Social Studies of Science
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Imaging the World in a Barrel: CORONA and the Clandestine
Convergence of the Earth Sciences
John Cloud
Social Studies of Science 2001; 31; 231
DOI: 10.1177/0306312701031002005
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http://sss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/2/231
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Special Issue: Science in the Cold War
ABSTRACT The CORONA satellite reconnaissance programme (1958–72), the first
American enterprise for secret photography from space, was predicated on
fundamental progress within the strategic earth sciences necessary to resolve the
Figure of the Earth with sufficient fidelity to wage or prevent nuclear war. CORONA
in turn rapidly evolved from an interim reconnaissance system to a sophisticated
series of earth remote-sensing imagery and data systems, which initiated the modern
era of global satellite remote sensing. These innovative scientific applications were
the results of a productive convergence in the post-war strategic earth sciences, the
details and mechanisms of which were diffused and concealed by elaborate security
protocols. With CORONA’s declassification, and prospects for further declassification
of Cold War-era archives, a window is opened into the clandestine reconfiguration of
the strategic earth sciences and their complex integration with military and
intelligence research and applications during the Cold War.
Keywords Cold War, geodesy, Godlewska, photogrammetry, reconnaissance
satellites, World Geodetic System
Imaging the World in a Barrel:
CORONA and the Clandestine Convergence of
the Earth Sciences
John Cloud
On 12 September 1962, on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis and some
15 years into the Cold War, President Kennedy gave a speech on the
acceleration of the US space programme. One passage is particularly
evocative:
We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade
and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are
hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our
energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to
accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one that we intend to win,
and the others too. (Kennedy, 1962: emphasis added)
The other things to which the President repeatedly referred may now be
considered a tacit acknowledgment that, less than five years after the
launch of Sputnik I, the United States had created an extraordinary series
of reconnaissance satellites. By 1962, the first of these, called ‘CORONA’,1
had already moved from experimental to operational status.
Social Studies of Science 31/2(April 2001) 231–251
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[0306-3127(200104)31:2;231–251;019097]
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The release in 1995 of previously deeply classified data on the
CORONA programme makes it clear that the coupling of open and secret
science, as in the Apollo programme and CORONA, was not unusual.
Such a coupling – now referred to as ‘Dual Use’ policy – extends throughout the USA’s post-war history. The roots of such contemporary programmes as ‘Medea’, which provides selected US scientists access to
classified space-borne intelligence data for tackling global environmental
problems (Richelson, 1998), may be found in the secret relationships
between civilian scientists and universities and nominally civilian federal
agencies, on the one hand, and the Department of Defense (DOD) and
the Intelligence Community, on the other. Forged in the very earliest days
of the Cold War, these relationships have survived and evolved to the
present day.
Historians of American science and technology have studied how
World War II and the Cold War mobilized and transformed scientific
research organizations and their priorities.2 The impact of Cold War
priorities on the shaping and reordering of the postwar earth sciences
has been a relatively recent subject of investigation (Doel, 1997; Oreskes,
1999). Preliminary analysis of declassified records from the nascent Directorate of Science and Technology of the Central Intelligence Agency
indicates that the complex exchanges between the Intelligence Community
and scientists and their institutions triggered changes in both directions
(Doel & Needell, 1997).3 The case of CORONA and its applications links
top-secret government programmes to federal and university research
laboratories, high-production map factories, professional and trade journals, and a myriad of scientists in many disciplines and institutions. In
contrast to the relatively more specialized products developed in some
Cold War laboratories that have already been analysed, the applications of
CORONA photography ranged from ICBM targeting to classified battle
plans to pioneering earth science datasets to mundane and ubiquitous
hiking maps.
The CORONA story is a missing chapter from the history of Cold War
science and technology: it is important for three reasons. First, its very
existence and successful application were predicated on significant earlier
breakthroughs in the elaboration of the Figure of the Earth, the model of
planetary dimensions and positions, and the actualization of these advances in satellite operations in space. These developments required a
‘convergence’ (see Godlewska, 1989) of many earth scientists and their
disciplines to solve problems created by the possibilities of nuclear war.
Second, the CORONA satellite system evolved, in less than a decade, from
an interim reconnaissance satellite system, designed to substitute for
increasingly risky aerial reconnaissance camera systems, into a sophisticated earth-imaging complex whose direct and indirect successors now
constitute the major sources for earthly remote sensing and all its applications. This paper examines how and why CORONA imagery eventually
shifted to a myriad of novel applications, especially to national and global
mapping and experimental global earth science datasets. Third, the paper
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Science in the Cold War: Cloud: CORONA & Convergence of Earth Sciences
233
highlights the extent to which new clandestine constituencies have completely eroded the nominal separations between the ‘civilian’ and ‘classified’ realms of American government and science. In discussing the
clandestine arena of interaction between nominally civilian and classified
institutions, I propose a ‘Shuttered Box’ model as a productive tool for
analysing this and other fields of Cold War knowledge production. With the
programme’s declassification over two decades after the last CORONA
mission, we can see more clearly the transformation of American science
and technology that was hidden during the Cold War.
The Clandestine Foundations of Cold War Geography
Three great strands were interwoven to create the enterprise of CORONA:
(1) the wartime mobilization of the American geographic and geodetic
intellectual infrastructure, which only partially demobilized after the end of
the war; (2) the massive wartime expansion in the scope and activities of
federal cartographic and intelligence agencies, both nominally military and
civilian, which elided quickly into post-war mapping and intelligence of the
entire globe at scales and with turn-around times undreamed of before the
war; and (3) the secret invention of new reconnaissance technologies
directed to the overarching goal of close observation of activities around
the world, driven by concerns about the potential for nuclear war.
