Increasingly the tripartite ‘nuclear club’ faced calls to halt or limit their continuing experimentation, while other nations proceeded to proliferate nuclear technologies for their own imminent deterrent capacity (France, China, Israel, India). Kramer’s protracted negotiations over military cooperation occurred during a period of intense international debates and public protest concerning the global effects of fallout, especially the biological uptake of radionuclides from ongoing atmospheric testing (USA, USSR, UK). The primary concern of the Navy and the motion picture liaison branch at the Pentagon was the film’s philosophical position in relation to nuclear weapons and US deterrence policy. Kramer had by then completed principal photography by enlisting the aid of the Australian Navy, converting the façade of a conventional submarine (HMAS Andrew) to mimic the new nuclear craft’s conning tower.
Begrudgingly, and only after the intervention and direction of Navy Chief of Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, official cooperation and a nuclear submarine was offered, though it was too little and too late. Undeterred, and emboldened by his earlier successful stoush with the Navy during The Caine Mutiny (USA 1954), Kramer pitched his project to Navy heads in Washington. However, in the pre-production planning Kramer was effectively given the runaround, and ultimately an official refusal to cooperate, by various senior Naval liaison officers.
Lockwood to act as technical advisor and, later, as go-between in discussions with the Pentagon and his independent production company concerning official cooperation to access a nuclear submarine for on location filming. Upon securing the rights to the novel Kramer enlisted retired Vice-Admiral Charles A. īased on Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, Stanley Kramer’s film adaptation of On the Beach drew the attention of the Eisenhower administration in ways that the published book – which was also widely serialised in international newspapers – mostly avoided.
Military and film historians such as Laurence Suid (1996, 2002) have long demonstrated the relationship between the US Department of Defense (DoD) in forging ‘official cooperation’ with Hollywood studios, where strict guidelines of rendering military assistance to any production were evaluated on whether the project benefitted the Pentagon’s perception of maintaining the reputation of the armed services and acting in the national interest. government’s recalcitrance over releasing information directly to the public about the twenty-first century’s most important intelligence search and military raid, and its decision instead to grant the film’s producers exclusive and unprecedented access to classified information about the operation, means that for the time being – for bad or good – Hollywood has become the public’s ‘account of record’ for Operation Neptune Spear In this extraordinary case, a Hollywood motion picture, with apparent White House, CIA, and Pentagon blessing and despite its historical inaccuracies, is now the closest thing to the official story behind the pursuit of bin Laden.
#Cobalt bomb vs hydrogen bomb archive
As the National Security Archive dossier on declassified CIA, US Department of Defense (DoD) and White House documents on the Osama bin Laden execution suggests: The recent release of Zero Dark Thirty (USA 2013) has once again drawn attention to the role of American government agencies in acting to shape the historical record, and potentially public opinion, to favour motion picture accounts vis-à-vis ‘real events’. While many studies have been produced concerning the convergence of politics, history and the influence of government agencies in producing soft power during the ‘American century’, little has been done to uncover direct influence by US Administrations on impacting individual films. It is less concerned with the dramatic, aesthetic, narrative and textual readings of Stanley Kramer’s film On the Beach (USA 1959) than with considering its geopolitical, cultural and scientific contexts. This article draws from primary sources at the Eisenhower Presidential Library, the Department of Defense Film Liaison Branch archive at Georgetown University Special Collections, the Stanley Kramer deposit at UCLA Arts Special Collections and the declassified files at George Washington University’s online National Security Archive.
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