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

Abstract

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