The Kitchen Debates and Ampex Color Tape: Technology and Cold War Order

• In Event: Scholar to Scholar II
  In Paper Session: The Kitchen Debate 1959-2009: Stability and Change in the Cold War

Abstract

In the first half of the 1950s the U.S. government undertook a set of major nuclear tests in the so-called Pacific Proving Ground. Each test was closely monitored through a network of video cameras. Subsequently, the tests were packaged in Hollywood-style films and widely distributed to movie-going audiences throughout the world. They argued not only for American technological superiority, but for the power of technology to bring order to the world of nations. Indeed, it was the filming of nuclear tests itself that Eisenhower-era propaganda films foregrounded—the capacity to monitor, via film, the nuclear tests was made to testify to U.S. abilities control nuclear technologies as an apparatus of world order. This paper will read Kitchen Debates within the context of the promise of a "technological order" in an unstable Cold War world. I argue that the exigence of the debates was not primarily the economy (e.g. labor and wealth), but America's investment in technology as an apparatus of world order, and that this exigence was manifested within the debates in the discourse about televisuality.

Author

• Ned O'Gorman, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign