The End of Ends

Author(s): Joseph Masco

Source: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124
Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41857292
Accessed: 25-09-2017 17:46 UTC

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SPECIAL COLLECTION

Extreme: Humans at Home in the Cosmos

The End of Ends

Joseph Masco, University of Chicago

ABSTRACT

This paper assesses the conceptual and technological negotiation of an

absolute end. The idea of a total ending is sublime: it is located outside o
language and powerful precisely because of its sheer incomprehensibility.
Yet, through the 20th century the United States built large-scale techno-
logical systems capable of achieving an absolute end to civilization. This
paper engages both the idea of an end, and the means to an end, inform-
ing US nuclear strategy. It begins with an assessment of Cold War nuclear
war plans that, if enacted, would certainly have eliminated most, if not
all, life on Earth. I then examine how this expert fixation on nuclear crisi
was itself circumscribed by new technological systems- notably secret
space satellites that provided images of Earth in its totality as well as a vita
check on the American projections of Soviet power. The exploration of
outer space was thus a crucial means of checking American fantasies of an
imminent and total danger, establishing a new limit on thought while open-
ing up the possibility of an "end of ends" in the nuclear age. [Keywords
Outer space, satellite photography, nuclear strategy, Cold War, science
and technology, US-Soviet relations]

eryday
The eryday experience
concept marked
experience regular,
of the unexceptional,
extreme banal. Yet,
marked is regular, American
relational, unexceptional, assuming a banal. counterpoint Yet, American to ev-
life for decades has been founded on machines (and accompanying log-
ics and affects) that are simultaneously infrastructural (and thus part of a
normalized everyday) and extreme, in the sense of being unprecedentedly

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4, p. 1 107-1 124, ISSN 0003-5491 . 2012 by the Institute for
Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.

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The End of Ends

violent. Instrumental rationality has- in the form of the atomic bomb- pro-
duced 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 em-
blematic 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 politi-
cal, 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
both ever more vital, yet also more inherently fraught.
In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for a
productive shock, an experience or insight that would allow us to rethink
the terms of everyday life? In the discipline of biology, the recent discov-
ery of microbial extremophiles in deep-sea volcanic vents has fundamen-
tally challenged longstanding scientific definitions of life (Helmreich 2008).
Living under conditions of extreme heat and pressure, these methane-
eating beings have redefined the very limits of life on planet Earth and
beyond. What could produce a similar effect in the domain of security?
Opportunities for such a critique are ever present, an endless stream of
moments in fact, yet constantly subsumed by the normalizing effects of
a national security culture committed to a constant state of emergency. A
return to basic questions of how to define profit, loss, and sustainability
is a key concern today in the US and this paper asks what kind of analy-
sis could begin to redefine the limits of a collective security? What kind
of de-familiarization and/or productive shock might allow insight into the
cultural terms of expert judgment today in the US, allowing us to rethink
the logics and practices that have simultaneously produced a global war
on terror, a global financial meltdown, and a planetary climate crisis? How
can Americans- extremophiles of the national sort- assess their own his-
tory 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?
This short paper does not provide an answer to these questions (would
that it could!), but rather seeks to offer a provocation and a meditation on
paths constantly not taken in US national security culture. It asks: how can
we read against the normalizing processes of the security state to assess

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 JOSEPH MASCO

alternative futures, alternative visions rendered invisible by the comple

logistics of military science, economic rationality, and global governanc
To do so is to break from the normalizing force of everyday national sec
rity/capitalism, and interrogate the assumed structures of security and risk
that support a global American military deployment and permanent w
posture. To accomplish this kind of critical maneuver, however, one nee
to be able to recognize the alternative futures rendered void by the speci
configurations of politics and threat empowering military industrial acti
at a given moment. An extreme critique requires the ability to assess th
alternative costs and benefits that remain suspended within the spaces
of an everyday American life constantly rehearsing (via media, politic
culture, and military action) terror as normality. What follows then is both
an examination and a performance of extremity- pushing a critical histo
and theory well beyond the usual scholarly comfort level. It seeks less t
settle and explain than to agitate and provoke.
To engage an extreme point of view on crisis, both exterior and ob-
jective, let's turn to a spectacular new technology that seemed to offer
just such a perspective on US security culture in 1960- that of an exteri
gaze on planet Earth. The first satellite imagery was not only a techno
logical revolution of profound importance to the military (and ultimately th
earth and information sciences), it also constituted a rare moment of ob
jective critique to American Cold War fantasies at their most virulent an
violent. Covert and extremely fragile, the first Corona satellite was secretly
launched into outer space in August of 1 960, offering a new optics on Co
War military technologies and fantasies. Imagine, if you will, a rocket ca
rying not a warhead but a giant panoramic camera (see Figures 1 and 2
slung into a low orbit over Europe, running a long reel of 70mm film, sp
cially designed by Kodak to function in outer space. The satellite makes
series of orbits exposing its film over designated areas, and then eject
fire-proof capsule carrying the film, sending it back into Earth's atmosphere
(see Figure 3). As the capsule descends via a series of parachutes, it emi
a homing signal, allowing a specially equipped plane to detect the signa
and swoop in, capturing the now charred film canister in mid-air via a g
ant hook (see Figure 4). On August 18, 1960 the Corona Project became
the first space based reconnaissance system, providing the CIA with th
first satellite photographs of Soviet military installations (see Figures 5 a
6; as well as Day, Logsdon, and Latell 1998; and Peebles 1997). Coron
provided the most accurate images of Soviet military capabilities to date

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The End of Ends

offering concrete photographi

dence of Soviet missile capab
at a time of near hysterical spe
tion about imminent Soviet attack.

Soon US officials knew via photo-

graphic documentation of commu-
nist military bases that the Soviets
did not have a vast and growing
ICBM superiority capable of over-
whelming US defenses. In fact, the
US had something on the order of
a ten to one advantage in missiles,
and even more in nuclear devices.
At this moment in the Cold

War, outer space provided the

Figure 1: Launch of Corona satellite.
only clear view of nuclear threat-
providing a series of photographs
that dramatically changed how US
officials viewed the immediacy of
nuclear war (Richelson 2006). Over
the next decade, the race to the
moon became the public face of
a covert enterprise to extend and
expand space surveillance. Plans
for manned photographic studios
in space with Hubble telescope-
sized lenses pointed toward Earth,
soon were enhanced by digital
communications that allowed in-
Figure 2: Diagram of Corona panoramic
cameras.
stant data transmission (see Willis
and Bamford 2007). The Corona
cameras evolved quickly, moving from the 40-foot resolution offered
1960 to five-foot resolution by 1967, a revolution in optics that was soo
followed by digital satellite systems capable of three-inch resolution, i
frared imaging, and the near instantaneous transfer of information. The
remote sensing technologies have since revolutionized everything from
geography, to climate sciences, to the now ubiquitous GPS systems and
Google Earth.

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 JOSEPH MASCO

LL
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Figure 3: Diagram of Corona recovery sequence.

The Central Intelligence Agency

(CIA) has long considered the
Corona satellite one of its most im-

portant achievements, a pure suc-

cess story. As Director of the CIA,
Richard Helms held a ceremony in
honor of the Corona Program's re-
tirement in 1 972 (in favor of the next
generation digital satellite system).
He presented a documentary film,
entitled "A Point in Time" to CIA
personnel detailing the crucial his-Figure 4: Catching a Corona film capsule
tory of the top-secret program, itsafter re-entry from space.
technological achievements, and
its central role in Cold War geopolitics. A Corona capsule and an exten-
sive photographic display of Corona satellite imagery was then centrally
installed at CIA Headquarters in Langley to document its success for all
future employees. On display there through the end of the Cold War, com-
ponents of this exhibit can now be seen at the Smithsonian Air and Space
Museum. The extensive Corona photographic archive became available

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The End of Ends

Figure 5: Photographic Path of Corona

Mission over the Soviet Union.