These developments involved the successful collaboration of certain
institutions of the strategic earth sciences, resulting in a greatly improved
model of the Figure of the Earth, one sufficiently advanced that it allowed
the determination of positions and distances accurately enough to both
wage and preclude nuclear war. The scope of the enterprise and its
exacting nuclear constraints triggered a convergence of the disciplines of
the earth sciences with far-reaching effects.4 Those members of the disciplines participating in this new convergence were sufficiently invigorated
and transfused by the experience (and the massive research funding that
was critical to their success) that a cascade of breakthrough discoveries and
productive theories in the earth sciences has ensued.
These novel academic research enterprises differed markedly from
their pre-war counterparts in objectives, funding sources and mechanisms,
and mixing of scientific disciplines. Civilian science institutions became
closely tied to the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Intelligence
Community (IC). This gave rise to extensive security regulations on
academic research and publication, as it was now based on vast quantities
of top-secret intelligence data, stripped of its source identification.
Perhaps the single most important strategic earth sciences research
laboratory for the CORONA story was the research enterprise in the
geodetic and allied sciences at Ohio State University, which began with the
foundation of the Mapping and Charting Research Laboratory (MCRL) in
1946. From the very beginning, the MCRL aimed to overcome the
technological and computational impediments to rapid progress in the
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234
Social Studies of Science 31/2
critical disciplines of cartography, geodesy (the science of the Earth’s size
and shape, and the specific locations of precise points on the planet’s
surface) and photogrammetry (the science of dimensions and spatial
relationships in images). This work was almost entirely funded by various
nascent research centres of the post-war Department of Defense (DOD),
and was conducted by classified contracts and secret reports (Cloud,
2000b).
Fundamental to the objectives of the research at Ohio State University
and other institutions was the recognition that, for the strategic earth
sciences, the Cold War began before World War II ended. In the last two
years of the war in Europe, both the Allied powers and the Soviet Union
and its allies raced to appropriate the science and technologies of the
collapsing Third Reich (Judt & Ciesla, 1996). The major Allied enterprise
originated as ‘Operation Overcast’, later renamed ‘Project Paperclip’
(Lasby, 1971). Several dozen American cartographers, geodesists and
photogrammetrists assembled as the Hough Team, headed by Major Floyd
Hough (then in the Office of the Chief of Engineers of the Army, and later
chief geodesist of the Army Map Service). The Hough Team played a major
rôle in systematically extracting geographic and cartographic technologies
captured in Germany. Their original objectives were to capture Axis map
series for the Pacific theatre of war, and German photogrammetric equipment. They found crates of these items, but they also discovered a treasure
trove of geodetic materials. These included vast archives of German and
Russian geodetic surveys made on the eastern front, and even German and
Russian geodetic survey data across the middle of Eurasia for planning the
route of the Trans-Siberian Railroad.5 The Hough materials were successfully recovered and shipped to Washington. There the horde was catalogued, analysed, and distributed to relevant cartographic and geodetic
institutions, including military cartographic agencies like the Army Map
Service, the Army Air Force Aeronautical Charting Center, the Naval
Hydrographic Office, and also civilian institutions.6 It was taken as a given
that the Soviet Union had captured equipment and personnel comparable
to those discovered by the Hough Team, and that Soviet scientists would
use them similarly.
As a result, the globally-scaled competition between the superpowers
that was the Cold War extended, from the beginning, to the technologies,
institutions and techniques of the strategic earth sciences. Also from the
beginning, the nominal divisions between civilian and military agencies
were breached. An assemblage of wartime civilian, military and intelligence
agencies and organizations reorganized to address new Cold War conditions and tasks.
In a complementary manner, the US technical infrastructure for
mapping and intelligence significantly expanded to meet the demands of
World War II and the Cold War. Major mapping facilities were built for the
Army Air Force near St Louis, Missouri, the Army Map Service at
Bethesda, Maryland, and the Naval Hydrographic Office near the Navy
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Science in the Cold War: Cloud: CORONA & Convergence of Earth Sciences
235
Yards in Washington, DC. These facilities only partially demobilized afterwards, because the world had changed so much during and after the war
that new map series were urgently needed. Rapid and sudden entry into
the Korean War, the first ‘hot’ conflict of the Cold War, soon drove map
production far beyond production during earlier conflicts. By 1954, total
employment at the Air Force St Louis Aeronautical Chart Plant was over
3000, double the peak World War II employment (Huff, 1993). Scientific
and technical imperatives shifted with Cold War geo-politics and advancing
capabilities of weapons systems, in general stretching from regional-scale
accuracies associated with national map bases, to intercontinental accuracies, made possible by progress towards a global map base – and made
necessary first by the arrival of strategic long-range bombers, and later by
Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs).
The global scale of the previous war had made clear the need for global
datums (essentially, national-scaled map bases tied to a reference ellipsoid
model of the Earth). Wernher von Braun had noted that aiming the V-2
rocket at London had disclosed that the national datums of Great Britain
and France were hundreds of metres out of alignment, even across the
narrow English Channel (von Braun, 1955). Post-war geodetic re-surveys
of the island chains used for atomic bomb tests in the Pacific revealed their
locations to be tens of miles distant from their previously described
locations. Even the extant continental datums were mismatched across
ocean basins by no less than hundreds of metres, which was intolerable in
the coming era of ICBMs.7
New generations of reconnaissance photography were also required, at
progressively higher resolutions, over ever more remote and more dangerous terrain. The biggest challenges were the great oceans and their islands,
and the vast landmass of Eurasia, the great majority of which was now
‘denied territory’, completely off-limits to every traditional photogrammetric and cartographic technique based on the use of ground control.
Basic survival in a world of rival nuclear powers required fundamental
knowledge of the other side of the planet, with sufficient spatial resolution
and positional accuracy to spot a rival ICBM, launch an ICBM of one’s
own, or conclude with assurance that an enemy ICBM did not exist.
In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower overtly acknowledged the
necessity for such surveillance technologies in his ‘Open Skies’ proposal,
which advocated mutual strategic reconnaissance by the US and the Soviet
Union. Eisenhower proposed ‘Open Skies’ explicitly as a deterrent to hasty
and uninformed actions, which would constrain the need for a vast and
punishingly expensive arms race (Hall, 1995, 1996). But Soviet Premier
Krushchev emphatically rejected the concept of ‘Open Skies’, as did a
significant element within the leadership of the American military. So, after
a few more years of agitation, the concept entirely disappeared until the
post-Cold War era.
Meanwhile, both superpowers pursued an advanced version of ‘Open
Skies’, not as a public enterprise, but as deeply secret programmes. Behind
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the fact that the CORONA reconnaissance system, and its Soviet counterpart, the ZENIT reconnaissance satellite system, both ‘worked’ to the
exacting standards of their users, there lies an even more significant
achievement. On the American side, the clandestine enterprise achieved
every one of the great challenges it faced in the new Cold War era.
The programme successfully captured and geo-referenced high-resolution
imagery for the entire globe. This was the long-sought realization of
analytical photogrammetry, which has now been renamed ‘geographic
information systems’ (GIS). Space-based reconnaissance was perfected,
and renamed ‘global remote sensing’. The programme mapped the world
and the nation, using the most secret intelligence assets in American
history.
The CORONA Reconnaissance Satellite System
All of these technologies and institutional orderings converged in pursuit
of the top-secret programme that became known as ‘CORONA’.
CORONA, declassified in 1995, was the first American satellite reconnaissance system. It was soon complemented by successor programmes, including SAMOS, GAMBIT and HEXAGON, but these remain classified
at the time of this writing.8 The evolution of the CORONA camera systems
is an extraordinary case study in Cold War science and technology. In less
than a decade, a reconnaissance system designed as a quick replacement
for vulnerable aerial camera systems, and directed to the traditional uses of
aerial reconnaissance, evolved into a sophisticated system for earth science
imagery and data acquisition, analysis and management. These systems
developed within an elaborate set of security protocols that thoroughly
disguised the extent and nature of the technological transformations
underway.9
CORONA’s immediate origin dates to 1956, when the US Air Force
contracted a classified but publicly acknowledged reconnaissance system
called ‘WS-117L’. The system included a satellite reconnaissance camera
coupled to an analytical plotter system and a sophisticated imagery storage
and recovery archive. In 1958, the Air Force abruptly cancelled WS-117L
entirely. Yet the programme was soon reconstituted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as a top secret codeword project – the codeword
being ‘CORONA’ (by American intelligence convention, top secret codewords are obligatorily capitalized). This clandestine project was run by the
same secretive directorate of the CIA that had earlier pioneered highaltitude reconnaissance balloons (the GENETRIX programme) and
high-altitude aerial photography, via the famous U-2 (the AQUATONE
programme), and later produced the celebrated SR-71 Blackbird (the
OXCART programme).10
GENETRIX, AQUATONE, CORONA and later OXCART were
deeply ‘black’ projects. They were small, closely controlled programmes
funded directly by unaccountable monies from the Directorate of Central
Intelligence (DCI) of the CIA, and they were contracted non-competitively
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Science in the Cold War: Cloud: CORONA & Convergence of Earth Sciences
237
through a major contractor – the Lockheed Corporation, in all three cases.
In all cases as well, the Eastman Kodak Company devised the camera
films. Specifications of the optics of the cameras were contracted through
the Itek Corporation, founded out of the former Boston University Optical
Research Laboratory by Richard Leghorn, who had been the author of
Eisenhower’s ‘Open Skies’ proposal.
Furthermore, all three pioneer platform sensor systems were included
in a new top-secret compartmentalized security system. ‘TALENT’
covered aerial reconnaissance systems, and was later complemented by
‘KEYHOLE’ for space-based systems. In 1961, when the National
Reconnaissance Office (NRO) was organized by the CIA and the US Air
Force to consolidate US reconnaissance activities, TALENT–KEYHOLE
protocols were merged into a single unified security and control system,
which survives to the present day. The deep secrecy imposed by TALENT–
KEYHOLE security protocols impacted on individuals and institutions.
TALENT–KEYHOLE isolated the holders of its clearances from the rest
of American society, but bound them to each other. By the middle 1960s,
the NRO acknowledged that the personnel in the strategic geographic
sciences were members of a ‘codeword mapping community’ (NRO,
1966). The community converged through consolidation of disparate
military and intelligence efforts into common facilities, and also by upgrading the mapping and intelligence institutions to a more professional
orientation (Huff, 1993). This codeword community was (and is) the
institutional embodiment of the convergence upon which CORONA was
built.
All CORONA missions were launched from Vandenberg Air Force
Base in California, where one of the early CORONA Thor launch pads is
now included as part of the Vandenberg National Historic Site. The Air
Force Discoverer satellite programme was organized as the ‘cover’ for the
actual CORONA payloads. The satellites were placed into polar orbit,
circling the earth about every 90 minutes, for one to 19 days on average.
CORONA was a ‘film-return’ system: exposed film was wound into a
special re-entry capsule and returned to the Earth for processing. Figure 1
shows the development of the CORONA KH series cameras, from the
earliest system, the KH-1 in 1960, to the ‘advanced’ KH-4 system series at
its zenith from the period 1965–72. Mechanically, the cameras worked
similarly throughout the CORONA programme. Film for the entire mission was stored in a canister, fed past the camera as the spacecraft passed
over the target, and then taken up into a cassette inside the recovery
vehicle, or ‘bucket’. Re-entry involved rockets (and later cold-gas jets) to
spin the re-entry capsule into the atmosphere, where its ablative heatshield protected the bucket of film from the heat of friction. Then a series
of drogues and increasingly larger parachutes opened to slow the descent.
The large main parachute was caught by a C-119 ‘flying boxcar’, a large
cargo plane, later replaced by the larger C-130. The planes were flown by a
special Air Force unit, the 6594th Test Group, based at Hickam Air Force
Base in Honolulu.
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FIGURE 1
The CORONA Camera Systems
Source: from the National Reconnaissance Office Declassified Records of the CORONA,
ARGON and LANYARD Programs.
The evolution of CORONA core technologies over its 12-year history
reflected a relentless drive for ever-higher resolution imagery, complemented by, and to some extent confounded by, another initiative stressing
more complex and sophisticated end-use applications of the reconnaissance photography – including pioneering earth sciences applications
having little to do with reconnaissance at all. This shift can be seen in the
evolving series of CORONA cameras.
CORONA’s most important initial objective was high-resolution
strategic photography using panoramic cameras. The earliest CORONA
camera system, the KH-1, used a single vertical panoramic camera.
Cameras KH-2 and KH-3 represented incremental improvements in camera design. In the subsequent ‘advanced’ KH-4 camera systems, the
satellite deployed pairs of tilted, longer focal length, higher-resolution
cameras rotated in synchronization. The tilted panoramic cameras provided higher acuity and resolution, and also allowed three-dimensional
depth to be extracted from the photograph stereo pairs.
A second experimental camera system, the KH-6 or LANYARD
camera system, was flown only once successfully, in 1963. KH-6 was a
specially adapted version of the much higher resolution camera system of
CORONA’s successor, the still-classified SAMOS system (Peebles, 1997:
134). Apart from its much longer focal-length lens, the major features of
LANYARD were its sophisticated image motion compensation systems
(which worked incorrectly in the one KH-6 mission), and the camera’s
ability to be pointed off-nadir perpendicular to the satellite’s line of flight –
a feature that greatly advanced the system’s intelligence-gathering capabilities, because the camera did not have to be directly overhead above a
critical target in order to acquire useful imagery.
KH-5, or ARGON, which flew from 1961 to 1964, was a third camera
designed for geodetic and mapping applications, trading lower feature
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Science in the Cold War: Cloud: CORONA & Convergence of Earth Sciences
239
resolution for greater spatial extent and higher fidelity of image calibration.
Its institutional history was different from other CORONA systems. Much
as CORONA began as an Air Force project secretly implemented by the
CIA, ARGON originated as an Army mapping camera programme, codenamed ‘SALAAM’, that was later incorporated into CORONA. The early
CORONA years saw considerable competition between the need for
strategic reconnaissance, using the panoramic cameras, and geodetic and
cartographic applications, using the ARGON camera, because the different cameras flew on separate missions. A given early CORONA mission
could not acquire both high-resolution reconnaissance photography and
geodetically-calibrated mapping photography.
This competition ended with the development of the fourth and most
advanced camera systems, KH-4A and KH-4B. These systems used the
Dual Integrated Stellar Index Camera, or DISIC, championed by Dr
Eugene Fubini, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (1963–65).11 The DISIC, used simultaneously with the advanced KH4 family of reconnaissance cameras, initiated the modern era of global
earth science remote sensing. DISIC matched a moderate resolution
geodetically-calibrated camera that photographed an indexing ‘footprint’
simultaneously with the higher-resolution panoramic cameras, coupled to
other simultaneous photographs by two star-field cameras. By resolving the
relationships among all the members of the set of simultaneous photographs, analysts could reliably determine the position and attitude of the
spacecraft, and then from that the positions of features in the highresolution photographs with accuracies necessary to prosecute nuclear
war.
Thus CORONA in application was a major venue for the complex
analogue-to-digital transformation in mapping and managing georeferenced data. Now all-but-forgotten technologies like the ElectroOptical Rectifier were initially critical to the demanding tasks of warping
panoramic photography to conform to standard mapping systems (Levine,
1961; Trachsel, 1967). These were soon displaced by the analytical solutions provided by more and larger computers. CORONA’s operators used
increasingly sophisticated software employing mathematical models linked
to satellite orbital ephemeris data so as to correlate the spacecraft’s position
and attitude with the index photographs, and then to correlate the highresolution panoramic photography with the index photographs. This evolving system, named ‘UPDRAMS’ (the Universal Photogrammetric Data
Reduction and Mapping System), eventually provided almost automatic
geo-referencing of the photographs and their image features, which triggered the revolution in mapping applications described in the next
section.
The earliest cartographic applications of CORONA supported traditional American strategic intelligence objectives. In particular, they served
the needs of Air Force pilots assigned to fly into ‘harm’s way’ on reconnaissance and bombing missions in or near Eurasia. A mapping enterprise that would subsequently map the world began by identifying the geoDownloaded from http://sss.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 10, 2008
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positions of strategic industrial and military sites to be entered in the
Bombing Encyclopedia.
Over time, precise geo-positioning became critical. In an ambitious
project lying beyond the scope of the programme as originally conceived,
CORONA was applied to extend the US global mapping system over the
vast interior of Eurasia. The captured Nazi geodetic archives contained in
the Hough materials proved invaluable in this effort. US intelligence had
acquired survey data of the precise positions of geodetic monuments in
interior Eurasia. The monuments were identified on CORONA photographs, which meant that specific features on reconnaissance photographs
could be geo-positioned with geodetic accuracy. Unparalleled in the history of geodesy, these positionings were acquired without setting foot on
the Eurasian landmass (Daugherty, 1995: 210).
Finally, photography from CORONA and its successor sensor systems
was integrated with data from multiple series of geodetic satellites, such as
ANNA and LAGEOS, to produce the enormous datasets and models used
to tie continental-scaled datums across ocean basins, resolve the undulations of sea-level, and combine all these improvements into the world’s first
mass-centred global datum, the Department of Defense’s continually
evolving World Geodetic System (WGS). The WGS stands as one of the
most important intellectual achievements of the Cold War.
Earth Science through a KEYHOLE
The Cold War transformation of the American geographic sciences can be
reconstructed in terms of a more general model of Cold War knowledge
production that Keith Clarke and I have referred to as the ‘Shuttered Box’
(Cloud & Clarke, 1999; Clarke & Cloud, 2000). The Shuttered Box traces
its lineage from the metaphor of the ‘black box’, which originally referred
to a technology or machinery that was sealed or otherwise inaccessible,
such that its contents and workings could not be seen. The ‘black box’ later
developed many more and subtle nuances, as used by Rosenberg (1982)
and by Latour (1987), and as modified by MacKenzie (1990: 26). In
almost all applications of the metaphor, however, the relations between the
inside of the box and its outside are essentially binary: the contents of the
box are either known completely or not at all. In our adaptation, the box is
equipped with shutters and represents an arena of exchange between
classified and unclassified institutions and their domains. The shutters
allow successful passage of people, money, ideas, technologies and data
back and forth between the disparate domains, but without ever providing
direct sight or communication between the realms. The Shuttered Box
therefore preserves the security of the classified realm. At the same time it
transforms or disguises the identities of the elements passing through it.
By the early 1970s, the cartographic innovator Donald L. Light, who
worked first with the US Army Map Service and later with the US
Geological Survey and the Eastman Kodak Company, described new
topographic information systems based on co-registered geodeticallyDownloaded from http://sss.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 10, 2008
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Science in the Cold War: Cloud: CORONA & Convergence of Earth Sciences
241
rectified image pixels derived from photography – without ever specifying
the sources of the photography, of course (Light, 1971). Referring to the
nickname given to a cylindrical mass-storage device designed for the US
Army Map Service, Light predicted there would soon be co-registered data
sets covering the planet, creating ‘The Image of the World in a Barrel’. The
access to that world in the barrel was through a keyhole – specifically, the
TALENT–KEYHOLE security protocols that governed CORONA.
CORONA also transformed nominally ‘civilian’ federal agencies as
they acquired top-secret labs and other facilities necessary to utilize
TALENT–KEYHOLE data. Immediately after the end of the CORONA
programme, in 1973, the Office of Management and the Budget (OMB)
Federal Mapping Task Force released a major report advocating sweeping
changes in the entire federal cartographic infrastructure, including the
extension of classified systems to civilian applications.12 Their major conclusion (OMB, 1973: 7–11, emphasis added) explained that:
The lack of civilian MC&G [mapping, charting, and geodesy] involvement has
been accompanied by the development of expensive systems for civilian use that
cannot compete in any meaningful way with DOD-developed techniques.
Failing to adapt to new technology will mean continued pressure for
redundant and less-efficient systems. . . . We believe that federal civilian
MC&G resources can be made more productive by a community reorganization based on establishing a comprehensive and integrated program to
provide multipurpose products.
Yet that ‘community reorganization’, which was really a significant enlargement of the ‘codeword mapping community’, had already occurred. The
initial step was the relocation of the civilian US Geological Survey’s
National Mapping Division from Washington to the isolated forest suburbs
of Reston, Virginia, and the construction of Building E-1, a TALENT–
KEYHOLE-level top-secret laboratory. Within E-1, USGS scientists and
technicians had access to CORONA film shot over North America.
Using CORONA and its associated mapping application systems, the
US Geological Survey revised the entire national coverage of the 1:250,000
scale national mapping series not once, but twice (Mullen, 1998; Starr,
1998). Then CORONA was applied to the national 1:24,000 scale 7 1/2
minute topographic map series. Geodetically rectified CORONA photography was projected at the same scale as the maps being revised. Skilled
technicians examining the maps and photography together could then
make immediate decisions about the relative accuracy of the map’s features, and see if there were significant changes in mappable features on the
land. Using decision trees to grade the maps, they quickly prioritized
the entire national collection for subsequent revision, thus saving years of
labour. Beyond that, CORONA photography provided the main or even
sole source for map revisions on hundreds of quadrangles per year during
the late 1960s (Mullen, 1998). The revised maps only coyly hint at the real
story. Their legends note that the map revisions were ‘based on aerial
photography and other source data’. The ‘other source data’ for all US
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Social Studies of Science 31/2
mapping programmes, for the last third of a century, have been CORONA
and its successor reconnaissance satellite systems.
Applying CORONA and its related mapping systems to domestic
cartography required a subtle but important upgrading in the professional
skills of American mapping specialists. During the mid-1960s, the key
professional journal, Photogrammetric Engineering, both reveals and conceals the changes needed to educate the professional workforce about the
transformations actually taking place, while thoroughly disguising the fact
that the relevant data sources and data management systems were topsecret intelligence assets. A good example is the 1964 paper on future
automatic mapping systems by H.F. Dodge.
