out is not going to be very impressive, and
unless people are warned in advance, the results of the test will sound like a consider-
able disappointment.â7
Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets, who was commissioned to par-
ticipate in the Bikini operation, was put off by the very idea of an atomic test. Trinity,
he explained, was the test for Japan, but now the United States military was staging
âdress rehearsalsâ for the Bikini test that was an end in itself. After the enactment of
atomic war, dropping a bomb on the atoll was âjust another job,â an âanti-climaxâ after
his historical Hiroshima mission.8
The desire to produce a more impressive experience and image of the bomb mo-
tivated subsequent tests and their cinematic records. From 1945 to 1963 (the year
the United States signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty permitting only underground
detonations), the Atomic Energy Commission and Department of Defense exploded
216 nuclear devices in atmospheric and underwater environments. By 1992, when the
Comprehensive Test Ban was enacted, the number of explosions carried out in the
4. FAY / atomic screen test
613
United States had increased to 1,054.9
In 1947, the US Air Force created the secret
Lookout Mountain Studios in Hollywood whose sole mission was to develop and test
photographic technologies to film atomic explosions and produce the nontheatrical
testing documentaries and newsreelsâsome sixty-five hundred in totalâthat have
given us the iconic images of nuclearism.10
The proving ground in Nevada became at
once an outdoor laboratory, a space for war rehearsal, and an open-air film studio. In
the middle of the desert real, fully-furnished houses were built, tanks, airplanes, cars,
trees, and shrubs were shipped in; rats, pigs, and dogs were caged in the blast basin,
and military personnel became the eventâs âliveâ audience, its cast of extras, and test
subjects. All of the structures one might find integrated in the world were isolated in
the blast range so that their exposure to both the bomb and to film could be indepen-
dently assessed and faithfully reproduced in anticipation of future tests and feature war.
As an experiment on materials, such tests set into motion the negative dialectics of
mid-century nuclearism: materials are manufactured, tested, and improved to with-
stand a bomb that will, itself, with future tests, improve in destructive potential. To
rephrase Robert J. Liftonâs study of apocalyptic violence, Destroying the World to Save
It, the motto of the tests is to improve the world in order better to destroy it.11
Yet the
relationship between weapons and world in these films abides by the symmetry of an
outdated industrial revolution that, as Hannah Arendt explains, maintains a balance
between production and destruction. âWhat men produce can in turn be destroyed by
men; what they destroy can be rebuiltâ by harnessing the natural forces on earth.12
The
transmundane power of atomic energy, however, irrevocably disrupts this equilibrium.
Indeed, as Arendt writes in The Human Condition, the Trinity atomic test marked the
end of both the modern age and modern man.13
Nuclear bombs may now destroy not
just human-made worlds but the earth itself, and humans are not able to rebuild the
earth that sustains human life as such: âMan is no longer acting as a natural organic
being but rather as a being capable of finding its way about in the universe despite
the fact that it can live only under the conditions provided by earth and its natureâ
(Arendt, âIntroduction into Politics,â 157). Yet the test films, with their narratives of
powerful bombs and ever-improved materials, hold out the impossible promise that the
human-made world (and thus we must presume modern man) will survive the earthâs
nuclear annihilation, in part because exploding atomic material in the proving ground
was not a product of war, but a calculated act of science.14
As an experiment in representation, these films may be seen as a genre of the atomic
screen test, films that test both the bomb and its targets (including human targets)
for their photogenic and photographable properties. In the spirit of Andy Warholâs
silk screens and film portraitsâmade just when nuclear testing was going âunder-
groundââthe atomic films are screen tests of repeatability that become individuated
ends and objects in themselves. A radical aesthetic emerging from the scientific goal
of predictability and reliability, the atomic screen test strives for uniformity and rep-
etition. But read through Warholâs work, one finds that in the effort to standardize
the image we may discover the vulnerability of each test subject. This essay considers
the atomic test films as part of a wider regime of mid-century aesthetics and testing
5. M O D E R N I S M / modernity
614 practices that push spectatorial experienceâand the status of human beingâto and
beyond the limit of endurance while also making the scene of this endurance, the test
itself, a worthy spectacle.
The Atomic Everyday, or the New Normal.
