NH #548: Nuclear Hollywood! Secret Government Film Studio Exposed!

Libbe HaLevy 

00:00:01

Nuclear movies or nuclear secrecy. Nowadays, we take it for granted that any kind of nuclear, anything will be cloaked hidden from public view. And it will take years if not decades, if ever before an uncomfortable nuclear truth is revealed. And by that time, a veritable army of nuclear defenders armed with calculated talking points will undercut our awareness and muddy the waters. So that the last thing we, the people will know is the nuclear truth. But it almost wasn’t that way. When you hear a genuine expert, tell you that in the early 1950s, president Dwight Eisenhower considered a different route and you hear

KEvin Hamilton

00:00:43

Very early in his administration and he was largely moving in that position of we’re just going to let the world know we’re going to let the American public know just how destructive these things are, including radiation. We’re not going to hide what we’re doing. Ultimately, that argument was overcome was defeated by another argument, which is we can’t do that because people will freak out and they will panic. Yeah,

Libbe HaLevy 

00:01:12

I think, well, for a brief window of time, in the early 1950s, we might’ve learned the truth about nuclear weapons and thus been able to stop their proliferation, but instead to prevent an appropriate mass emotional response to the horrors being unleashed on the world, the powers that be just silently shoved us into that uncomfortable unavoidable seat that we unfortunately all share

Announcer

00:01:39

Clear hot seat. What are those people thinking? Nuclear hot seat. What have those boys been breaking their hot seat? Ms. Sinking, our time to act is shrinking, but the visceral nuclear Hotsy, it’s the bomb.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:02:10

Welcome to nuclear hot seat. The weekly international news magazine, keeping you up to date on all things nuclear from a different perspective. My name is Leiby Halevi. I am the producer and host as well as a survivor of the nuclear accident at three mile island from just one mile away. So I know what can happen when those nuclear so-called experts get it wrong. This week in an astonishing interview, we learn about the us government’s secret Hollywood studio that for 20 years, not only filmed nuclear above ground blasts and turn them into pro nuke propaganda, but cranked out other images and films that the government used to manipulate nuclear consent. During the coldest of the cold war, we talk at length with Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman authors of lookout America, the secret Hollywood studio at the heart of the cold war. It’s a whole new take on how we’ve been manipulated into believing what we believe or think we believe about nukes.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:03:16

We will also have nuclear news from around the world, numbness of the week for outstanding nuclear bone headedness, and more honest nuclear information than we’ll ever pass a vote in the current Senate. All of it coming up in just a few moments today is Tuesday, December 21st, 2021. And here is this week’s nuclear news from a different perspective in Japan and inspection of Fukushima Daiichi unit two in June of 2021 has shown a fatal design flaw of the boiling water reactors that may have contributed to their destruction. A series of photos and full text of this is [email protected], Fukushima derived cesium 1 34 and 1 37 radioactive substances that flowed into the ocean due to the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 have arrived in the Arctic ocean. Additional analysis has shown that some of the cesium released into the ocean and atmosphere due to the accident, went northward after reaching the west coast of the United States and reached the Bering sea along the Alaska peninsula.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:04:26

Now as part of tech CO’s plans to release tritium contaminated water also radioactive from Fukushima Daiichi into the Pacific ocean has taken a step forward. As the company starts off shore drilling for an under sea tunnel planned to release the radioactive water 1 million, 280 metric, tons of it, roughly one kilometer or six tenths of a mile away from the site. Speaking of faulty nuclear reactors, French power giant EDF has found faults on pipes in a safety system at its civil nuclear power station. Corrosion was detected close to welds on the pipes of a safety injection system. Circuit EDF has shut down two reactors at SIBO in Western France and two reactors at shoes in Eastern France, stockbroker chairs in the French utility EDF dropped 15% one day after this announcement in Taiwan, a referendum seeking to unseal and restart work on Taiwan’s fourth nuclear power plant failed to pass.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:05:33

The first time people have been allowed to directly vote on the facility that has been under construction for more than two decades. Here’s this week’s featured interview. We’ve all seen those powerful black and white films of atmospheric nuclear bomb tests. Most notably in the montage at the end of the film, Dr. Strangelove, but did you ever stop to think where those films came from? Who shot that footage and why? I know I didn’t until I read my Alma Mater’s newsletter and discovered a new book with a nuclear premise that blew me away. It’s called lookout America, the secret Hollywood studio at the heart of the cold war. And the book was written by two professors from the university of Illinois, Kevin Hamilton and Nitto Gorman. What they uncovered during their 10 years of research is the mind blowing saga of a hidden propaganda arm of the us military. And it explains a lot about how us beliefs about nuclear weaponry were developed and implanted it in the populace. I could barely contain my excitement when we finally had the opportunity to talk on September 6th, 2019, Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman. Thank you so much for joining us here on nuclear hot seat.

KEvin Hamilton

00:06:52

Thank you for having us on. We’re glad to be here. They’d be really glad to be here. Thank you.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:06:56

I can’t begin to tell you how I’ve been eagerly anticipating this interview. Let’s start out with a little bit about the two of you. What are your backgrounds, Kevin you take?