A scientist working in the IBM Corporation’s federal systems division,
Dodge alerted his readers to the implications of current research ‘in
relation to increasingly urgent requirements for military real-time mapping
or charting (mapping as fast as photography is acquired)’ (Dodge, 1964:
238). Dodge’s flow charts contrasted the lineal flow of a traditional
mapping system (see Figure 2) to the more complicated inter-related flow
of an automatic mapping system (see Figure 3). Dodge’s contrasting
FIGURE 2
Traditional Mapping System
A
ACQUISITION
BASIC
GROUND
CONTROL
C
B
SUPPLEMENTAL
GROUND
CONTROL
ACQUISITION
ACQUISITION
PHOTOGRAPHY
D
BASE
SHEET
PREPARATION
E
INSTRUMENTAL
AEROTRIANGULATION
F
MODEL
COMPILATIONS
G
MOSAICKING TO
QUADRANGLE
SIZE
H
OFFICE AND
FIELD
COMPLETION
J
CARTOGRAPHY
AND
EDITING
K
PUBLISHING
Source: Dodge (1964): 239.
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Science in the Cold War: Cloud: CORONA & Convergence of Earth Sciences
243
FIGURE 3
Automatic Mapping System
ACQUISITION
BASIC
GROUND
CONTROL
A
1
GEODETIC
POSITION
DATA
SUPPLEMENTAL C
GROUND
CONTROL
ACQUISITION
d
CAMERA
CALIBRATION
DATA
PHOTOGRAPHY
WITH
GROUND CONTROL
IDENTIFIED
AND MARKED
EXP
STA
EXT
5
GROUND
CONTROL
PHOTO
COORD
6
F
ELECTRONIC
PHOTO
SCANNING
SCAN
DATA
XY1
E
ESTIMATE
EXPOSURE
STATION
PARAMETERS
B
ACQUISITION
PHOTOGRAPHY
b
2
PHOTO IDENTIFY D
AND MARK
GROUND
CONTROL
G
CORRELATE
SCAN
DATA
7
SELECTED
PASS POINT
PHOTO
COORD
H
8
K
PRINT
CONTOURED
ORTHOPHOTOGRAPH
J
FINAL
ORTHOPHOTOCALCULATION
10
ORTHOPHOTO
DATA
X, Y, I
CORRELATION
DATA
X1Y1X2Y2
QUADRANGLE
AND MAP
PROJ.
DATA
ANALYTICAL
AEROTRIANGULATION
3
LEGEND:
MANUAL ACTIVITY
9
AUTOMATIC ACTIVITY
d
b
L
ELECTRONICALLY PRINTED
CONTOURED
ORTHOPHOTOGRAPH
CAMERA
POSITIONS
AND
ATTITUDES
[M], R
OFFICE AND
FIELD
COMPLETION
M
CARTOGRAPHY
AND
EDITING
N
PUBLISHING
Source: Dodge (1964): 239.
graphics accomplished two tasks. First, he instructed the reader in the
sequencing of machinery, computers, and skilled operations that rectified
the original photography, connected the rectified photography to the
geodetic database, and performed successful aerotriangulation analytically,
thereby allowing automatic map production. At the same time, Dodge’s
schematics minimized the rôle of ‘Acquisition Photography’, which in the
traditional system is prominent and inserted functionally into the system’s
throughput five different times. ‘Acquisition Photography’ is just as critical
in the automatic mapping system – if there is no photography there will be
no maps. But now it only appears as a minor component of the system.
The development of CORONA’s many applications required the Shuttered Box, where civilians could use top secret intelligence while its origins
remained disguised. The US Geological Survey is still a nominally civilian
agency, but it has had access for the last third of a century to the most
secret intelligence assets of the nation. So have all relevant ‘civilian’
agencies of the federal government. The Shuttered Box has been institutionalized in the structure of the Civil Applications Committee
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244
Social Studies of Science 31/2
(CAC), a federal enterprise, traditionally chaired by the US Geological
Survey. CAC serves as the interface that ‘provides interagency oversight
and advocacy for the collection and use of classified overhead imagery by
Federal civil agencies’.13 CAC functions as the broker between the nominally civilian federal agencies and the Intelligence Community over the
entire array of overhead classified intelligence assets.
These nominally civilian agencies, like USGS, maintain classified,
secure labs. These labs are both ‘there’ and ‘not there’: in the former sense,
they exist on site at USGS or other facilities, but in the latter sense, they
are never entered, little known, and seldom discussed by the vast majority
of scientists and other workers on site, even though data from the labs
provide the critical foundation for all other projects at the facility.14 The
maps from USGS presses and the vast public digital geo-data archives that
the Survey maintains are only a small part of the huge array of earth
science data and analysis generated through the stealthy mechanisms of the
Shuttered Box. In their candid display, they function like Edgar Allen Poe’s
‘Purloined Letter’. All about us are the nation’s deepest secrets, secrets
effectively hidden in plain sight.
Conclusion
This analysis of the CORONA reconnaissance satellite system and its
primary applications underscores the general mobilization of the earth
sciences by World War II and the Cold War. Reaching the Moon required
first discerning the Earth. Geopolitics coalesced with ICBMs and nucleararmed jets and submarines to render all places on the globe at least
potentially strategic. Therefore, geo-positioning and monitoring strategic
places became a planetary enterprise. Earth scientists crossing many
disciplines were mobilized to organize the datasets, create the instruments,
and conduct the research necessary to devise the World Geodetic System
and make CORONA work for its purposes.
These scientists, their disciplines and their institutions, were reordered
in the process, by new sources and purposes of funding, by the demands
that secrecy imposed, and by new instruments and planetary data that
cascaded from space. This represented another great convergence of the
geosciences. This convergence has had counterparts at other times. At the
present, for example, a wide variety of traditionally disparate disciplines are
converging at the nano-scale.