Most of us are familiar with the Civil Defense films, such as Duck and Cover (1951),
that were designed to condition American responses to perpetually impending thermo-
nuclear war. Campy were it not so chilling, the documentary explains to schoolchildren
that at any momentâduring a math class, a bike ride, or a family picnicâa nuclear
bomb could detonate, and that our actions in the interval between white light and the
sonic boom mark the difference between life and sudden death. After Hiroshima,
and as World War II gave way to the geopolitics of Mutually Assured Destruction,
anyone in a major city, especially, lived with the knowledge of their vulnerability to
nuclear annihilation. Scenarios of future nuclear war and strategies for survival were
grounded in the lessons of Hiroshima. John Herseyâs 1946 account of six survivors,
for example, explains how âeach of them counts the many small items of chance or
volitionâa step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead
of the nextâthat spared him,â at âexactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning,
on August 6th, 1945, Japanese time.â15
Providing the minute details of each survivorâs
location in time and place at the moment the bomb exploded, Hersey confronts us
with the terrifying contingencies, some retrospectively interpreted as providential, that
allowed some people to live and condemned most others to die.16
As Cathy Caruth
writes, accidental survival is the psychic substrate of the traumatic experience because,
in its randomness, it âresists simple comprehension.â Traumatic experience, in turn, is
marked by âthe unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature
of its survival.â17
The point of the American defense films was to minimize fatalities by
turning chance survival into strategic reflex training and nuclear explosions into leg-
ible physical causes and effects. Yet for those living in targeted cities, the rehearsal for
survival and the brute everydayness of the looming threatâthe waiting and wondering
if life will suddenly end in instantaneous carbonizationâmay have enhanced rather
than mitigated nuclear anxiety. Paul K. Saint-Amour rightly diagnoses the pre-traumatic
stress syndrome specific to the atomic age, a syndrome in which the future, as opposed
to the past, lays claims on the psyche and leads to pre-traumatic stress disorder. Prepar-
ing for a war that obliterates all civilization and upends the delicate ânuclear balance
of terror,â we are not likely to survive the apocalypse that proleptically causes the
stress. This is the âinverted or preposterous phenomenon of traumatic symptoms . . .
that exist not in the wake of a past event, but in the shadow of a future one,â an event
whose destruction will be so total that there will be no âafter.â18
Drawing on Jacques
Derridaâs seminal essay on nuclear criticism, Saint-Amour isolates the uniqueness of
the ânuclear conditionâ that âafflicts humanity with a case of anticipatory mourning, a
mourning in advance of loss because the loss to come would nullify the very possibility
of the traceâ (Tense Future, 25).
6. FAY / atomic screen test
615
The presiding scenarios of nuclear criticism toggle between the singular events at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and their post traumatic afterlife) and the pre-traumatic
projections of thermonuclear war.19
But the regime of atomic tests would seem to be
of a different order and to summon a different kind of everydayness. These blasts and
the films that issue from them feature not past trauma nor a dreaded war to come, but
scheduled and expected, frequent and predictable events (often disappointing), which,
on one hand, were opportunities to rehearse atomic warfare with live ammunition, but
were also, on the other, intended to prove the reliability of the bomb, its targets, and
the image. Atomic explosions without thermonuclear war, targeting without malice,
repetition for sake of demonstrating repeatability, the atmospheric testing regime of
mid-century may well have traumatized those who looked upon the irradiated dessert
with a different set of expectations or who were caught unaware. But as scheduled
and predictable events, the tests thematized and aestheticized as non-traumatic the
repetition of controlled catastrophe.
Take, for example, Tumbler-Snapper, a series of eight nuclear explosions (four
weapon effects tests carried out by the Department of Defense and four new weapons
tests overseen by the Atomic Energy Commission and the Los Alamos National Labo-
ratory) carried out in Nevada in April 1952 and featuring the poorly televised Charlie
bomb described above.20
The official film Military Participation on Tumbler-Snapper
(1952) explains that the primary purpose of the operation is to find ways of amplifying
the bombâs blast curve in response to the diminished damage recorded after previous
tests. Over scenes of devastated Hiroshima, our narrator explains that âfrom a military
standpoint, the atomic detonations in Japan seemed to be pretty effectiveâ because the
shock wave destroyed or damaged every type of standing structure. âSo, Hiroshima
and Nagasaki became the norm.â The task now was to reproduce predictably both
the blast wave and its damage to military and domestic building materials in order to
âfind out what really does happen when an atomic bomb kicks out fiercely at the world
around it.â In this short history of destruction, the bombing of Hiroshima is not just
an act of war, but one in a series of tests, and these detonations are simultaneously a
test of offensive and of defensive measures. In order to differentiate the blast from its
effects, the film separates the footage of the explosions from the images of the shock
wave hitting the materials such that the chronology of the bomb and the distinction of
each detonation become difficult to track. This organization at once assures us that all
explosions have a before and recordable after and that new materials will replace the
old, despite the fact that we often cannot locate ourselves within these temporalities.
Perhaps most visually striking is that early in the film, four atomic detonations are pre-
sented on a partitioned screen in order to summarize efficiently the âSnapperâ phase
of the test (fig. 1). Moving clockwise, the first bomb appears in its own quarter of the
frame, followed seconds later by the next bomb at the instant of detonation. Eventually
all four explosions, each at a different distance from the camera and in different phases
of fission, share the quartered screen. At end of this thirty-second sequence, the first
explosion has faded to black, the second to abstract traces of smoke and fire, while the
last is still an infernal column with the signature cloud on top. A kind of animated War-
7. M O D E R N I S M / modernity
616
holian silkscreen (though produced several years before his work), this short sequence
captures the small variations in each bombâs explosion while also demonstrating the
repeatability of the image. This sequence of explosions transcribes nuclearism into data
sets producing, in the process, an aesthetic of predictable outcomes. The problem of
the atomic scale becomes the promise of a standardized picture.
