Terror as normality

Abstract

Reflecting on two US-engineered Cold War programs and plans, the author finds how terror, over past decades, has become a normal element in everyday US life. The historic period that saw the Corona satellite and the Single Integrated Operational Plan come to light, the author argues, taught Americans to be committed to total war as a precondition for everyday life—while locating death as exterior to the nation.

The concept of the extreme is relational, assuming a counterpoint to everyday experience marked regular, unexceptional, banal. Yet US life for decades has been founded on ideas, logics, and machines that are simultaneously infrastructural (and thus part of a normalized everyday) and extreme in the absolute sense of unprecedented and utterly violent. Instrumental rationality has—in the form of the atomic bomb—produced a world that is simultaneously normal and extreme, at once capable of informing everyday life or of ending it in a flash.

In the atomic bomb, technological means and ends combine in a new constellation—one that exceeds modernist rationality, creating epistemic problems that are emblematic of our moment. The kind of technical expertise responsible for producing the atomic bomb has engineered an industrialized, globalized, networked world, one now experiencing the combined pressures of political, military, economic, and environmental crises. In such a world, which relies on a highly developed social commitment to normalizing extremes in the effort to secure profit, self-knowledge and reflexive critique become ever more vital, yet also more inherently fraught.

A return to basic questions of how to define profit, loss, and sustainability is a key concern today in the United States. It is worth asking what kind of analysis could begin to redefine the limits of a collective security, as well as what kind of de-familiarization or productive shock might allow insight into the cultural terms of expert judgment today in the United States, allowing Americans to rethink the logics and practices that have simultaneously produced a global war on terror, a global financial meltdown, and a planetary climate crisis. It also is helpful to ponder how Americans—extremophiles of the national sort—assess their own history within a national-cultural formation devoted to the normalization of violence (as war, as boom-and-bust capitalism, as environmental ruin) as the basis for everyday life.

An extreme critique requires the ability to assess the alternative costs and benefits that remain suspended within the spaces of an everyday US life constantly rehearsing—via media, political culture, and military action—terror as normality.

Lessons from Corona

Covert and fragile, the first Corona satellite was secretly launched into outer space in August of 1960, offering a new optics on Cold War military technologies and fantasies. It was a rocket carrying not a warhead, but a giant panoramic camera, slung into a low orbit over Europe, running a long reel of 70 mm film, specially designed by Kodak to function in outer space. The satellite made a series of orbits exposing its film over designated areas, and then ejected a fireproof capsule back into Earth’s atmosphere carrying the film. As the capsule descended via a series of parachutes, it emitted a homing signal, allowing a specially equipped plane to detect the signal and swoop in, capturing the now charred film canister in mid-air via a giant hook.

On August 18, 1960, the Corona Project became the first space-based reconnaissance system, providing the CIA with the first satellite photographs of Soviet military installations (Day et al., 1998; Peebles, 1997; Ruffner, 1995). Corona provided the most accurate images of Soviet military capabilities to date, offering concrete photographic evidence of missile capabilities at a time of near-hysterical speculation about imminent Soviet attack in the United States. Corona images documented that the Soviet Union did not have a decisive advantage in missile technology but was instead outnumbered by a factor of at least 100 to 1 by the United States.

The Central Intelligence Agency has long considered the Corona satellite one of its most important achievements. But a basic lesson of the Corona achievement remains unrecognized: The first satellite system not only offered a new optic on Soviet technology, it also revealed how fantastical US assessments of Soviet capabilities were in the 1950s. Thus, the first Corona images have as much to say about the ferocious US commitment to nuclear weapons, and a global nuclear war machine already set on a minute-to-minute trigger by 1960, as about Soviet weapons.

The first Corona images constitute a moment when administrators of the national security state had their own logics and fears negated in the form of direct photographic evidence, opening a potential conceptual space for radical reassessment of their own ambitions, perceptions, and drives, powerfully revealed in black-and-white photos as fantasy. We might well ask why the Corona imagery (and any number of similar moments when existential threat has objectively dissolved into mere projection—most recently, the missing weapons of mass destruction used to justify the US invasion of Iraq in 2003) did not produce a radical self-critique among defense experts in the United States.

The Cold War nuclear stand-off installed existential threat as a core structure of everyday US life, making nuclear fear the coordinating principle of US geo-policy and a new psychosocial reality for citizens increasingly connected via images of their own imminent death. Indeed, few societies have prepared so meticulously for collective death as did Cold War America, while simultaneously denying the possibility of an actual ending. The Cold War hysteria from 1957 to 1962 was a moment of maximal danger (supported by constant civil defense drills) but also of new perspectives—crucially those derived from outer space—that momentarily opened up multiple contingent and radically different security futures.