Kevin Hamilton

00:07:07

So I come from a fine arts background Libby. I was trained as an artist who had a focused on public art and public memory. And I came to university of Illinois, Urbana champagne in 2002 to come as an art professor and teach people how to address these big issues of how we understand what’s happened in the past, through art, through digital media. And as I started working here and finding good collaborators like NA I started working more and more as a scholar, as well as, as an artist.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:07:35

And how did you switch over to doing media work or communications with

KEvin Hamilton

00:07:40

That really happens in large part because of when I came out of school and because of my interests, I really followed a path from art that was primarily about image making and how images work into a world that in the early digital revolution was really turning upside down that way. And I started to apply my questions I had about how images work and how people have made images over the centuries to our new digital technologies and the new social connections that they afford.

Libbe HaLevy 

00:08:10

How about you? How did you come to this conversation?

KEvin Hamilton

00:08:13

Yeah, I’m a professor in a communication department and my research and work over the last decade and a half who’s tacked back and forth between history, specifically the history of the cold war and philosophy, philosophy of communication, public discourse on how publics get motivated or discouraged how they get informed or misinformed. And so the cold war has been a great place for me with respect to both of those, you know, the history part, but as well as the more sort of philosophical questions, cause it was a time when a lot of major historical importance was happening across the globe. And there were a lot of ways in which publics were misinformed about what was taking place,

Libbe HaLevy 

00:08:58

Who first became aware of lookout mountain studios. And how did that happen?

Kevin Hamilton

00:09:05

This is Ned and I was working on my first book, which was on president Eisenhower and the Eisenhower administration focused in specifically on nuclear weapons and on nuclear weapons discourse. And I came across a memo when I was doing research at there at the Eisenhower library about a film that president Eisenhower had watched there in the white house. And when he finished watching it, he turned to his staff and he said, every American should see this film. And it was a film about the first test of a Thermo nuclear device in the Pacific in 1952 done by the United States. It turns out that film was made by lookout mountain laboratory. So that’s what got me keyed into it. And from there, Kevin and I started what ended up being a decades worth of research into the history of this particularly unusual Hollywood studio.

Libbe HaLevy 

01:10:06

How did you proceed with your research? Because certainly within the movement of people who oppose nuclear, there has been no awareness of this studio. So where did you go? What were you looking for and how difficult was it to find?

Kevin Hamilton

01:10:22

We learned the studio’s name through the credits and they don’t actually credit themselves for many of their films, but for some of those early wins they did. And once we started looking around for mentions of this, really one of the first places we came to was the department of energy, of all places who had released just a one page PDF that they put up online and probably gave out and printed copies somewhere in some of their sites about what came out in laboratories. It turns out to contain a lot of inaccurate information, but that was our first little nugget. And where that took us was to declassification efforts that had started in the nineties when the Clinton administration out of which that little bit of information had come. And some of the films that have been declassified at that time,

Libbe HaLevy 

01:11:09

Did you have to go foil in order to get the information, freedom of information act requests?

Kevin Hamilton

01:11:15

You know, once we started seeing what was already out there early on in this project, we made a decision to try to uncover as much as we could without foil. And that really became a commitment early on, just as a way to prove what you could tell that had been hiding in plain sight in a way,

Libbe HaLevy 

01:11:33

Taking a look at lookout mountain from the start, what was its mandate and what was it created to document?

Kevin Hamilton

01:11:42

Yeah, it was created to document nuclear tests, primarily tests that were taking place in the late 1940s and the Pacific operations sandstone was the first test that they were charged with documenting. It was a highly secretive affair. This film, the footage, as well as the documentary products that they produced out of the footage were classified. They were meant for atomic energy commission officials for the Pentagon, for the white house for Congress. And in certain cases for personnel who would be working in these operations to inform them what to expect and how to best prepare for the experience of taking part in and regular tests. And maybe some of what was happening there early on was just the logistics of secrecy. They knew they needed it, the photographic documentation of these tests, but they also knew that it was really easy, a photographic project, a film project to end up getting out of hand. If they had to go process the film in one place and edit it another employ different photographers from another source to actually shoot the thing. And they really decided, you know what we need as a one-stop shop, we need a place we we know is on lockdown, where photographers start, they can do their work. They come back, they develop and the work gets produced for its audiences.

Libbe HaLevy 

01:13:13

So look out mountain was really a consolidation of efforts that were already taking place under the Aegis of the government to document nukes. Is that accurate?

Kevin Hamilton

01:13:22

Yeah. You know, to call it a consolidation, maybe gets a little ahead of things. Look out mountain really came to be just as the nuclear weapons testing itself was a program itself was coming to peace immediately after the war, you had a kind of spectacle test known as operation crossroads, and that was open to the press. But once under the Truman administration, the United States government got serious about developing more powerful and more destructive nuclear weapons. They immediately began to think about how were they going to document these events on film. And that’s where lookout mountain came in at that point. So it was sort of right there at the beginning. And you can think about it as coming out of the air force, which of course was already in the business of photography, if not least from the perspective of assessing the bombing impacts in world war II, right?

Kevin Hamilton

01:14:16

So took photography to identify targets and then photography to evaluate the damage. And so a lot of the early photographers there and look on mountains that early stages of course were coming from the air force. But the sheer size of these projects require that they also hire civilian photographers. And by our research really seems to be less reconsolidation consolidation. Then maybe a formalization where the government saw that it needed to take an operation that had been partly managed by the air force, but dipping into civilian realms and really formalize it into something they could say was working on.

Libbe HaLevy 

01:14:51

It was an entity unto itself, but it was directly dependent upon an answerable to elements in the military, the government,

Kevin Hamilton

01:15:03

Yes, it was officially a part of the air force, but it was strangely answerable primarily to the atomic energy commission. And this is something that took some finagling on the part of the leadership of lookout mountain, but in the early 1950s, they successfully, even though it was a military outfit, at least in leadership, they rested free the chain of command and came under more or less the authority of the atomic energy commission, because they were just so intertwined into the nuclear testing operations. And it was really the ADC that was managing these operations,

Libbe HaLevy 

01:15:44

Taking a step back to look at the studios itself. Before we go deeper into the nuclear part of the issues. There were many Hollywood big names. They had to hire the technicians and the hands on people, but there were also many major people from Hollywood who became involved with lookout mountain, including Walt Disney, Jimmy Stewart, John Ford, Susan Hayward, and Marilyn Monroe taking just one example while we do think of Maryland as a bombshell of the blonde variety, what did she have to do with films about nuclear bounds?

Kevin Hamilton

01:16:17

They brought Maryland in a head of a really big test. They were working on called operation castle, which is probably familiar to your listeners access to largest nuclear disaster.

Libbe HaLevy 

01:16:30

That was castle Bravo. Wasn’t it it’s sometimes referred to that way. Yeah. Yes.

Kevin Hamilton

01:16:35

And what had been happening in previous tests was that the huge workforce required to essentially build new from scratch labs out in the Marshall Islands to run these tests is workforce had not been keeping their stories under wraps. They were riding home. They were telling their family and friends what they were up to out there. And after lookout mountain had already established itself as a credible storyteller about the tests to classify audiences and to government audiences. They said, you know, maybe you all can help us with the secrecy problem. So the studio came up with the idea that maybe they could cut some short films trailers, really that would be put in front of the films that soldiers were looking at as part of their RNR, that would encourage them to keep their work to themselves. And so they fill Marilyn Monroe looking into the camera and encouraging them to keep what they were doing secret. In that way.

Libbe HaLevy 

01:17:33

I’ve written a lot, including a full play about Marilyn Monroe, done a lot of research into her life and never came across that particular factoid.

Kevin Hamilton

01:17:42

It’s a really interesting story. We didn’t know how she got there until we dived into this a little deeper. We ended up finding the way that she got there through our interaction with the descendants of Harold Lloyd, the silent film star, which really became one of the main connections by which she got hooked up with the lab. They actually filmed her on Harold Lloyd as a state. And there’s a longer story to tell here that’s that we’ve actually told was another journalist has been published in a California publication called Alta.

Libbe HaLevy 

01:18:12

Well, we’ll get a link to that so that people can check it out. Moving this along. The films that were created by lookout mountain told stories of the bomb as a controlled physical and political instrument for a variety of audiences, enthusiastic technophiles skeptical, decision-makers aggressive generals, mystified, military personnel, and eventually a wary public. What kind of impact was intended by the films and what kind of impact did they actually have?

Kevin Hamilton

01:18:44

It’s a hard question to answer because there were so many films doing so many different things for so many different kinds of audiences, but in the 1950s, which was the peak of above ground nuclear testing, clearly lookout mountain intended to make films that were going to cause audiences to be overwhelmed and perhaps overawed by the spectacle of a nuclear blast. And at the same time to say, despite the over powering site, before your eyes, we, that is the atomic energy commission and the department of defense have this under total control. And so there’s no reason ultimately to fear what we are doing. The only thing we really need to fear is what the Soviets are doing.

Libbe HaLevy 

01:19:45

Let’s take a look at, look out mountains role in operation Ivy, which you referenced earlier, Ned. It was America’s first thermonuclear device, and it’s considered to be what inaugurated the age of Thermo nuclear weapons. You stayed in the book that quote, it was not really the device itself, the bid, the inaugurating of the age of thermonuclear weapons, but rather it’s fantastic images. So talk to us about project Ivy, what those images were and what the resulting film led to.

Kevin Hamilton

02:20:17

And that film really was what started our whole project in many ways, really diving into that film and asking questions about why it told the story the way it did and how it came to be the way it was, and even how that came to be different versions out there, different edited versions over the years. And what we saw there was that this was a film in which the, the makers and the commissioners, the clients, as it were knew that this was going to be a game changer. This was really going to be what they would call historic. And yet they needed to both claim the newest authority that being the first across that line would give them without making it look like something was out of their control. Because of course, for many of our perspectives, it might be historic in a way that is a direction.

Kevin Hamilton

02:21:04

We don’t want to go a direction that would seem to be spinning out of control. That could be igniting the whole atmosphere on fire. These kinds of questions were still on people’s minds about what might happen with a test this big. And so the film that they made was a highly scripted film. It was the first film they made that used an on-camera narrator for which they secured a known television face, a trusted face that walked us through there as if we were there as if we were counting down as if we were right there waiting for history to happen. That was the approach anyway, but this was of course a very different story. Once the test happened and images started actually appearing to folks back in Washington. And what ended up getting out in front of the public is a different story.

Libbe HaLevy 

02:21:52

Why was it a different story and how was it different?