In the film of the 1953 test series, Operation Upshot-Knothole (1953), the scales
become even more bizarre. Towards the beginning of the film a voiceover narrator
explains in rather jocular lingo the laboratory environment of the site: âMany hundreds
of tons of materials and months of intense planning by skilled personnel were the
ingredients poured into a gigantic test tube of the Nevada proving ground. In spring
of 1953 the mixture boiled up in a series of eleven atomic detonations.â21
Rather than
watch the blasts individually, or see them animated on a partitioned screen, we now
scan eleven small color photographs mounted in an album held by the hand of an
off-screen reader (fig. 2). The miniaturization of the mushroom cloud is an index of
control and a testament to the scientific domestication of this otherworldly energy. The
off-screen hand turning the pages is now about the same size as an atomic cloud. As
the bombs become more lethal, they appear to be smaller and more manageable. The
point of this film, however, is not to show the explosions, hardly necessary because so
familiar, but the effects of detonations on military materials, âfrom a service point of
view the main feature of the show.â And indeed, subsequent footage of incinerating
houses, airplanes, medical encampments, and railcars, all captured with a high-speed
camera at twenty-four hundred frames per second, are stunning demonstrations of
âČ
Fig. 1. Partition screen effect. Military Participation on OperationTumbler Snapper (Department of Defense,
Atomic Energy Commission, 1953).
8. FAY / atomic screen test
617
Fig. 3.The instant of incineration. Operation Upshot-Knothole (Department of Defense,Atomic Energy Com-
mission, 1953).
Fig. 2. An atomic photo album. Operation Upshot-Knothole (Department of Defense,Atomic Energy Commis-
sion, 1953).
âČ
âČ
9. M O D E R N I S M / modernity
618 instantaneous rupture slowed down and abstracted for our delectation (fig. 3). Akira
Lippitâs characterization of nuclear warfare holds true for the tests. âAtomic bombing
produced symbolsâas opposed to images of warâwhich drove the presentation of
atomic warfare from fact to figure, toward the threshold of art.â22
StandardizingTests
It is perhaps worth pausing here to consider further the proto-Pop sensibility of the
atomic test as an aesthetic practice. Designed to redress dissatisfaction with the dam-
age and image of nuclear explosions, these films also normalize and conventionalize
the event of detonation. Even the music that accompanies several of the explosionsâa
vaguely Wagnerian riffâis repeated from blast to blast in Military Participation on
Tumbler Snapper in what becomes a kind of unintentional parody of the sublime or
proof that such seemingly singular experiences and images may be reproduced, repur-
posed, rescaled, and, on film, reduplicated. The repetition of this image is a feature of
mid-twentieth-century photojournalism that Warhol would exploit in his early 1960s
âDisasterâ series, the photo-silkscreen depictions of flamed out superstars, the electric
chair, plane crashes, and scenes of accidental death and chance survival reprinted on
the canvas and abstracted through saturated hues. The critique often leveled against
Warholâs headline art is that by reducing such images to a play of surface effects and
emptying them of political and historical meaning, Warhol, according to Francesco
Bonami, âdid not murder painting, but masterminded the killing of content.â23
Yet in
the context of late capitalist art markets and modern testing practices, Warholâs repeti-
tion compulsion was more than merely glib. His work testedâand testified toâthe
ordinariness of contemporary catastrophe, as well as to the degraded status of art
and its human makers.24
Thierry de Duve argues that Warhol successfully navigated
the mid-century art market and spelled out its aesthetic economy by making art of
commodities. His giant canvases of Campbell soup cans and Brillo Pads âtest[ed] the
possibility of an art condition.â25
The art object, then, was not its own end so much as
a process, or test, of its worth.