For an anthropology of extremes, this period of the Cold War can be approached as an ur-moment, foundational in terms of the technology, theory, politics, and ambitions supporting the US security state. In the immediate post-Cold War period, the Corona archives were declassified, creating a vital new resource for Earth scientists studying climate change, but also for cultural historians examining the terms of US militarism. Interrogating this first period of global nuclear danger via such documents raises questions about how one ends the possibility of a total ending, as well as how a society pursuing war as a normalized condition of everyday life should pause and reflect on its own intellectual and psychosocial processes.

Within modern political theory, the means to an end has been embedded within the very concept of rationality, making ends and means synonymous with progress, a perpetual engine of improving the infrastructures of everyday life as well as the morality of those living within it. Within this modernity— glossed here as the application of reason to nature as progress—we have few efforts to theorize the reality or implication of conceptual blockages or blindnesses within the very notion of security. The assumption that instrumental reason is not only a means to an end but an essential good structures a Euro-American modernity in which superstition is set against the possibility of an unending technological progress (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002).

Instrumental reason has enabled our globalized, economized, technologized modernity, but it has also installed a set of compensations for those events, desires, or biological facts that disrupt specific calculations of progress and profit. By the mid-twentieth century, the products of instrumental reason— the very means to an end—produced new forms of war that ultimately challenged the survival of the species. The atomic bomb stands as both a rational technology—produced via the combined work of physicists, engineers, chemists, industrialists, military planners, defense intellectuals, and civilian policy makers—and as a limit case to that instrumental reason (Edwards, 1996; Oakes, 1994). In the early days of the nuclear age, some Manhattan Project scientists hoped this new technology would be so terrible that it would simply end the possibility of war (Federation of American Scientists, 1946). Instead, US war planners built a global system for nuclear war that could end life itself within a few minutes of actual conflict, and constantly pursued military action around the world.

What these technical experts were attempting to negotiate through engineering is a basic relationship to death, a perverse project of building ever more destructive machines in the name of producing “security.” Indeed, displacing the threat of one machine (the bomb) with another (the bomb) became the basis for deterrence theory, a way of organizing and containing the thought of death by expanding technological systems.

Cold War planners managed the threat of nuclear war through constant proliferation—of weapons, delivery systems, images, theories, and calculations. Through this proliferation, planners pursued a program of intellectual compensation for the confrontation with a new kind of death. In the process, Americans learned (through military planning and civil defense drills) how to be committed to total war as a precondition for everyday life while locating death as exterior to the nation, even as the war machine grew ferociously in its technological capacities. This represents a distinctive national-cultural achievement: a notion of security that brings collective death ever closer in an attempt to fix its location with ever more precision.

From Gaither to the SIOP: Shaping understandings

US military systems became both the most direct application of technical rationality and the location of deep fantasies about national immortality and systems of total control. In the first decade of the Cold War, for example, the lack of detailed intelligence about the Soviet Union enabled a US national security project that was both technologically utopian and driven by increasingly apocalyptic visions of an omnipotent other.

A top secret blue-ribbon panel studying the possibility of nuclear civil defense in 1957, known as the Gaither Committee, not only recommended a nationwide commitment to building underground bunkers and training citizens to think calmly about experiencing nuclear war, its members also concluded that a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union left the United States increasingly vulnerable to a devastating “first strike” (Security Resources Panel of the Science Advisory Committee, 1957).

US national security debates, by the end of the 1950s, were structured by visions of a Soviet sneak attack that would destroy urban America in an instant—a nuclear Pearl Harbor. The Gaither Committee leaked to the press its conclusion that by 1959 the Soviets would have a decisive advantage in intercontinental ballistic missiles (Roman, 1995; Snead, 1999), provoking huge nuclear arms expenditures in the United States. The domestic politics informing the missile gap narrative were part of the battle between military branches for nuclear resources and soon key to John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign strategy of positioning his Republican rivals (Eisenhower and then Nixon) as weak on national security.

Today we can see that in addition to the new weapons systems built at the end of the 1950s, there was also an important political discovery crucial to the evolving Cold War, namely, the universal utility of threat proliferation in US security culture. The raw political value of existential threat as a motivating narrative became a well-worn domestic strategy in the United States, one linking the missile gap of the 1950s to the “window of vulnerability” of the 1970s, to the “strategic defense initiative” of the 1980s, to the “space-based Pearl Harbor” narratives of the 1990s, to the terrorist “WMD” discourses of the 2000s, as illustrations of a nuclear culture. In each of these cases, it is clear how the bomb (as a consolidated form of existential threat) has been good for Americans to think with, becoming the basis for building a nuclear state and a global military system, but also for transforming raw political ambition into a necessary form of what is now termed “defense.”