Kevin Hamilton

02:21:55

The film itself really became the primary object about which people in the government argued and debated it wasn’t the thermonuclear weapons program. It wasn’t the IB test. It was this film that was shot about it, that caused people and civilian defense to argue with people in the atomic energy commission to argue with people in the Pentagon and for the white house staff to mediate and all these arguments. And at the heart of the argument was when should we tell the world about this? And what should we tell the world about this? And the film became the way in which these debates were sort of hashed out over an 18 month period. When finally the castle Bravo incident happened before the IB film was released publicly. And by that time, everybody in the world knew anybody who was paying attention knew that the United States was engaged in a Thermo nuclear weapons program and taking us into an entirely new era and nuclear weapons history.

Libbe HaLevy 

02:23:06

No, I understand that it was president Eisenhower who said, let’s show this to the public when he said that everyone in the country should see it. How was the film distributed and shown to the public? And what, if anything, was the general response to it?

Kevin Hamilton

02:23:22

The result of all the deliberations and arguments that it was talking about was the film getting sent back to look at mountain for new edits and even the filming of new introductions and the first folks to end up seeing this film outside the inner circle, who saw the full length film, not too long after the test itself was actually a council of mayors that Eisenhower had convened and a much shorter version that’s for 20 minute version of this film was screened for them as a first step here. And as was kind of almost resolution to the arguments from there, that version of the film, the much reduced version of the film didn’t end up getting screened for Congress and eventually screened across theaters screens across America and on television. And the response was mixed. And all those audiences, we can read television reviewers and their comments about the film. We can read what the mayors themselves said about the film. And some of these responses are indicative of maybe a story in which they saw the technical aspects of the story getting so foregrounded that they were sort of lost a sense of what else was happening there. The film itself, I think even for finances at the time, read as a little over the top for some folks,

Libbe HaLevy 

02:24:38

Did it just show the explosion as a marvelous piece of technology that had been developed or was there any reference at all to what the human toll would be? If such a bomb were exploded in a populated area,

Kevin Hamilton

02:24:55

There was quite a bit of attention in the film, both in the full version of the film, and even in the shorter edited versions of the film that were made for the public or for the mayors that detailed on maps, what would happen to the city of New York, if this bomb was dropped on it, or what would happen to the city of Washington DC, if this, or dropped on it. And so there was attention to the human costs we might say, but it was a kind of graphical attention that is to say it was a view from the sky. It depended upon maps. We didn’t see actual humans or really hear any stories about the kinds of sufferings that even the Marshall LEAs themselves were undergoing at that time due to America’s nuclear weapons, testing programs. So attention to the human costs, but a very carefully crafted kind of attention to it.

Libbe HaLevy 

02:25:59

Was there any discussion at all of radiation releases from such a bomb and what the aftermath of the radiation would be?

Kevin Hamilton

02:26:07

The focus of the operation Ivy films. When they tried to communicate the size of the blast were more on how deep the crater was or how wide the blast radius would be. And some of your listeners probably have seen some of these blast radius, protectors and calculators that the civil defense people distributed at the time. And that’s, that’s the kind of approach that this took. It really didn’t focus on the radiation piece to focus on the, the yield of the blast as a kind of measurable geographic size.

Libbe HaLevy 

02:26:39

We need to get into the ethics of what lookout mountain was doing during the depression in 1938, the farm security administration produced the film, the river, which was about the Mississippi river. I actually saw it when I was at the university of Illinois in one of the journalism classes. And this was such a powerful film about how farming and timber practices led directly to soil loss, catastrophic floods, and impoverishing, the farmers that the program that produced it was discontinued shortly thereafter. There was a fear that it was just going to produce more new deal propaganda to sway the public in the direction of whatever the administration wants it. So there is a decision to separate government from the making of films, and yet after the war, that’s exactly what the government did with lookout mountain. How was that justified?

Kevin Hamilton

02:27:36

I think part of the justification was more broadly cultural. And what I mean by that is that during world war II, as well as in the years after world war II, Hollywood itself really moved to the center in so many ways of American popular culture. And I think that part of the justification was a desire that is perennially true on the part of the state or on the part of the federal government to try to make sure they’re connecting with people where people feel connected with, if you get what I’m saying today, it might be social media or Twitter, right. But then it was Hollywood. And so I think part of the government’s justification for aggressively pursuing a film operation and Hollywood was Hollywood is kind of where the cultural action was. And they felt as though this is where they need to be able to connect with people.

Libbe HaLevy 

02:28:38

We’ll continue with this. Week’s featured interview with Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman authors of the book, look out America, the secret Hollywood studio at the heart of the cold war. We’ll do that in just a moment. But first this holiday gift giving season reminds me of what my mother used to say. You can’t play with your toys until you’ve cleaned up the mess in your room. I wish she were here to tell that to the nuclear industry. See they love playing with their toys, bombs, reactors, bailouts, even dangerously radioactive nuclear waste because it’s all a big money making Ponzi scheme that the industry has sold to a well propagandized public, but the new steers never clean up their room, meaning the planet. They might give it a lick and a promise, but they always leave behind a deadly radioactive mess. How do they get away with it?