Rather than fight the symbolic and literal machine of the art market, Warhol fa-
mously labored to become a machine even as he exposed its violent effects. He wanted
to become a device both for impassive recording (to be, in essence, photosensitized
material) and mechanized reduplicationâto replace human-made inconsistencies with
the machinic glitch. The âpleasure drawn from repetitionâ symptomatized an impulse
Warhol shared with other moderns: namely, âto be the machine and not its slaveâ (de
Duve, âAndy Warhol,â 11). As Hal Foster notes, Warholâs oeuvre is a study in the effects
of mechanization and automatization on human subjects. The photo-booth portraits
and screen tests record human confrontations with technology. The more Warholâs
subjects try to pose for the flash photography or remain still for the screen test, the
more they become mortified. âWarhol reveals the photo-booth to be a site not only of
self-staging but also of subject-testingâin effect, a âdrill.ââ26
10. FAY / atomic screen test
619
It is entirely coincidental that Warhol celebrated his seventeenth birthday on August
6, 1945, the day America dropped âLittle Boyâ on Hiroshima. Wayne Koestenbaum
speculates that Warhol was sufficiently sensitized to his own life as a catastrophe that
his silkscreen Atomic Bomb (1965) commemorates both the bomb and Warholâs birth,
and thus this canvas belongs to the genre of an âexplosive self portrait,â âan image of
Andy as international trauma.â27
Or, alternatively, Warholâs machine dreamâhis im-
age of himself as the bombâwas, writes de Duve âa desire to be without desire, to be
insentient, to be beyond suffering or the fear of deathâ (âAndy Warhol,â 10). His was
a desire to escape the pitfalls of the test, the trauma of an aftermath, and âbe noth-
ing, nothing of the human, the interior, the profoundâ (4). Warholâs testing impulse
combined with his anesthetic inhumanism and obsession with everyday disaster made
him the incarnation of the American dream as death drive, as de Duve concludes:
âOne doesnât take on the existence of the perfected machine, one does not turn into a
camera or tape recorder, without also taking on the existence of all machines and above
all those that killâ (13â14). As art in the age of large-scale experimentation, Warholâs
disaster silkscreens and portraits attest to the inseparability of death drive and what
Avital Ronnell calls the âtest drive,â which links testing and torturing to the risks we
take in order to make âclaims . . . about the world and its contractions.â28
If Warholâs automatism was intended to shield him from machinic and explosive
violence (and project it instead on his test subjects), the atomic tests were likewise
something of a preemptive rite. Anthropologist Hugh Gusterson writes that atomic test-
ing became a scientific ritual aimed not only at eliminating warâs surprises by rehearsing
detonation, but deterring nuclear war itself by demonstrating the âhyperreliabilityâ of
new weapons and nuclear stockpiles.29
The test deters weapon deployment because
the publicized images of the explosions convey to our would-be attackers that our arms
are both secure and viable. The test, we may surmise, functions as a threat or a form
of national security performance art. For the scientists, the effect of overwhelmingly
successful operations was that nuclear devices, so familiar and predictableâregarded
by their makers as being âbenign as vacuum cleanersââwere not the tools of global
annihilation or subject to human error. Instead, they were associated with the âposi-
tive experience of reliability,â a pleasure, we might say, drawn from repetition and
âperformed proof of technical predictabilityâ (Gusterson, People of the Bomb, 159â60).
The critique of Warholâs disaster seriesâthat they turn catastrophe into a banal and
everyday eventâwas one of the goals of tests for these scientists. âWhere many of us
worry that a nuclear explosion will occur at some point in our lives,â nuclear scientists,
writes Gusterson, âworry that one wonâtâ (160). Yet the tests, argues Gusterson, also
had a more magical function as rituals in which deterrence is enacted in the very event
of detonation that deterrence is supposed to eliminate. Rather than leading to pre- or
post-traumatic stress, the tests relieved scientistsâ anxieties associated with nuclear an-
nihilation because they provided firsthand knowledge of what these bombs are meant to
prevent. In this way, the test helped the scientist to bridge âthe gulf between a regime
of simulations and the realm of firsthand experienceâ (159). Predictable and imitable,
the test proves a weaponâs function. Just as importantly, it also tests and produces the
11. M O D E R N I S M / modernity
620 weapons scientists, as such, and, we may add, the entire military apparatus of the nuclear
establishment: âNuclear tests not only test technology, they also test peopleâ (157).
We see the testâs performative elements in Military Participation onTumbler Snapper
when American military personnel arrive at the blast range to participate in an atomic
exercise. The troops settle into their assigned trenches, share cigarettes, and mentally
prepare for the exercise to come: they will watch the atomic explosion from close range
and then march to ground zero, as if invading an enemy territory in the wake of a US
airstrike.30
Our narrator explains their collective state of mind as they await the blast:
Like all too many people both in and out of the military, before these men got their as-
signment for this operation they had many misconceptions about the bomb and its effects.
Some of them thought they would never again be able to have families. Some of them
expected to be deaf or blind. Some of them expected to glow for hours after the bomb
went off. Like so many people, many of them were afraid. They had never taken the
time or invested the effort to learn the facts about what to do in case of atomic warfare.
These men have been indoctrinated in what goes on and what to do when the bomb goes
off. Any doubts that are left will be eliminated after the full experience of this operation.
