Space Station Los Angeles: Aerospace Capital of the Cold War, 1945-1992
The dream of peaceful space exploration opened-up by missile technology was visualized at Disneyland (1954-) and in countless science fiction movies. But its dystopian side was laid bare in the science fiction novels of Los Angeles authors Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein in the 1950s. The core function of aerospace was to target the greatest cities of human civilization. Nuclear annihilation, possibly triggering a mass-extinction event in a global "nuclear winter," was a very real possibility from the 1950s through the 1980s. The US firebombing and nuclear bombing of civilian Japan in 1944-45 had established the will and the supporting ideologies that justified mass civilian killing. Los Angeles made a major contribution to the commission of those war crimes by covering them up with Hollywood propaganda, as documented in the companion essay, Target Tokyo.
Contemplation of "Megadeath," --the term coined by RAND Corporation nuclear warfare planner, Herman Kahn--became commonplace in Los Angeles, as thousands of technicians, engineers, advanced scientists, developed more and more deadly nuclear weapons delivery vehicles, the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) that could accurately place a 20-megaton hydrogen bomb over Moscow or Leningrad, killing millions in an instant.
The social geography of 1950s Los Angeles anchored the institutions of suburban white racism, of populist anti-communism, militarism, and nuclear warfare. This was Richard Nixon's constituency as he rose from congressman to senator to Vice president from this very soil. He represented the far-right wing of the Republican Party, advancing the most hawkish foreign policy of his party in the confrontation with China and the Soviet Union. This essay maps the reinvigoration of LA's "aeronautics" industry as "aerospace" and the intersection of that inscription with white-racialized suburban space in the origins of a militaristic New Right.
Southern California from the 1950s through the 1970s became even more segregated than it had been in the 1930s or 1940s, and held those social shapes as the New Right took national power in the Image of Cold War Los Angeles under Nixon and Reagan. But this phase of Los Angeles development reached a turning pointa gain as the United States “won” the Cold War during the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the next sector to decline was the arsenal of that war. “From 1988 to 1993, California lost 140,000 aerospace jobs, at a time when the state was growing so rapidly that it needed to create 200,000 new jobs a year to stay even.” Most of those jobs were in Southern California.[37] Members of the U.S. Congress, eager to put those funds elsewhere (beginning with their own districts), began to point out that the U.S. maintained far more nuclear-tipped missiles than were conceivably necessary.[38] In 1995 Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta to become Lockheed Martin, and moved its headquarters to Bethesda, Maryland. Northrup merged with Grumman in 1994 but remained headquartered in Century City until 2010.
Los Angeles remains a major player in aerospace, however. A great deal of the expertise and industrial capacity remains rooted in the region, supporting such post-Cold War enterprise as Space X and , thanks to the SeaLaunch Corporation, the Port of Los Angeles is, in 2013, the only seaport in the world that exports to space.
NOTES
[1] Piszkiewicz (1998): 82, 102, 106, 177-182.
[2] Newfield, (1995); Piszkiewicz, (1998): 227-238.
[3] Operation Overcast was later renamed Operation Paperclip. Simpson (1988).
[4] Life Magazine, 18 November 1957; Time Magazine, 17 February 1958.
[5] “Man Will Conquer Space Soon,” Collier’s magazine, 22 March, 18, 25 October 1953. Contributors included Wernher von Braun, Heinz Haber, Joseph Kaplan, Willy Ley, Oscar Schachter, and Fred L. Whipple. Von Braun’s career chronology is documented in Stuhlinger and Ordway (1994): 358-9.
[6] Piszkiewicz (1998): 43-54, 71-91; Stuhlinger and Ordway (1994): 115-117.
[7] The JPL was a new incarnation of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Cal Tech, known until then as GALCIT. Lord (2005): 60-93.
[8] Lord (2005): 68.
[9] Lord (2005): 93-97.
[10] Dower (1987).
[11] Quoted in Erie (2004): 81.
[12] Morrison (1991): ***
[13] Richard West, “Diversification Key Policy at North American Aviation,” Los Angeles Times, 27 April 1961, p. B1.
[14] Simonson (1964): 305.
[15] Lonnquist (1996): 2.
[16] Lonnquist (1996): 44.
[17] Lonnquist (1996): 113.
[18] “That's the reason why I built the Hughes operation; there was an opening for a company who would engage in this new kind of technology dominated by electronics and systems” Oral History, “Dr. Simon Ramo interviewed by Martin Collins, 27 June 1988, Los Angeles.” National Aeronautics and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
[19] “Howard Hughes Near Death After Plane Hits Four Houses,” Los Angeles Times, 8 July 1946, p. 1.
[20] “Hughes and Brewster Exchange Charges,” Los Angeles Times, 7 August 1947, p. 1.
[21] Notebook, item 13.
[22] Ramo (1988): 36, 44.
[23] Richard West, “60 Was Lockheed's Worst Year, but Future Is Bright” Los Angeles Times, 26 April 1961, B1.
[24] Richard West, “Convair Officials Optimistic Despite Financial Setbacks,” Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1961, B1.
[25] Paul Beck, “Douglas Aircraft Co. Pinning Hopes on Space-Age Plans,” Los Angeles Times, 25 April 1961, B1.
[26] Paul Beck, “Douglas Aircraft Co. Pinning Hopes on Space-Age Plans,” Los Angeles Times, 25 April 1961, B1.
[27] Yuko Notebook, p. 58
[28] Yuko Notebook, p. 82.
[29] Ramo (1988): 58, 37.
[30] Ramo (1988): 61.
[31] Ramo (1988): 58-77.
[32] Ramo, Business of Science, p. 36.
[33] Lonnquist (1996): 131-38. Quotations at 137-8.
[34] Ramo, Oral History, part 2.
[35] Ramo, Oral History, part 2.
[36] This paragraph is based on Schwartz, ed, (1998).
[37] Cannon (1999: 8-9).
[38] Keith Schneider, “A Fifth of Nuclear Arms Spending Deemed Wasteful or Unneded,” Los Angeles Times 20 May 1991, p. A1.
This page has paths:
- Air , Space, and Cinematic Power: Los Angeles the Military-Industrial Capital of the 20th Century Phil Ethington
- Narrative Essays Phil Ethington
- Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Phil Ethington
- Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles and Its Places in Global History, From the Pleistocene to the Present Phil Ethington