Libbe HaLevy 

02:29:35

Well, focus group talking points along with copious quantities of smoking mirrors funded by all money that they’re making into a big PR campaign to make it seem like they’re responsible citizens and mainstream media politicians, the general public, even so-called environmentalist fall for it. That is why you need nuclear hot seat. We look through the smoke and mirrors to find the real nuclear stories so we can report the ongoing, evolving nuclear truth that the industry would rather you not hear about. Now, as we come to the end of 2021, consider celebrating this season with a donation to help us keep going, just go to nuclear hotseat.com and click on the big red donate button to send us a donation of any size. That’s also where you can sign up to be a monthly sustaining supporter of the show for as little as $5 a month, same as a cup of coffee, and a nice tip here in the U S know that however much you can help. I’m deeply grateful that you’re listening and that you care. Now we continue with this week’s featured interview with Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman authors of the book. Look out America, the secret Hollywood studio at the heart of the cold war. From your perspective as communications professors for a major university, what are the ethical problems that were, or might be posed by this kind of connection between the government and the film industry, let alone having their own studio?

Kevin Hamilton

03:31:12

You know, I think to go into that in relationship to the work we’ve been looking at, I think it’d be most interesting to look at the kind of exchange is, and quid pro quo is that we’re going on between lookout mountain and industry itself. Because when you look at things like how, when there was a fire in the sound studio there at like a mountain laboratory on Wonderland avenue, Walt Disney was happy to let them come down the mountain there from Laurel canyon and use the sound studios down at Disney studios, early cinema scope technology, even before, if I might, the robe came out that that technology was already in use by the air force. You don’t see a blockbuster film that includes military technology in which there hasn’t been a lot of consultation and maybe even loaned equipment from the Pentagon. And I think that relationship there and what’s happening there across an exchange mutual influence, a discovery of shared rhetorics and stories, and iconographies is where I would look for that conversation.

KEvin Hamilton

03:32:15

Yeah. And if I could add another dimension to the ethics of all this, there was actually in and around 1950, a really, really interesting debate happening at the level of the white house. And this is in the late Truman years going into the early Eisenhower years. And that was a debate that was typically called the debate about candor. How candid should we be with the American public and the world about nuclear weapons and the kind of destruction that they could do, and the kinds of activities the United States is engaged in with respect to making them even more destructive. And there was a substantial wing in the highest levels of the federal government making arguments that we really just need to be upfront with people about this. We shouldn’t sort of whitewash it. We shouldn’t dress it up. We just need to tell them the facts.

Kevin Hamilton

03:33:11

And Robert Oppenheimer was at the forefront of making this case, ultimately unsuccessfully, but it was part of what got Eisenhower’s ear very early in his administration. And he was largely moving in that direction. That is towards this position of, we’re just going to let the world know we’re gonna let the American public know just how destructive these things are, including radiation. And we’re going to be candid. We’re not going to hide what we’re doing. Ultimately that argument, which Oppenheimer represented an Eisenhower for a time and braced was overcome, was defeated by another argument, which is we can’t do that because people will freak out and they will panic. That was the word that was used. People will panic. And then we will have a situation where we have mass hysteria about this, and that’s no way to run a society, was the counterargument. So you can see there, there really is an ethical argument about the nature of the public, about the capacities of the public to know, and what is the responsibility of the government to the public when it comes to some of the more dangerous activities in which the government is engaging?

Kevin Hamilton

03:34:30

I think one other ethical dimension that I think we could look at about hookah Mountain’s work is looking at their role in the identification of the test sites as disposable and the ways in which when lookout mountain borrowed from Hollywood ways of looking at things, Hollywood, rhetorics, and symbols, they really helped build a whole view of the Pacific, the whole view of what we might even think of as Tiki culture and that kind of a depiction of the Pacific as sort of outside of history, where one islands as good as another, it’s mostly populated by Palm trees and peoples that don’t really care about, which I won there on. I mean, this was the basis by which these folks were removed and irradiated in many ways was by their depiction as less than human and depiction of these oceans, these waters, these lands as replaceable. I mean, that’s another place we could go here and be the ethics of representation in that.

Libbe HaLevy 

03:35:31

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the film nuclear Savage, have you seen it?

Kevin Hamilton

03:35:35

Yes. For

Libbe HaLevy 

03:35:36

Those who aren’t familiar, it, it is about the bombing of the Marshall Islands and what was done to the natives there, the lies they were told and the way that it was used as almost a mangle, a type laboratory, not to give healing and treatment to the people who were subjected to the bombs, but to just track what happened to them as a result so that we would have some data on exposure to radiation and what it did to people, which of course is environmental genocide and environmental racism.

Kevin Hamilton

03:36:09

Absolutely. It’s one of the motivating factors for us to write our book is to bring attention to how images played a role in that story. I mean, how did we get to a point where we were able to take a territory that had been stewarded by the United States on behalf of the United nations and decide that this was an acceptable use of that stewardship to use it as a bombing site, as a test site, as you said, as a site for really human experimentation. And I think we learned from indigenous scholars who are, I think the highest authority in this, we learned that the depictions of the people that addictions to the lands play a key role in their rendering as, as disposable and as other,

Libbe HaLevy 

03:36:53

What do you see as the larger danger when films are made by the government, not only to document, but to dramatize an issue in this case, the nuclear issue.