These changes remain little known and understood, because the
secrecy fundamental to their execution has hidden the webs of relationships, particularly between civilian and classified institutions, that were
integral to the process. TALENT–KEYHOLE and other security protocols
imposed unique constraints on the institutions and personnel ordered by
them. Codeword science engendered a codeword community. Its members
made novel adaptations in institutional structures and organization, clandestinely changed technological systems and their applications, re-directed
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Science in the Cold War: Cloud: CORONA & Convergence of Earth Sciences
245
and re-trained professional workforces, and ultimately initiated the contemporary era of global digital geo-referenced datasets, without revealing
that the source data systems driving these transformations included some
of the most closely guarded intelligence assets of the nation. The Shuttered
Box as a metaphor of knowledge production is a potentially important tool
for examining the zone between nominally disparate civilian and military
scientists, institutions and organizations. Precisely in that zone have the
major transformations of Cold War science occurred. This line of analysis
thus complements the body of Cold War science scholarship, more closely
oriented to particular institutions and activities within specific organizations, rather than between those organizations.
Continued research in these areas of intersection in Cold War science
confronts certain challenges. Analysing the history of Cold War science and
its applications, particularly those cases that cross the divides between
civilian and classified institutions, means overcoming a serious lack of
available documentation. The poor state of available records reflects the
decades-long time lags between the generation of papers and their deposition and organization in archives. In addition, security protocols limit
record disclosures, delay record releases, and generally increase the costs of
records management. While investigations can be most productive precisely in those ambiguous zones between institutions, these areas are the
ones that specific institutions are least well equipped to document. As a
result, the skills and tools best adapted for such study come more from
ethnographic and anthropological studies than from traditional historical
scholarship.
Research on Cold War science will benefit if secrecy protocols are
removed, or at least violated, by some participants. In the case of
CORONA, the programme’s declassification in 1995 allowed participants
to speak about their activities, even in the absence of declassified documents related to those activities. However, as of this writing, CORONA’s
contemporary reconnaissance programmes (like GAMBIT and HEXAGON) remain classified. Few individuals appear willing to risk disclosing
significant details about the close relationships among the various programmes, their creators, and their users.
For US records and archives, classified information has been released
through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and its constantly
evolving case law. Although FOIA was perhaps not originally intended to
organize and systematize secret collections, the constraints of legal compliance with disclosure requests, along with the significant infusion of
outside funding made available to answer FOIA requests, have encouraged
many government archives to order their collections and make them more
productive.15
Secrets will out inevitably, by a variety of means. As the clandestine
histories of the Cold War become accessible, they will trigger reinterpretation of the interactions between the institutions and mechanisms of the
military-industrial-academic-complex (Leslie, 1993), the complex that
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246
Social Studies of Science 31/2
generated the surprisingly productive, and clandestine and counterintuitive, scientific achievements of the Cold War.
Appendix
CORONA Chronology and Cold War Context
1944 Hough Team dispatched to the European Theatre.
1947 Mapping and Charting Research Laboratory (MCRL) established at Ohio State
University (OSU); Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established, nominal Cold War
begins.
1951 Institute of Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography (IGPC) established at OSU.
1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower elected President of the United States.
1954 U-2 Programme begins. Spatial Resolution Target built at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
1955 President Eisenhower proposes ‘Open Skies’ Programme, which is rejected.
1956 International Geophysical Year (IGY) declared for 1957–58.
1957 The Soviet Union launches Sputnik I.
1958 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) established, Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA) established, Air Force WS 117-L cancelled [and
reconstituted secretly as CORONA].
1959 First series of ‘Special Students’ from Air Force Aeronautical Charting and
Information Center (ACIC) arrives at OSU, Army World Geodetic Datum (WGD59)
finished.
1960 First successful CORONA mission, Francis Gary Powers and U-2 shot down over
Soviet Union, John F. Kennedy elected President of the United States, Mercury
Datum finished and adopted by NASA for the Mercury programme.
1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, TALENT–KEYHOLE security protocols formalized, National
Reconnaissance Office (NRO) established.
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 156 signed,
first successful ARGON mission, first ‘advanced’ CORONA KH-4 mission.
1963 President Kennedy assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson becomes President of the United
States, only successful LANYARD mission, first KH-4A mission, Eugene Fubini
becomes Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, first Air Force
GAMBIT mission, National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) moves to
Building 213 at the Washington Navy Yard.
1964 President Johnson re-elected. ‘Meet the Beatles’ released.
1965 Significant escalation of the wars in Vietnam and Laos, a secret DOD study suggests
applications of classified reconnaissance by nominally civilian federal agencies.
1966 US Geological Survey (USGS) begins planning for Building E-1 at new National
Mapping Division (NMD) centre in Reston, Virginia.
1967 Six-Day War, Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, first KH-4B mission, Outer Space
Treaty signed.
1968 First colour films flown in CORONA missions, Richard M. Nixon elected President
of the United States, Civilian Applications Committee (CAC) formed.
1969 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) begin in Finland, Apollo 11 astronauts reach
the Moon.
1971 First HEXAGON mission.
1972 President Nixon re-elected, last CORONA mission, SALT Treaty signed, World
Geodetic System of 1972 (WGS72) completed, most DOD and IC service-level
mapping and geodesy agencies consolidated into the Defense Mapping Agency
(DMA).
1973 Office of Management and the Budget (OMB) Federal Mapping Task Force report
advocates major consolidations of federal mapping and geodetic efforts.
1978 President Jimmy Carter first publicly acknowledges that the US employs satellite
reconnaissance.
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Science in the Cold War: Cloud: CORONA & Convergence of Earth Sciences
247
1992 National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is officially acknowledged to exist. William
Jefferson Clinton elected President.
1995 President Clinton signs Executive Order 12598, authorizing declassification of
CORONA and allied early reconnaissance systems. The Center for the Study of
Intelligence of the Central Intelligence Agency presents ‘Piercing the Curtain’ and
declassifies CORONA. Duplicate negatives of most CORONA films deposited at
National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, and USGS EROS Data Center, Sioux
Falls, South Dakota.