But if the bomb has been crucial to constituting US “superpower” status, it has also produced a complex new domestic affective political domain, allowing images of, and appeals to, existential threat to become a central means of establishing and expanding a militarized national security culture.

By 1961, US war planners sought to rationalize a vast set of military logics and capabilities into a comprehensive war plan—known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP. The first plan, known as SIOP-62, promised to reduce contingency and error, and to coordinate a US war machine that included bombers, submarines, and missiles deployed globally, as well as a vast array of front-line nuclear technologies, from nuclear cannons to backpack bombs to atomic land mines (Ball and Toth, 1990; Burr, 2004; Keeney, 2011; Sagan, 1987).

The first SIOP had two options, each involving a total assault on the Communist bloc—preemptive war and retaliation. The preemptive option in SIOP-62 committed the full US arsenal in a simultaneous global nuclear strike, involving 3,200 nuclear weapons delivered to 1,060 targets around the world.

The scale of destruction detailed in SIOP-62 is beyond comprehension, which raises a crucial issue about how administrators of the nuclear state resolve such terror and complexity. In national security planning, the compensation for this experience of cognitive overload was a fixation on command and control, as well as the articulation of specific war calculations, marking degrees of violence for different nuclear war scenarios (Eden, 2004; Kahn, 1960). What would likely be an unknown chaos of missiles and bombs launched for the first time from a vast range of technologies, located all over the planet under deeply varied conditions, appears on paper as a rational program of cause and effect, threat and preemption, attack and counterattack. This was an apocalyptic vision rationalized as math.

From 1962 until today, the SIOP nuclear war plan has been continually revised to acknowledge different global political contexts but never truly abandoned (McKinzie et al., 2001). The United States maintains the ability to destroy all major population centers outside the continental United States within a few minutes of nuclear conflict. It is important to recognize that this technical capacity to deliver overwhelming violence to any part of the world in mere minutes has relied on structures of the imagination as well as on machines, on threat projections and fantasies as well as physics and engineering.

The SIOP target list would continue to grow through the 1980s, eventually including tens of thousands of global targets and constituting a nuclear war system so complex that it is very likely that no single human being understood its internal logics or likely effects. US ideologies of nuclear fear constantly threaten to overwhelm the material evidence of danger, and have become a core part of a now multigenerational commitment to militarism for its own sake. The result is that the United States spends as much as the rest of the world combined on military matters but has not yet achieved “security.”

War capacities and actions

The constant slippages between crisis, expertise, and failure are now well established in the US political culture. The cultural history of Cold War nuclear crisis helps us understand why.

Philosopher Jacques Derrida, working with the long-running theoretical discourse on the sublimity of death, describes the problem of the nuclear age as the impossibility of contemplating the truly “remainderless event” or the “total end of the archive” (1984: 27). For him, nuclear war is “fabulously textual” because until it occurs all you can do is tell stories about it, and because to write about it is to politically engage in a form of future making that assumes a reader, thus performing a kind of counter-militarization and antinuclear practice.

In the early 1960s, the US nuclear war policy was officially known as “overkill,” referencing the redundant use of hydrogen bombs to destroy targets (Rosenberg, 1983). This overkill installs a new kind of biopower, which fuses an obliteration of the other with collective suicide. The means to an end here constitutes an actual and total end, making the most immediate problem of the nuclear age the problem of differentiating comprehension from compensation in the minute-to-minute assessment of crisis.

This seems to be a fundamental problem in US national security culture—an inability to differentiate the capacity for war with the act itself, or alternatively to evaluate the logics of war from inside war. Today, space is filled with satellites offering near-perfect resolution on the surface of the Earth and able to transmit those data with great speed and precision to computers and cell phones, as well as early warning systems and missiles. What we cannot seem to do is find an exterior viewpoint on war itself—a perspective that would allow an assessment not only of the reality of conflict but also of the motivations, fantasies, and desires that support and enable it.

Indeed, expert systems of all sorts—military, economic, political, and industrial—all seem unable to learn from failure and instead in the face of crisis simply retrench and remobilize long-standing and obviously damaging logics. War, for example, is not the exception but the norm in the United States today—which makes peace “extreme.” So we need to consider what it would take for Americans to reassess not only the means to an end—that is, the tactics, the surges, the counterinsurgencies, the preemptions, and surgical strikes—but also to re-evaluate war itself. For what would it take today to consider an actual end to such ends?