Kevin Hamilton

03:37:04

I think that one of the larger dangers is certainly the way in which the mushroom cloud becomes kind of cliche, such that there’s hardly a Hollywood production over the last 30 or 40 years that involves, you know, world cataclysm that doesn’t feature a mushroom cloud. And that mushroom cloud could be nuclear in the film in origin, or it could be some others, some extra terrestrial beam that implodes and produces the equivalent of a mushroom cloud, but that kind of familiarity that kind of cliche desensitizes us to the reality. And I think that that is on the one hand, a very effective way to manage. And I use that in the most, almost insidious way to manage populations, but clearly from you don’t even have to speak from any kind of perspective of democracy. You can just say from a human perspective, we don’t want to be desensitized to these things.

Kevin Hamilton

03:38:16

Do we? And so I think one of the dangers here is the way in which film is part of a major part of the way in which we have become desensitized to nuclear issues. I think it comes back to history as well. I think something of that de sensitization is happening as a result of those mushroom clouds, getting edited over and over again and taken out of their context and that we know the most famous montage of all of these, right at the end of Dr. Strangelove, we see, see the one after another. And we actually don’t know what led up to that for each of those particular explosions. We don’t know the calculated decisions about which sites in the desert, which islands were going to be lost through those pieces. We don’t know the cost. I think it’s about taking it out of, out of the history. That’s where these films take us.

Libbe HaLevy 

03:39:09

There’s another aspect that we haven’t gotten into, and that is that the camera operators and other technicians who are actually onsite to shoot these films sometimes from very close up, they were exposed to the blast, to the radiation, to the fallout. Has there been any kind of health study or followup done on these individuals?

Kevin Hamilton

03:39:33

Part of how we know anything we know at all about locum is because of the declassification effort that happened in the Clinton administration and when the cold war was deemed by some as over, it was at that time that the energy secretary has a little leery, authorize the release of a lot of documents to help irradiated workers and veterans get access to the actual data about what they have been exposed to because they couldn’t get to it before. And so if you look up some of these nuclear tests now, and you look up for what documents are out there online, the first thing you’re going to find are the reports that came out of that time that have tables and tables of exactly how much radiation, different workers and the tests were exposed to that’s to say that that is not a test that was done later, that was data that was gathered at the time. That is to say that what was measured at the time was deemed to be acceptable. So in that case, what has been happening since has, would only been a case by case is people seeking compensation, families, seeking compensation for what happened. And right now that we have talked to a number of the actual veterans and former photographers, we’ve not talked to any who were involved in that kind of litigation.

Libbe HaLevy 

04:40:48

It would be interesting to find out if any of them are still alive.

Kevin Hamilton

04:40:51

Well, when you look at how few are, of course you wonder, and even some of the ones we’ve met along the way have since passed. And they’re very glad to get together. The combat cameraman is the order to which they claim to belong. It’s a broader kind of identity for themselves and they gather, and they would be the ones to talk to about this about who’s still here and who’s not in line.

Libbe HaLevy 

04:41:15

That’s definitely a potential for our next program. Now look out mountain was closed down in July of 1969. Why then? And what happened to the archives who owns the copyrights and how are the films and photos access

Kevin Hamilton

04:41:33

Today? Yeah. So why did look at mountain clothes? That was a long process beginning, really in the early 1960s with the Kennedy administration and Robert McNamara and his incessant desire to try to centralize and make as efficient as possible. And his V right, all the operations of the Pentagon, including film operations. And so there was talk relatively early in the Kennedy administration about consolidating. There were other film units in the military across the country, none like lookout mountain, but there were other film units. So there was talk relatively early in the Kennedy administration about some sort of consolidation effort. So that’s part of the story. Part of the story is that Hollywood was becoming a less and less convenient place for lookout mountain to be in the 1960s for a variety of reasons, but not the least of which was the Vietnam war. And you might say the way in which Hollywood turned from a kind of a cold war consensus, a more center position politically in the 1950s, or even, you know, far out right position in the 1950s to a more left position and anti-Vietnam politics.

Kevin Hamilton

04:43:02

And that sort of thing, start to create some problems for lookout mountain in the 1960s. So, you know, there were a variety of reasons is it just became a less fruitful place in their eyes for them to be. And so eventually, as you said, in the late sixties, the operations were moved to another area. San Bernardino is that right air force, air force base. And that was part of a more general consolidation effort. As far as the holdings, the issue is not copyright. The issue is classification. These are government products, right? And so they weren’t privately owned. There is no real copyright law that covers them, but there’s all kinds of security and classification laws cover them. And so many of their holdings were sent to secure facilities. Some of them ended up sort of randomly and various places, including people that worked at lookout mountain, taking stuff home, a lot of it was destroyed.

Kevin Hamilton

04:44:03

And so the story of the archives is itself its own kind of quite messy story. And the fact that we were able to gather as much as we were able to over 10 years was partly just good sleuthing on our part. And partly, you know, we hit some luck to be honest. I mean, we, we ran into some people that put us onto some things that, that really helped her project. You know, maybe there’s another story that might interest your listening to her aspect of this story that might interest your listeners. In that one of the biggest surprises for us was to learn just how involved look up mountain laboratory was in Vietnam. By the time they closed there in late sixties, they were as big as they’ve ever been. And there were hundreds of hundreds of photographers and support workers for that effort that were going back and forth to Southeast Asia.

Kevin Hamilton

04:44:53

And at that time look out mountain had become known, not just for producing slick Hollywood style narrative films, but for being the most efficient deliverers of visual documents, visual evidence of military operations. And so they were documenting all the bombing in Vietnam and all the agent orange work. And within that footage around back and forth across the ocean to measure it, to evaluate it in what it was increasingly a data-driven enterprise as war was becoming. And so in many ways, the closure of lookout mountain was a part of the Pentagon learning of the value of images as data and absorbing of what was a very specialized at bruh operation into a capacity that the Pentagon today does with just about every piece of its being. It’s now hope as part of almost everything they do

Libbe HaLevy 

04:45:48

With the declassified films, because I know they show up all over YouTube and I’ve seen so many of them, are they accessible to the general public? Can they be used? Are they under public domain now?

Kevin Hamilton

04:46:03

Yeah, they’re under public domain and we’ve cataloged every film we can find online or that we have even found and digitized put online, we’ve put on our website, look out america.org and they’re all public domain. Now, sometimes folks are acquiring these films and restoring them and releasing copyrighted versus of them in high resolution. And that’s a different story, but partly the reason why you see these things popping up in YouTube edits all the time is because they’re in the public domain, our book that’s full of images we’re able to do in part because so many of those images are in the public domain.

Libbe HaLevy 

04:46:36

What has been the response to your book so far, both in the general reading public in the academic community and with the university of Illinois, having such a large nuclear engineering department to some of perhaps your neighbors on campus,

Kevin Hamilton

04:46:53

Each one of those audiences that you just described tends to operate in their sort of according to their own sense of time and timeliness. I would say that when our book was first released, we spent a lot of our time and a really wonderful way doing podcasts and radio interviews. And we’ve entertained some conversations with documentary film producers. And so, you know, there’s been more than anything else that I’ve done in my career. This has certainly been a public facing project. And one, that’s gotten a fair amount of public reception of the Smithsonian just released a documentary a couple of months ago. That features a lot of our work in it from this book. And so the academic world just operates at a different pace book. And the academic world is only been out about seven or eight months. And so that’s still almost a kind of forthcoming book and in the academic world, it’s still hardly out right now.

Kevin Hamilton

04:47:59

So we’re, we’re waiting to see what happens in the academic world with our work. And we really do hope that it gets taken up. Kevin might want to speak to that more. We have some folks with seeing this out to a broader audience in film form, for sure. We think that there’s a lot of ways to tell this story that reflects some of the values and the critical concerns that have come up in our conversation here with you. You mentioned the nuclear engineers, and that’s a really interesting point that not many people have asked us about. And we know some here on campus that are interested. They’ve invited us to come and screen some of these films and talk about them with them. Of course, as with any campus like this, where at some point in history, there were probably some Manhattan project scientists here.

Kevin Hamilton

04:48:38

We have some traditions here of really anti nuclear physicists that have been teaching with some of these films in their classes over the years to actually teach the students about the damages of these technologies. But maybe the most interesting piece of this is that we started to finally get a more conversation with the folks who are actually studying these films from the perspective of science out of Lawrence Livermore. And that might be an interesting subject for your listeners to look into these films are now under close scrutiny yet again, out of Lawrence Livermore to actually correct some of the bad data, the ways in which these films resulted in datasets that were actually not serving nuclear engineering well. And so they’re going back to these films to try to see if they got the data right for their science.

Libbe HaLevy 

04:49:25

And is there a department or an individual at Lawrence Livermore who is in charge of this?

Kevin Hamilton

04:49:30

Yes, there is this, his name is Greg sprigs and he is a nuclear scientist and his project, which is in its own way, quite fascinating as he discovered, as they began to digitize some of these films several years ago and use computers as opposed to humans to do things like try to measure blast radius or fireball circumference, they realized the many, many of the measurements from the 1950s were inaccurate that there was all kinds of human error. And so the yield figures that we have in these documents that have been out there forever right now, many of them are wrong. So the films are becoming the basis for recalculating. Things like yield from these various tests. So it’s AI technology, super competing technologies. All of that is, are coming back to bear on these films and in ways that who would’ve thought it 15 years ago,

Libbe HaLevy 

05:50:41

Everything old is new. Again, unfortunately, including the arms race,

Kevin Hamilton

05:50:48

If

Libbe HaLevy 

05:50:48

People wish to purchase your book and I would encourage them to do it because it is a fascinating green, we’ve barely scratched the surface here with this interview, where can they go to access the book?

Kevin Hamilton

05:51:01

They can buy our books, look out America, the secret Hollywood studio at the heart of the cold war directly from university of Chicago, press on their website or from Amazon or from their local bookstore where they can request it to come get delivered in support local bookseller.

Libbe HaLevy 

05:51:17

And you have a website that you’ve mentioned as well, that I assume has other information on it.

Kevin Hamilton

05:51:22

Yes. Levy, if people want to see more of the material on which we based our research and our book that [email protected], you can see not only into films, but a lot of the documents that we used to figure out exactly what was happening over the years there at the studio. So that’s still an ongoing concern. We’re putting up new things. We think there’s a lot more work to do. We’re just scratching the surface ourselves on this.

Libbe HaLevy 

05:51:44

Is there anything else that we have not gotten to that you think is important to mention at this time?