These men have already been through extensive mental, ideological, and physical
training. After all, this is not a simulated explosion as a preventative measure, but an
actual detonation and a real maneuver in a contaminated zone. While previous weapons
tests may have produced unexpected results, this explosion, we are assured, will not
only generate blast curve data and test the durability of materials; it will also eradicate
doubts about the bombâs homicidal, genocidal function. According to the logic of this
film, it is only by surviving an atomic test that one can be fully convinced that survival
is possible. In standard issue uniforms and protected with only a thin booklet entitled
How to Survive a Nuclear War tucked into their back pockets, the men bear witness
to the test and, in the process, serve as one of its principal objects of study. Just behind
the troops are hundreds of âPlanning Level Observers from throughout the defense
establishmentâ who study the exercise from close range in this seemingly infinite re-
gress of human testing subjects and objects. At H minus two minutes, the men hide in
their foxholes arranged around the perimeter of the blast basin. Three seconds after
detonation they are commanded to stand erect, watch the column of fire ascend, and
brace themselves for the shock wave. Boom! Silhouetted against the radiant fireball
the soldiers await the shockwave that ripples across the desert floor in their direction
(fig. 4). A new camera position shows the men standing in their foxholes when the ir-
radiated desert sand hits them with visible force, and momentarily they are lost in the
dust cloud (fig. 5). Just as abruptly, the men are now framed in close-up against blue
skies. In order to provide the eye-line matches and demonstrate the soldiersâ endur-
ance, the film intermixes footage of the rising mushroom cloud with staged enactments
(either reenactment or pre-enactment, as the case may have been) of the men gazing
and approvingly pointing at the fireball with smiles on their faces (fig. 6). This series
of responses both captures the menâs presumed affect and models the appropriate
response for future participants. After surveying the blast basin and inspecting the
12. FAY / atomic screen test
621
test materials, the men march back to the parking area where they smoke cigarettes
and reflect on the day. The âbiggest valueâ of this exercise, we are told, was âto prove
to ourselves that it can be done,â that fear can be replaced with a âconfidence that
comes only with experience.â To verify this emotional state, âpsychiatrists are with us
to study our reactions before, during, and after the experience.â A film about training
and testing, Tumbler-Snapper is itself a therapeutic or homeopathic exercise that trains
the next batch of nuclear soldiers to be atomic spectators, explicitly so. To watch the
film of this test is to begin to train for the next test.31
The hyper-reliability of the bomb and the repeatability of the image are also pre-
sumed to reliably structure the soldierâs response. Thus the eye-line matches of the
smiling men looking at the mushroom cloud could be inserted into subsequent films.
For example, the Federal Civil Defense Administrationâs appropriately titled Letâs Face
It (1954), which describes to American audiences measures for nuclear preparedness,
takes us to a different test but recycles the shots of these happy atomic soldiers, gazing
now at a different explosion.32
Of course, the tests were filmed in order to generate
footage that could be recombined for different audiences, above all civilians who,
themselves, underwent ritualized practice for a nuclear World War III.33
According to
Tracy C. Davis, the whole purpose of civil defense rehearsalsâthe âduck and coverâ
drills but also the elaborately staged disaster theater of urban evacuations, mass feed-
ings, and medical triageâwas to supplement the persuasive discourse of preparedness
with rehearsed action: âPersuasion may have conditioned the public to believe, but a
rehearsal would enable the public to behave, not only in an orderly but in a constructively
predictable mannerâ (Stages of Emergency, 85). Seen in light of Civil Defense theater,
these instances of recycled footage and tutored responsiveness suggest that the purpose
of the test films is not only to study weapons effects but to standardize human affects.
A different kind of film addresses civilians living close to the proving ground.
The opening sequence of Atomic Tests in Nevada (1955) offers a little vignette of St.
George, Utah.34
The voice-over sets the scene: âItâs pre-dawn. Five in the morning.
Pretty deserted at this hour. Everything is closed down. Everyoneâs asleep.â From
images of early-morning Main Street, we cut to three charactersâthe milkman, the
police officer, and the gas station owner. These are âthe St. George night-owls,â who,
as they carry out their daily tasks, are witness to an atomic blast just one hundred and
forty miles away. The night sky suddenly turns a blinding white. Rather than ducking
or taking cover, the men barely take notice and carry on with their morning tasks:
delivering milk, checking locked doors, and pumping gas. No dramatic non-diegetic
music, or post-production sound of an atomic rumble. The bomb is, we are told, âold
stuff in St. George. Routine. Theyâve seen lots of them ever since 1951. Nothing to get
excited about anymore.â Far from eviscerating the town and searing everyday routine
into the specificity of catastrophic time, the bombâs explosion at precisely 5 a.m. St.
George time in any given morning is the routine: the explosion, a nuclear non-event.
The test? To remain impassive. The morning unfolds. The sun rises and children go to
school, housewives wash up the breakfast dishes, and shop owners open their stores.
Then comes a radio announcement with this warning: âDue to a change in wind di-
13. M O D E R N I S M / modernity
622
âČ
Fig. 5. Soldiers are hit with irradiated dust from the atomic blast. Military Participation on OperationTumbler
Snapper (Department of Defense, Atomic Energy Commission, 1953).
Fig. 4. Soldiers await the shock wave. Military Participation on OperationTumbler Snapper (Department of
Defense, Atomic Energy Commission, 1953).