FROM, CIA "JOINT MISSION COVERAGE INDEX,

MISSION 9009" 18 AUGUST 1960

for public use at the US National

Archives in 1995, declassified by
President Bill Clinton via Executive

Order 12951. A central player in

this declassification effort was Vice
President Al Gore, who saw in the
Corona images the opportunity
for new kinds of earth science re-

search, as the satellite imagery sur- Figure 6: First Corona Satellite Image,
veyed not only military machinesMys Shmidta Air Field, USSR.
but also millions of miles of the NATIONAL RECONNAISSANCE OFFICE

earth- including its lakes, oceans,

and glaciers- with precise detail (Cloud 2001). The Corona project con-
tinues to be a productive information system, informing climate science,
archaeology, and a variety of earth sciences. But while the CIA remembers

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 JOSEPH MASCO

Corona as a fantastically successful covert spy system and others today

value its photographic record for non-military scientific research, 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 American assessments of Soviet capabilities were in the
1 950s. It offered a new remote viewing photography but also new insight
into the American national security imaginary. 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 trig-
ger by 1960, as about Soviet weapons. The first Corona images contra-
dicted expert US judgments of Soviet capabilities and desires, providing
a powerful counterweight against arguments for a preemptive US attack
on the Soviet Union. The slightly blurry satellite photographs thus held the
potential for a radical critique of American perceptions of the Soviet Union,
showing that US officials were as much at war with their own apocalyptic
projections in 1 960 as with Soviet plans for territorial expansion.
An anthropology of extremes requires a non-normative reading of cul-
ture and history, an effort to push past consensus logics to interrogate
what alternative visions, projects, and futures are left unexplored at a given
historical moment. The rapidly evolving historical archive provides one op-
portunity for this kind of critique: our understanding of the 20th century
American security state is changing with each newly declassified program
and document, dramatically reshaping what we know about US policy, mil-
itary science, and threat assessments since World War II. The Corona pho-
tographs are a compelling illustration of the power of the evolving national
security archive. As the enormous military state apparatus that constitutes
the core of the American political and economic machine is grudgingly
opened to new kinds of conceptual interrogation, Americans should seize
the opportunity to learn about their own commitments, political processes,
and security imaginaries. Indeed, the national security archive is one place
where we can formally consider how the 20th century "balance of terror"
has been remade in the 21st century as a "war on terror"- following the
affective politics, technological fetishisms, and geopolitical ambitions that
have come to structure US security culture. The declassified Cold War ar-
chive allows us to pursue an extreme reading of US security culture, one
committed to pushing past official policy logics at moments of heightened
emergency to consider how threat, historical contingency, technological
revolution, propaganda, and geopolitical ambition combine in a specific

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The End of Ends

moment of extreme risk. The first Corona images, for example, consti-
tute 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 dis-
solved into mere projection- most recently, the missing weapons of mass
destruction used to justify the US invasion of Iraq in 2003)- did not pro-
duce a radical self-critique in the US.
The Cold War nuclear standoff installed existential threat as a core

structure of everyday American life, making nuclear fear the coordinat-

ing 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 ac-
tual ending. From large scale civil defense drills in which the destruction
of the nation-state became a kind of public theater, to the articulation of
a Cold War militarism that understood all global political events as condi-
tioning everyday American life, the height of the Cold War worked in novel
ways both to enable and deny the possibility of a collective death (Masco
2008). The early history of the Corona Satellite System offers a compel-
ling story about the technological achievement of a total ending, and the
Cold War hysteria of the years 1957-1962 in the US. This is a moment
of maximal danger 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 Cold War can be approached as an ur-moment; foundational
in terms of the technology, theory, politics, and ambitions supporting the
American security state. Interrogating this first period of global nuclear
danger via recently declassified materials allows us to ask: how does one
end the possibility of a total ending? How does a society pursuing war as
a normalized condition of everyday life pause and reflect on its own intel-
lectual and psychosocial processes?
Within modern political theory the means to an end has been embed-
ded within the very concept of rationality, making ends and means syn-
onymous with progress, a perpetual engine of improving the infrastruc-
tures of everyday life as well as the morality of those living within it. Within

