Kevin Hamilton

Whether poring through thousands of images and files in official archives and boxes offered out of car trunks, learning on site from archivists of state violence, or searching for the right theoretical frameworks to understand our subjects, we seek to understand how these weapons have changed us at every scale.

Through publication, design, imaging, visualization, popular media, convenings, and more we strive to see anew the evidence of these changes often hiding in plain sight amidst the icons, technologies, landscapes, and institutions of our age.

Almost two decades of this pursuit has made us the foremost experts on the Air Force film unit known colloquially as Lookout Mountain Laboratory (LML), and officially as the 1352nd Motion Picture Squadron. The U.S. government founded LML in 1947 to provide secure and reliable documentation of Pacific nuclear tests; the secret facility founded in an abandoned radar station in Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon grew quickly to become the go-to chronicler for the Atomic Energy Commission and the Air Force at large. Relying on a staff of over 200 civilian and military personnel at home, and many more abroad, the unit drew from experts in photography and motion picture production to create thousands of edited films and countless photographs. Scientists, military leaders, diplomats and Hollywood professionals converged on this secret location in a storied residential neighborhood to comprise, arguably, the Cold War's most prolific and influential film studio.

Over its two-decade history Lookout Mountain produced at least 600 edited films about America’s nuclear weapons program, and many others on other topics. Closed in 1969 with no deliberate attempts to preserve its legacy, Lookout Mountain was nevertheless the film studio of choice for the Department of Defense and Atomic Energy Commission’s joint effort to document and report on America’s nuclear test programs. And for the Air Force, Lookout Mountain was among a small cadre of film groups used to document and report on its ballistic missile program, the early years of the space program, and Air Force activities in Vietnam. The unit produced everything from high-speed scientific film documentation, to training films for missile operators, to journalistic coverage of minor Air Force events, to fully scored and acted feature-length films. Subject matter also extended to experimental aircraft, flight safety, diplomatic missions, propaganda for Civil Defense, or even the global travels of comedian Bob Hope.

The importance of a published monograph to this project grew as we learned just how ephemeral the nuclear archive could be– subject to shifts in policy, resourcing, and the very organization of the state. Dartmouth University Press / UPNE provided the home we needed for a book whose design was essential to its argumentation. Through typesetting, collage, and information design, our argumentation found form in and through its visual staging.

Among the greatest challenges of telling LML's story is that very few of their works bear their name. As we forensically reconstructed the unit's history, we also developed the first definitive bibliography of these films, compiling many of them on a new online repository. By learning to recognize their style and building a record of their contracts, we were also able to verify their responsibility for most every image of a mushroom cloud any of us have seen.

Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we also built a number of interfaces and databases to annotate these films, making meaningful time-specific ties between films and documents, and uncovering stylistic and formal patterns and rhythms within the studio's industrial workflow.

Before we learned of LML's existence, our research lay more in interpretation of their products. One thread of this work continued analyses of the role of interface imagery in these and other films; we noticed early on the prominence of "operators" at their consoles in these scenes, performing authorized use of these world-ending systems through appropriate mediation at a distance.

• “The Sensibility of the State: Lookout Mountain Laboratory’s Operation Ivy and the Image of the Cold War ‘Super’,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, vol.18, no.1 (2016): pp. 1-44.
• “At the Interface: The Loaded Rhetorical Gestures of Nuclear Legitimacy and Illegitimacy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (March 2011): pp. 41-66.
• “The Diffusion of an Atomic Icon: Nuclear Hegemony & Cultural Memory Loss,” in Rhetoric, Remembrance and Visual Form, eds. Anne Demo and Brad Vivian (London: Routledge, 2011): pp. 189-209.
• “Where is the Nuclear Sovereign?” in Responding to the Sacred, eds. Kyle Jensen and Michael Bernard-Donals (University Park: Penn State, 2021).

With America's nuclear "adventures" often styled in the aesthetics of the Hollywood western, and the Air Force an important opportunity for advancing both the image and technological reality of an "air age" empire at a planetary scale, we turned increasingly to examining the role of nuclear testing and imagery in the production of space and place. Beneath the deathly annihilation of homelands and waters lay vast systems of control, literally buried under lagoons and deserts as endless miles of signal-bearing cables. In the book and later articles, we also examine the geographic dimensions of this work:

• “Seeing Experimental Imperialism in the Nuclear Pacific.” Media+Environment 3 (1), March 05, 2021.
• "The U.S. Air Force Academy and the Grounding of Atomic Modernity," in A People’s Atlas of Nuclear United States, eds. Sarah Kanouse, Shiloh Krupar (Georgetown University, 2021).
• "Engineering Geographies: The Arctic in the Cold War Air Defense Films of the United States Air Force," in Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos, eds. Lilya Kaganovsky, Scott MacKenzie, and Anna Westerståhl Stenport (Bloomington IN : U. of Indiana, 2019).

We also continue to reach for ever new opportunities for engaging this work through forms less familiar to scholarly argumentation. Through lecture and film series at home, appearances in documentary and journalistic media abroad, performative lectures and experimental sound, we keep looking for new ways to unsettle our all-too-familiar ways of seeing and hearing the nuclear. Our contributions, appearances, and public projects have included:

• "Atomic Light in the Public Light," a film and lecture series at the University of Illinois, Spring 2011. (Link to series trailer and news story.)
• Beauchamp, Cari, "Atomic Blonde." Alta Journal (October 18, 2018).
• O'Gorman, Ned, & Kevin Hamilton, “The Horrifying Hollywood Movie that Determined U.S. Nuclear Policy," zocalopublicsquare.org (February 2, 2020).
• "Filming the Bomb," Atomic Age Declassified. Smithsonian Channel (July 30, 2019).
• Hamilton, Kevin & Johanna Gosse, "Atomic Sublime," [audio documentary]. For the Machines in Between podcast (May 30, 2023).