âČ
14. FAY / atomic screen test
623
rection, the residue from this morningâs atomic detonation is drifting in the direction
of St. George.â Residents are advised to take cover for one hour, but there does not
appear to be any particular rush. The announcer stresses: âThere is no danger.â This,
too, is just a routine precaution, âto prevent unnecessary exposure to radiation.â Once
again, the citizens of St. George are non-reactive and peaceably continue their morn-
ing routinesânow of peeling potatoes, getting a haircut at the barber shop, feeding
the baby a bottle of milk, working in the shop. This is not a documentary only about
preparedness for a future war, it is a reenactment of already past contamination from
fallout. Reassuring viewers that there are no serious risks, the documentary is a defense
of weapon testing in the âbackyard workshopâ and âoutdoor laboratoryâ of the Nevada
Proving Ground. In âthe loneliest acres the world has seen,â testing will soon resume
with even more frequency.
Becoming Photographic
Atomic test films exemplify what Walter Benjamin, writing in 1936, understood to
be the real significance of the film actor in the age of industrialized labor. He explains
that in contrast to the stage actor who performs for a live audience, the film actor per-
forms for technology (the camera, the microphone) before a group of specialists (the
director, the cinematographer, the producer) who assess him from the same position
as an âexaminer in an aptitude test.â More like a typist than an athlete, the successful
actor must persevere against the technology. And while such tests go on in offices and
Fig. 6. Smiling soldiers watch the mushroom cloud ascend. Military Participation on OperationTumbler Snapper
(Department of Defense, Atomic Energy Commission, 1953).
âČ
15. M O D E R N I S M / modernity
624 factories every day (the typing test, the efficiency test), invisible even to those who
endure them, film âmakes test performances capable of being exhibited, by turning
that ability into a test. . . . To perform in the glare of arc lamps while simultaneously
meeting the demand of the microphone is a test performance of the highest order.
To accomplish it is to preserve oneâs humanity in the face of the apparatus.â35
In the
capitalist age, one does not pass a screen test; one survives it. Nothing short of oneâs
humanity is at stake. And this victory of man over apparatus, which every fiction film
documents, explains the attraction movies and movie stars have for the majority of city
dwellers. Those who âhave relinquished their humanityâ to the technologies of the
workplace during the day, go to the movies âto witness the film actor taking revenge
on their behalf not only by asserting his humanity (or what appears to them as such)
against the apparatus, but by placing that apparatus in the service of his triumphâ
(Benjamin, âThe Work of Art,â 31).
Inspired by the genre of the mug shot or photo-booth self-portrait, Warholâs Screen
Tests were three-minute uncut films in which the subject was well illuminated and
framed in medium close up against a neutral background. Unlike a Hollywood screen
test in which an actor might deliver lines or interact with an off screen director in
anticipation of the real film to come, in Warholâs âtestsâ the subjects were asked to
maintain complete stillness for the duration of the static shot, which would be its own
end. Commanded to be inexpressive and even unblinking, Warholâs subjects were
tested for their ability not to be photogenic so much as photographic. As Callie Angell
explains, Warhol âcreated a set of diabolically challenging performance instructions
for his sitters who . . . struggled to hold a pose while their brief moment of exposure
was prolonged into a nearly unendurable three minutes.â Many nervously twitched.
Others, most famously folk singer Ann Buchanan, managed not to blink but were then
overcome by involuntary tears as the body fought back (fig. 7). The sadistic nature of
this filmmaking gradually took over as Warhol intentionally staged the sitting âto make
things as difficult as possible for the subjectsâ and then recorded their discomfort.36
Whereas Benjamin celebrated the film actor as the survivor of the machine age, Warhol
fetishized those moments when the actorâs body, as involuntary machine, triumphs
over the subjectâs will.37
Unto itself, then, each screen test testified to each subjectâs
individual physiology and unique capitulation. We all break down differentlyâbut we
all break down, just the same (figs. 8, 9, 10). Collected into a series, as they typically
were, the Screen Tests (like the atomic tests) were experiments in producing likeness
across the subjects, capturing the similitudes in Warholâs social collectivities. The Screen
Tests, argues Jonathan Flatley, in their âability to produce assemblages of likenesses
[do] the work of exteriorizing and presenting the collectivityâ of Warholâs factory while,
at the same time preserving âthe singularity and multiplicityâ of each person.38
The
âbeing-in-commonâ arises out of Warholâs experiment âin which everyone can succeed
in failingâ (Flatley, âLike,â 92). The Screen Tests poignantly archive the vulnerability of
the human test subject when likeness is the aesthetic goal. This is the precariousness
that the atomic films at once presume for the enemy population and disavow for the
American soldiers who are commanded to face the bomb of their countryâs making
and, uniformly, repeatedly, pass the test.
17. M O D E R N I S M / modernity
626
Fig. 9. ScreenTest: Ingrid von Scheven (Warhol, 1966).
âČ
Fig. 10. ScreenTest: MaryWornoy (Warhol, 1966).