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 JOSEPH MASCO

this modernity- glossed here as the application of reason to nature

progress- we have few efforts to theorize the reality or implication of con-
ceptual blockages or blindnesses within the very notion of security. T
assumption that instrumental reason is not only a means to an end but
essential good structures a Euro-American modernity in which supers
tion is set against the possibility of an unending technological progres
(Horkheimer and Adorno 2002:1). Benjamin (1969) offers perhaps t
most powerful critique of "progress" by showing how the promise of t
"new" can be the vehicle of social mystification and entrenchment. His c
to "brush history against the grain" and establish a critical method th
can "seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger" i
ultimately a call to resist the normalization (and naturalization) of violen
in everyday life. But how, and under what terms, can this be accomplish
in a national security state that is premised on the total ending of nucl
war? Having built the war machine as a global system, how can a socie
turn towards an alternative notion of security, one not grounded in t
technological possibility of total nuclear war?
How, indeed, does thinking about an absolute ending work to install
a new set of fantasies and short circuits that prevent reflexive critiqu
How do rational modes of planning work not to eliminate the possibili
of collective death but rather, through self-mystification, to install its pos-
sibility ever deeper into an expert state system? Kant (1986) articulate
one central area where reason is installed as a compensation for a lack
understanding in his notion of the sublime. Sublime experience, in his view,
overwhelms the human sensorium providing that strange mix of pleasu
and terror involved in surpassing one's cognitive limit. For Kant, the experi-
ence of incomprehensibility is then managed by an act of categorizing-
a naming of the event- rather than through understanding. Compensat
rather than comprehension is thus achieved, installing at the very cent
of his notion of reason an irreducible problem about means, ends, and t
ability of human beings in extreme moments to comprehend both. "Terr
has an inherent sublimity, one that has been multiplied across contemp
rary crisis- war, economy, environment- to create a new complex con
figuration of planetary risk that exceeds the power of the national secur
state (Masco 201 0). Nuclear terror, as a permanent state system, howev
is not a momentary experience (as Kant's sublime requires) but is inste
a global infrastructure- one that coordinates American military power
well as its domestic politics. This infrastructure requires constant affect

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The End of Ends

as well as technological support, merging complex social and technologi-

cal processes that become fused in perceptions of global risk.
Put differently, instrumental reason has orchestrated our globalized,
economized, technologized modernity but it has also installed a set of
compensations for those events, desires, and biological facts that dis-
rupt specific calculations of progress/profit. By the mid-20th 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 (see 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 pos-
sibility of war (e.g., 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. Each new nuclear system- bomb-
er, submarine, and missile- was both a technological achievement of the
first order and an accelerating progression towards the end of modernity
in the form of nuclear war.

What these technical experts were attempting to negotiate through

engineering is a basic relationship to death, a perverse project of build-
ing 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 organiz-
ing and containing the thought of death by expanding technological sys-
tems. Freud (1991) saw this contradiction in militarism early on, and in
his remarkable 1915 essay "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death"
he is definitive that it is impossible to comprehend- to actually believe
in- one's own death. Thus, he notes, even as the human organism moves
closer to death with each tick of the clock, the ego pursues a program
of immortality and works to relocate the onrushing reality of death to
exterior locations- to novels, to foreign populations, to distant wars,
to a radical outside. Thus, the thought of an "ending" here literally pro-
duces a new set of means- fantasies, projections, displacements, and
amnesias all mobilized to suture together an idea of an eternal self. In
American national-culture, the Cold War performed this task through a
series of circuits: the communist threat was simultaneously everywhere

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 JOSEPH MASCO

and nowhere, and the immanent threat of nuclear war was mitigated by a
fetishistic focus on technological detail. Cold War planners managed the
threat of nuclear war through constant proliferation- of weapons, deliv-
ery systems, images, theories, and calculations. Through this prolifera-
tion, Cold War planners pursued a program of intellectual compensation
for the confrontation with a new kind of death. They did so by mobilizing
all national resources (changing the very temporal horizon of war from
days, to hours, to minutes in the process), as well as by pursuing proxy
wars and covert actions around the world. In the process, Americans
learned 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 distinc-
tive national-cultural achievement: a notion of security that brings collec-
tive death ever closer in an attempt to fix its location with ever more preci-
sion. By the time of the first Corona photograph, the US nuclear system
was on constant and permanent alert, managing a global war machine on
a minute-by-minute temporal scale- one that imagined a Soviet nuclear
strike coming with less than seven minutes warning (Keeney 201 1 :1 86).
US military systems became both the most direct application of tech-
nical rationality and the location of deep fantasies about national immor-
tality 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
an American national security project that was both technologically Uto-
pian 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 recom-
mended a nationwide commitment to building underground bunkers and
training citizens to think calmly about experiencing nuclear war, its mem-
bers also concluded that a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union left the US
increasingly vulnerable to a devastating "first strike" (Security Resources
Panel of the Science Advisory Committee 1 957). Reinforced by the hys-
teria over Sputnik later in 1957- the first artificial satellite in space- 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. The Gaither Committee leaked to the press their conclusion that
by 1959 the Soviets would have a decisive advantage in ICBMs (see
Roman 1995, Snead 1999) provoking huge nuclear arms expenditures
in the US. The domestic politics informing the "missile gap" narrative

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The End of Ends

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. Thus, a threat projection with multiple political uses
became codified as a kind of truth in US national security policy, leading
to massive increases in defense spending at the end of the Eisenhower
administration and then again at the start of the Kennedy administration.
The nuclear triad- of bombers, ICBMs, and submarines- is built at this
moment, providing multiple redundant systems for waging nuclear war
and giving each branch of the military a nuclear capability.
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 pro-
liferation in US security culture. The raw political value of existential threat
as a motivating narrative became a well-worn domestic strategy in the
US, one linking the "missile gap" of the 1950s to the "window of vulner-
ability" of the 1 970s, to the "strategic defense initiative" of the 1 980s to the
"space based Pearl Harbor" narratives of the 1 990s to the terrorist "WMD"
discourses of the 2000s as illustrations of a nuclear culture. In each of
these cases, we can see how the bomb (as a consolidated form of existen-
tial 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 trans-
forming raw military ambition into a necessary form of "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 Operating 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 glob-
ally, as well as a vast array of front line nuclear technologies, from nuclear
cannons, to backpack bombs, to atomic land mines (see Sagan 1987,
Ball and Toth 1990, and Burr 2004). The first SIOP had two options each
involving a total assault on the communist block- preemptive war and
retaliation. What is crucial to acknowledge today is that SIOP-62 was not
a war plan in any traditional sense, rather it articulated in technologically

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 JOSEPH MASCO

feasible terms a total ending (see Keeney 2002, Burr 2005, Rosenberg a
Moore 1981/1982). The preemptive option could be triggered by "signs
of an imminent Soviet attack. What constituted a definitive "sign" of su
an attack however was left unstated, creating potential slippages betwee
different organizations- the Strategic Air Command, the Navy, and th
White House, for example- which might interpret Soviet actions diffe
ently. American Cold War state and nation-building was also increasingl
devoted to rehearsing a surprise attack on the US and to applying t
worst-case scenario thinking as normative (Masco 2008).
The preemptive option in SIOP-62 committed the full US arsenal in a
simultaneous global nuclear strike, involving 3,200 nuclear weapons de
livered to 1 ,060 targets around the world. In short, it was a plan to elim
nate "communism" from planet Earth within a few hours of nuclear wa
It involved targets not only in the Soviet Union, but also China (not yet
nuclear power), and all of their allied states. In a few hours of nuclear wa
hundreds of cities, and more than 500 million people would be destroye
followed by millions more from radiation injuries. Not included in this c
culation were nuclear counterstrikes or the environmental or climatic con-

sequences of nuclear war, which would have magnified and spread these
effects to all corners of the globe.
The scale of destruction detailed in SIOP-62 is a distinctive moment in

human history and is, in Kant's strict technical sense of the term, sublime.
It is beyond comprehension, which raises a crucial issue about how the
nuclear state resolves such terror/complexity. In national security plan-
ning, 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 (see Kahn 1960, Eden 2004). 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 condi-
tions, appears on paper as a rational program of cause and effect, threat
and preemption, attack and counter attack. This was an apocalyptic vi-
sion presented simply as math. From 1 962 until today, the SIOP nuclear
war plan has been continually revised and rationalized for different global
political contexts but never truly abandoned (McKinzie, Cochran, Norris,
and Arkin 2001). The US maintains the ability to destroy all major popula-
tion centers outside the continental US within a few minutes of nuclear

conflict. It is important to recognize that this technical capacity to deliver

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overwhelming violence to any part of the world in mere minutes has relied
on structures of the imagination as well as on machines, threat projec-
tions, and fantasies, as well as physics and engineering.
US policymakers have experienced many moments of rupture in their
global vision, shocks that might have recalibrated how threat, security,
fears, and technology were organized. After U-2 pilot Gary Powers was
shot down over the Soviet Union in 1 960, covert spy flights over the USSR
were stopped, leaving policy makers in the US with no definitive intelligence
on Soviet military activities. It is difficult today to imagine a period more
fraught, more susceptible to paranoid fantasy and projection, and more
primed for nuclear conflict. US policymakers lacked basic information
about Soviet society and military capabilities, creating a huge information
gap that invited speculation and fantasy, as well as paranoia. In a national
security culture rehearsing surprise attack, and negotiating increasing
confrontations in Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, what
could provoke a de-escalation in this nuclear system, which by the early
1960s was already primed for nuclear war on a minute-to-minute basis?
The Corona system offered a radically new perspective on Cold War reali-
ties but its role has been historically and culturally limited to revealing the
objective facts of Soviet nuclear capabilities, not the American fantasies
that generated the "missile gap" in the first place.
The Corona system was both cutting edge technology and a new form
of expressive culture, an early planetary technology mobilized to com-
bat official panic. The missed opportunity provided by the first Corona
photographs was to evaluate the fantasies and paranoia of an American
military system that had so thoroughly misjudged the scale of the Soviet
technological capabilities that preemptive nuclear war was under consid-
eration. Instead, the "missile gap" narrative was never publicly retracted,
and the satellite photographs that proved this major discourse of the Cold
War to be false were classified top secret until 1995. Classification pro-
tected the technology, but also the self-critique that Corona photographs
might have generated of official US projections. Thus, an opportunity for
a public discussion of how national fears are constituted out of a lack of
information, fantasy, and political demonology was lost. Instead, a new
effort to normalize nuclear crisis was pursued. The US nuclear stockpile
grew to over 30,000 weapons by the end of the 1 960s, and space became
an increasingly militarized domain. The SIOP target list would continue to
grow through the 1980s, eventually including tens of thousands of global

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 JOSEPH MASCO

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. American ideologies of nuclear fear constantly threaten to over-
whelm the material evidence of danger, and have become a core part of a
now multigenerational commitment to militarism for its own sake. By 201 1 ,
the result is that the US spends as much as the rest of the world combined
on military matters but has not yet achieved anything like "security."
The Corona system offers us, in Benjamin's terms, an important oppor-
tunity to "brush history against the grain" as it was both a technological
marvel- a demonstration of the power of instrumental rationality- and a
stark reality check on US national security culture itself, offering a new
optics on the psychopolitics of Cold War (Orr 2006). The first photographic
survey of the Soviet Union from outer space showed that US policymakers
took the world to the brink of nuclear war in response to their fantasies of
Soviet power, not the reality of Soviet capabilities. This well documented
insight might have produced a fundamental rethinking of how threat, secu-
rity, and nuclear power were organized in the US, establishing a caution-
ary tale at the very least. But instead the Corona photographs remained a
highly classified set of facts through the Cold War. This secrecy enabled a
system of nuclear normalization to be reinforced rather than interrogated,
securing the project of Cold War for the next 30 years. In the end, the new
optics offered by Corona (on both Soviet machines and American fanta-
sies) were reduced simply to a push for new space technology- higher
resolution photographs, better real time transition of data, and so on. In
other words, the structure of the security state did not change even when
confronted with evidence of its own fantasy projections and error. The
"success" of Corona ultimately produced an American Cold War project
even more focused on technological innovation and the projection of nu-
clear power rather than one capable of re-thinking its own cultural terms,
expert logics, or institutional practices.
The constant slippages between crisis, expertise, and failure are now
well established in an American political culture. The cultural history of
Cold War nuclear crisis helps us understand why. Derrida (1984), work-
ing with the long running theoretical discourse on the sublimity of death
(which links Kant, Freud, and Benjamin), describes the problem of the
nuclear age as the impossibility of contemplating the truly "remainderless
event" or the "total end of the archive." For him, nuclear war is "fabulously
textual" because until it occurs all you can do is tell stories about it, and

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The End of Ends

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
anti-nuclear 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 dif-
ferentiating comprehension from compensation in the minute-to-minute
assessment of crisis.

This seems to be a fundamental problem in US national security cul-

ture-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 that data with great speed and precision to com-
puters and cell phones, as well as early warning systems, missiles, and
drones. 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 real-
ity of conflict but also of the motivations, fantasies, and desires that sup-
port 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 longstanding and obvi-
ously failed logics. War, for example, is not the exception but the norm in
the US today- which makes peace "extreme." So what would it take for
Americans to consider not only the means to an end- that is, the tactics,
the surges, the preemptions, and surgical strikes- but also to reevaluate
war itself? What would it take to consider an actual end to such ends?

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