Blurred Visions: Atomic Testing, Live Television, and Technological Failure

Introduction

the three live network broadcasts of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s were signal events in the early history of American television. They aired on multiple networks simultaneously, drawing lavish coverage in newspapers nationwide and the attention of some of the country's most prominent broadcast journalists. One report estimated that 35 million people watched the first test, around midday on Tuesday, 22 April 1952 (Fehner and Gosling 3)—less than a year after the completion of AT&T's transcontinental coaxial cable enabling coast-to-coast live broadcasting and at a time when many cities between the coasts were still not linked into the national network (Sterne 516). NBC and CBS distributed coverage of the detonation from the Yucca Flats near Las Vegas using a microwave relay system built for the purpose by Klaus Landsberg, an engineer at the unaffiliated Los Angeles station KTLA. Las Vegas itself did not yet have a television station, and the FCC's freeze on station licenses had been lifted only eight days prior. Television was still growing into the nationwide cultural force it would eventually become over the course of the decade, a process in which this program, along with two more that followed, played an important role. The technologically complex broadcasts were expected to be convincing displays of the medium's power.

The tests were also important to the American military's plans to publicize the power of, and its control over, nuclear weapons. Alongside pamphlets, films, slideshows, and other media, these broadcasts served to justify the military's nuclear stockpiles via a publicity strategy of conventionalization, in which nuclear weapons were framed publicly as simply larger versions of conventional ones. By this logic, atomic and eventually thermonuclear (hydrogen) weapons were immensely powerful, but also just as manageable as conventional weapons were assumed to be, enabling the government to reconcile the weapons' force with the American strategy of deterrence. As Guy Oakes puts it, "[a]lthough atomic bombs might be quantitatively more destructive than the conventional bombs used in World War II, qualitatively they achieved essentially the same results. This was the conventionalization argument" (52). Should a nuclear attack by the Soviets occur, so the logic went, the United States would still be able to respond with force of its own. For both the television industry and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and related agencies, therefore, the broadcasts were important as demonstrations of technological control. Ideally, from the planners' perspectives, the detonations and their television coverage would be mutually reinforcing, each proceeding exactly as anticipated by television engineers and representatives of the atomic agencies alike and each serving as sources of reliable information.

Put simply, things did not go according to plan. Onscreen, the detonations were barely discernible, due to broadcast static, the brightness of the fireball, and other factors I discuss later in this article. Critics were frustrated by the first broadcast and remained unimpressed by the second and third ones. Even the weather proved uncooperative, as conditions prompted long delays in one case and stymied attempts to document civil defense procedures in a model town built near the blast site in another. On the whole, the broadcasts failed to evince technological mastery, instead serving as reminders of the possibility of technological failure.

Recent work by Jennifer Fay explores the "disappointment" that nuclear imagery across media prompted in this period (611–12), and numerous scholars have written on the broadcasts from other perspectives.¹ This article builds on this work by examining the test broadcasts as failures of a specifically televisual technology, failures that expose the contradictions in the discursive construction of televisual success in this period. That success was closely linked to the oft-theorized concept of live television: a primary appeal of liveness, as evident in several discursive contexts in this period (trade journals, promotions, criticism, and so on), was that it would provide immediate views on events whose conclusions were unknown in advance. Although immediacy was ascribed to live dramatic and comedy performances—in terms of actors' immediate proximity to viewing audiences (Boddy 80–84; Berenstein)—producers of this period were particularly...