âČ
18. FAY / atomic screen test
627
Nuclear Inhumanism
â[H]ow immensely the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness of destruc-
tionâ comments Walter Benjamin in his 1931 essay, âThe Destructive Character.â
Writing more than a decade before the Trinity test, Benjamin observed presciently
that âthe destructive character is reliability itself.â39
He was, of course, not reflecting
on the atomic bomb, but he captured something of nuclearismâs testing ethos. What
he describes is an annihilating sociability that acts like a force of nature, dispatching
the world without malice (this is a âcheerfulâ character) in order to make space and to
clear away the debris of an era. The destroyer welcomes âa complete reduction, indeed,
eradication, of his own condition,â and he craves the attention of people who become
âwitnesses to his efficacyâ (Benjamin, âThe Destructive Character,â 301â02). This self-
canceling destructive character is an ambivalent figure for Benjamin because, as Irving
Wohlfarth explains, it makes way for revolutionary change by sweeping away an ossified
order, but may also be a futurist celebration of the aesthetics of war and a harbinger
of fascist annihilation. It is, in any case, âpredicated on the assumption that there are
critical moments when it is only through âdestructionâ that âhumanity . . . can prove
its mettle.ââ40
The risk is that humanity, along with the world that sustains it, will fail.
By mid-century, humans had not just survived various tests, but had become enam-
ored with the scientific environment of the experiment as a space apart from history and
sheltered from politics and public scrutiny: the test as war by other means, or worse,
as a trial without end. This is the spirit of Arendtâs warning in The Human Condition.
When the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957 people everywhere were ârelieved,â despite
the satelliteâs portent of war. Gazing at the heavens, humans could now behold some-
thing man-made and project a future in which they might inhabit a similarly fabricated
planet. The fancy for flight is a âfateful repudiationâ of an earthbound human ontology
and it speaks to a perverse desire to live in an anthropogenic world (2). The possibility
of producing life in a testtube through genetic engineering was similarly, for Arendt, a
desire for a scientifically pre-programmed existence, a means of escaping the random-
ness of evolution. Both test tube procreation and a life in orbit betokened a longing to
be born and then live in a world without contingency and separated from a ânatureâ
that humans share with a non-human world. To put it forcefully: it was a desire for a
life lived in the controlled (even if catastrophic) space of the laboratory, a willingness
to become a test subject. Atomic weapons and the devastating atomic tests suggested
to Arendt that we had already begun, in our own minds at least, to inhabit the satellite
over earth and to relinquish our human advantage and meaning in the world.
We have found a way to act on the earth as though we disposed of terrestrial nature from
outside, from the point of Einsteinâs âobserver freely poised in space.â If we look down
from this point upon what is going on on earth . . . [and] apply the Archimedean point
to ourselves, then these activities will indeed appear to ourselves as no more than âovert
behavior,â which we can study with the same methods we use to study the behavior of rats.41
The surprising claim is that inhumanism in the atomic era is not a radical transformation
of people into machines, or a post-human transcendence of biology, nor is it merely
19. M O D E R N I S M / modernity
628 our capacity for worldwide destruction, or a vision of human life after nuclear war. It is
rather that the cult of the atomic experiment, practiced by a number of nuclear nations,
fixates on processes and means (tests for testsâ sake) rather than producing durable
worlds and meaningful ends. Without its world, the human is merely another species
on earth, testing itself against threats of its own creation and in the process becoming
a force like nature (capable only of overt behavior) that jeopardizes its own existence.
Or, living on an entirely human-made planet, humans would put all their effort into
their biological survival while forsaking the meaningful action of politics: âman may be
willing, and, indeed, is on the point of developing into that animal species from which,
since Darwin, he imagines he has comeâ (Arendt, The Human Condition, 322). That
we have created the weapons of our planetary extinction is only the most obvious mani-
festation of a kind of inaction, or as Claire Colebrook has recently put it, of a âhuman
impotentiality, our essential capacity not to actualize that which would distinguish us
human.â This âhuman inhumanityâ pivots on an ocular-centric orientation to the world,
which connects our fascination with looking to the experimental regime: âThe eye is
geared to spectacle as much as speculation, with speculation itself being both produc-
tively expansive in its capacity to imagine virtual futures and restrictively deadening in
its tendency to forget the very life from which it emerges.â42
The inhumanism of the
atomic screen test is that it transforms not just the Nevada proving ground, but the
earth itself, into a laboratory and studio in which the human and its world are reduced
and recorded strategically as impassive test subjects, where the results of explosions are
interesting in and of themselves and where, without question, the reproducibility of
the test is predicated on the technological and biological replaceability of the subject.
Notes
1. For a discussion of the television coverage, see Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium:
Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 6â11.
An excerpt of the broadcast may be viewed on YouTube in which the television coverage is compared
to the cinematic test film of the same explosion: âTumbler Charlie: April 22, 1952,â YouTube video,
1:56, posted by Kevin Hamilton, August 10, 2010, youtube.com/watch?v=ZcaCTp3A6mo.
2. Jack Gould, âRadio and Television: TV Brings Atomic Bomb Detonation into Millions of Homes,
but Quality of Pictures is Erratic,â New York Times, April 23, 1952, 35.
3. âL.A. Sky Watchers Miss Blast Visible Over TV,â Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1952, 2.