Kevin Hamilton

05:51:50

Now, one of the chapters of lookout mountains, history that we have not talked about, but I think your listeners would be very interested in as the missile development program, which lookout mountain ended up being really, really integral to that whole project. So that the way in which the nuclear weapons program shifted in the 1950s from a, an airplane based approach to a missile based approach. And, and that was the transformation that took place in the Pentagon, but it was one that was quite fraught. And one where there was plenty of opposition within the Pentagon itself to missile development over Armor’s using bombers in nuclear war and look out mountain ended up getting pulled into the middle of that and all kinds of really interesting ways that we discuss in the book. And so given the interests of your listening audience, we think they might want to turn to that missile chapter when they get the book and read up on that.

Kevin Hamilton

05:52:46

It’s also truly be that they ended up covering the development of early experimental nuclear reactors. So there are some films out there from a few that they were, they were out there documenting that might be of interest to some of your listeners who are studying some of the particular cleanup sites and that sort of thing, and might find some documents of landscapes that they know all too well. As we’re getting to a conclusion here, I would just say that I think one of our biggest hopes here is that we are able to ignite and catalyze conversations about the roles that images play and that moving images play in these critical, critical debates, whether they’re about what happened in the past or what’s happening in the present, whether it’s the current arms race, or even the climate crisis,

Libbe HaLevy 

05:53:32

You’ve clearly made an important, valuable and blasting contribution to our understanding of the whole nuclear landscape and the research you’ve done strikes me as being critical. And I know that listeners are going to be looking this up because that’s the kind of people they are for now. I want to thank the two of you, Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman for the marvelous book that you wrote. And also for being my guest this week on nuclear hot seat,

Kevin Hamilton

05:54:03

It’s been our pleasure to be here levy and thank you to your listeners as well. Thank you so much.

Libbe HaLevy 

05:54:08

Kevin Hamilton and Nitto Gorman are the authors of lookout America. The secret Hollywood studio at the heart of the cold war, their website is lookout america.org, and it contains a treasure trove of links to films and documents directly taken from the lookout mountain laboratory. As the studio was known to learn more about the bombing of the Marshall Islands. I strongly suggest you view the film. I mentioned nuclear Savage by Adam Jonas Horowitz. We will have a preview of that movie up on the website for this episode, nuclear hot seat.com. Number four 30 we’ll link to the film operation Ivy, and also the article on how Marilyn Monroe came to briefly be part of lookout mountains work. And just for fun, for those of you who may have been too young to remember Dr. Strangelove we’ll link to the films ending with the scene in the government bunker leading to the bomb, blastic finish all will be available on our website, nuclear hot seat.com under this episode, number 4, 3 0, that was Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman authors of the book. Look out America. The secret Hollywood studio at the heart of the cold war we’ll have links up to their book, their website, and the films and research information mentioned in this interview on our website, nuclear hot seat.com under this episode, number five forty eight,

Announcer

05:55:33

The business

Libbe HaLevy 

05:55:41

Congratulations to Mary Osborne of three mile island alert who lived only eight miles from three mile island at the time of the accident and collected misshapen plants, quote unquote, when they first showed up in the wake of that nuclear accident. Now more than four decades later, 90 of her specimen have been accepted by the Smithsonian institution in Washington, DC under the care of the staff and the department of botany. When appropriate specimens may be made available to Smithsonian scientists and other researchers who wish to examine them for their relevance to the three mile island events of 1979, kudos to Mary for her work. And thanks to Scott port’s line of TMI aid who helped prepare the collection for submission, we will revisit the nuclear hot seat interview with Mary Stamos for our three mile island annual special posting on March 28th, 2022 and San Louis Obispo. Mothers for peace are fighting back against a newly released Stanford MIT study that recommends exploring the extension of Diablo Canyon’s license to operate, but completely ignores a series of important conditions that exist at the Abloh canyon.

Libbe HaLevy 

05:56:53

Mothers for peace have created these as talking points and we will have a link to it up on our website, nuclear hot seat.com. Again, this episode is number 5 48. This has been nuclear hot seat for Tuesday, December 21st, 2021. You can listen to nuclear hot seat, any place you get your podcasts, or here’s the easy way. Get it delivered to your email every week as it posts go to nuclear hot seat.com. Look for the yellow box. Fill in your first name, your email address. We will send you one email a week with the link to the show and a short summary of some of the material that’s in it. Now, if you’ve got a story lead, a hot tip or suggestion of someone to interview, send an email to [email protected] really you’re on the ground where you are tell us what’s happening in your neighborhood and in the giving spirit of this holiday season.

Libbe HaLevy 

05:57:46

If you’d like to help us out, take a moment, go to nuclear, hot seat.com. Look for the big red button, follow the prompts and anything you can do to help. We will really appreciate your support. This episode of nuclear hot seat is copyright 2021 Leiby Halevi at hardest street communications, all rights reserved, but fair use allowed. As long as proper attribution is provided. This is Leiby Halevi of harvestry communications. The heart of the art of communicating, reminding you that as Albert Einstein said, the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything. Save our modes of thinking. And thus, we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe. Ooh, happy holidays. And there you go. That is your nuclear wake-up call. So whatever you do do not go back to sleep because we are all in the nuclear hot seat.