4. For a compelling discussion of the atomic tests and the aesthetic and affects of liveness, see Tung-
Hui Hu, âReal Time/Zero Time,â Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 34,
no. 2 (2012): 163â84. Hu also makes the convincing observation that the televisual failure may better
capture the bombâs true nature than the spectacular mushroom cloud of the cinematic archive (171).
5. Bob Mielke, âRhetoric and Ideology in the Nuclear Test Documentary,â Film Quarterly 58,
no. 3 (2005): 28â37, 29.
6. This footage is included in the documentary, A Tale of Two Cities (US War Department, 1946),
from University of North Carolina School of Education, Learn NC, The Great Depression and World
War II, Flash video, 12:02, learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-worldwar/5963.
7. W. A. Higinbotham, quoted in âSecrecy Favored on Atom Test Data: House Committee Approves
Bill to Curb Revelations by Military Officials,â New York Times, January 31, 1946, 8.
8. âHiroshima Bomber Ready for Bikini: Plane With 4 of Crew That Dropped First Atomic Missle
Here After Practice,â New York Times, April 6, 1946, 2.
20. FAY / atomic screen test
629
9. US Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Field Office,
United States Nuclear Tests: July 1945 through September 1992 (Oak Ridge: US Department of Energy,
2015), xiâii, nv.energy.gov/library/publications/historical/DOE_NV -- 209 Rev 16.pdf.
10. William J. Broad, âThe Bomb Chroniclers,â New York Times, September 13, 2010, D1. The
Lookout Mountain Air Force Station studio in the Laurel Canyon areas of Hollywood, CA is the sub-
ject of the documentary Hollywoodâs Top Secret Film Studio, directed by Peter Kuran (Novato, CA:
Visual Concepts Entertainment, 2003), DVD. For the official explanation of the studio, see Nevada
National Security Site, âSecret Film Studio: Lookout Mountain,â Nevada National Security Site His-
tory (Las Vegas: National Nuclear Security Administration, 2013), nv.energy.gov/library/factsheets/
DOENV_1142.pdf.
11. Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It: Am ShinrikyoÌ, Apocalyptic Violence, and
the New Global Terrorism (New York: Henry Holt, 1999).
12. Hannah Arendt, âIntroduction into Politics,â in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New
York: Schocken Books, 2005), 154.
13. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013),
4â6.
14. This statement is informed by Thomas Vanderbiltâs discussion of the test site in Survival City:
Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 87.
15. John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Vintage, 1989), 1â2. Herseyâs account was first published
in The New Yorker in 1946.
16. See Alan Nadelâs deft reading of Hiroshima and his attention to Herseyâs movement between
the everyday routine and history. As Nadel argues, Hersey plays the unpredictable nature of the bomb
at the moment of its detonation against the known future on which Herseyâs ânon-fiction novelâ relies
(Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age [Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995], 53â67).
17. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1996), 6â7.
18. Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), 24.
19. See, for example, the special issue of diacritics on ânuclear criticism,â14, no. 2 (1984): 1â81,
which includes Jacques Derridaâs essay, âNo Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Mis-
siles, Seven Missives),â trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, 20â31; John Whittier Treat, Writing
Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
Peter Schwender and John Wittier Treat, âAmericaâs Hiroshima, Hiroshimaâs America,â boundary 2
21, no. 1 (1994): 233â53; Cathy Caruth, âLiterature and the Enactment of Memory (Duras, Resnais,
Hiroshima mon amour)â in Unclaimed Experience, 25â56; Paul K. Saint-Amour, âBombing and the
Symptom: Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear Uncanny,â diacritics 30, no. 4 (2000): 59â82.
20. âNuclear Test FilmâOperation Tumbler-Snapperâ (Lookout Mountain Laboratory, 1952),
Archive.org video, 48:02, posted by âmalamud,â May 18, 2010, archive.org/details/gov.doe.0800011. For
a full description of the test, see the âfull testâ link from the Nevada Field Office, US Department of
Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration website at nv.energy.gov/library/films/testfilms.aspx.
21. âOperation Upshot-Knotholeâ (Lookout Mountain Laboratory, 1953), Archive.org video, 35:48,
posted by âGravitonUSA,â July 12, 2006, archive.org/details/OperationUPSHOT_KNOTHOLE1953.
22. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2005), 92. On the relationship between art and atomic testing and, for that matter, artists and
atomic scientists, see Alessandra Ponteâs chapter âDesert Testingâ in Architecture Words 11: The
House of Light and Entropy (London: Architectural Association, 2013), 97â134.
23. Francesco Bonami, âPaintingâs Laughter,â in Andy Warhol/Supernova: Stars, Deaths, and
Disasters, 1962â1964, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walter Art Center, 2006), 20â27, 21.
24. Douglas Fogle, âSpectators at our Own Deaths,â in Andy Warhol/Supernova (Minneapolis:
Walter Art Center, 2006), 11â19, 18.
25. Thierry de Duve, âAndy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected,â trans. Rosalind Krauss, October
48 (1989): 3â14, 6.