1996 The Declassified Archives of the CORONA, ARGON, and LANYARD Programmes
(approximately 38,000 pages of documents) open at NRO headquarters, Chantilly,
Virginia.
1999 The first web site dedicated to CORONA scholarship opened at: <http:/
/www.geog.ucsb.edu/~kclarke/Corona/Corona.html>
2000 Partial acknowledgement of SAMOS, GAMBIT and HEXAGON reconnaissance
satellite programmes, coordinated for the 40th anniversary of the founding of the
NRO.
Notes
Support for this research from the US National Science Foundation (SBR-9810440) is
gratefully acknowledged. I would also like to thank the many CORONA pioneers and users
who agreed to talk to me, both on and off the record, R. Cargill Hall of the National
Reconnaissance Office, and the dozens of librarians and archivists who have guided my
research and directed me to records and sources. I received a Smithsonian Pre-Doctoral
Fellowship under the sponsorship of Deborah Jean Warner, National Museum of American
History, which has been most productive.
1.
CORONA began in 1958, first successfully returned film from orbit in 1960, and ran
until 1972. For most of the programme’s life, it was complemented by other satellite
reconnaissance systems, still classified at the time of this writing.
2. For a selection, see: Leslie (1993), Dennis (1994), DeVorkin (1992), Hounshell
(1997), Forman (1987), and Forman & Sánchez Ron (1996).
3. Specifically, Wallace R. Brode, the first director of the scientific branch of the CIA,
attempted to recreate the model of university disciplines within the CIA organizational
structure, both to identify potential security threats not anticipated by the various
traditional intelligence and security fields, such as biological warfare, and also because
a CIA internal structure familiar to academics would mitigate the problems of
recruiting scientists to the CIA (Doel & Needell, 1997: 64).
4. This may be considered as a ‘Godlewskian Convergence’ of the strategic earth sciences
because it recognizes the key insight of the cartographic historian Anne Godlewska. She
noted that, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, once the great intellectual
challenges of essentially completing European national-scale mapping programmes had
been realized, the hitherto unified discipline of geography diverged into the separate
disciplines of cartography, geodesy, and geography redefined as written descriptions of
regions. The histories of these subdisciplines were, from that point forward, no longer
synonymous. My extension of Godlewska’s argument is that, in the latter half of the
20th century, at an entirely different suite of spatial scales and associated accuracies
necessary to wage or prevent nuclear war, a clandestine re-convergence of many of the
relevant 20th-century earth science disciplines occurred (see Godlewska, 1989).
5. See: Daugherty (1995), quoted in Day, Logsdon & Latell (1998: 209, 210); Clarke &
Cloud (2000); Cloud (2000b).
6. The surviving archives of the Hough Team are deposited in the National Archives at
College Park, MD (NARA II), at RG 77.11, Records of the Office of the Chief of
Engineers, in the Cartographic and Architectural Records Division. For additional
information on the Hough Team, see Cloud (2000a, 2000b, 2001a, 2001b).
7. For an extended discussion of some of the problems raised by the challenge to ensure
ICBM accuracy, see MacKenzie (1990).
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248
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
Social Studies of Science 31/2
There are two bodies of publications on CORONA and its successors. The first were
books and articles published before CORONA’s declassification, based primarily on
interviews with unattributed sources (Klass, 1971; Richelson, 1983; Burrows, 1986;
McDougall, 1986; Richelson, 1990). The second set of publications followed
CORONA’s declassification, and these volumes are in effect part of the process of
declassification itself. The most succinct publication is McDonald (1995), while fuller
treatments of CORONA history and applications are included in Ruffner (1995),
McDonald (1997), Peebles (1997), and Day, Logsdon & Latell (1998).
This has confounded subsequent analysis of the history of global remote sensing. In
many respects, the traditional history of remote sensing, prior to the declassification of
CORONA, was really the presentation of the principal cover story used to conceal
CORONA.
See: Davies & Harris (1988); Pedlow & Welzenbach (1998); and Jensen (2000): 74–78.
See Wheelon (1998), and the interview with Wheelon by Dwayne Day, quoted in Day,
Logsdon & Latell (1998): 258–59; and Cloud (2000b).
I am indebted to William Harris of the RAND Corporation for this source. He directed
me to the document, noting that if one read carefully ‘between the lines’, the report
was describing clandestine cooperative applications already well-underway, but couched
as recommendations for future collaboration.
Quotation from a CAC leaflet (January 2000). The Civil Applications Committee is
essentially the legacy of CORONA applications. CAC was advocated in a classified
DOD/Bureau of the Budget report issued in 1965, really began with the USGS topsecret facility in 1969, and was re-organized and chartered in 1975 by the Executive
Office of the President. The fact of the existence of CAC was declassified in 1995.
Their unique state defines another important example of the rôle of spatial contexts in
knowledge production (Gusterson, 1996; Kirsch, 2000).
Perhaps the greatest practitioners of FOIA, in the context of Cold War science and
technology-related research, are the National Security Archive, at George Washington
University. Their useful website is located at: <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
index.html>
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Starr (1998) Lowell Starr, interview by author, Prince George County, Virginia (30
October).
Trachsel (1967) Arnold F. Trachsel, ‘Electro-Optical Rectifier’, Photogrammetric
Engineering 33/5 (May): 513–24.
von Braun (1955) Wernher von Braun, ‘Why Guided Missiles?’. Library of Congress,
von Braun Papers, Box 46.
Wheelon (1998) Albert D. (Bud) Wheelon, ‘CORONA: A Triumph of American
Technology’, in Day, Logsdon & Latell (1998): Chapter 2, 29–47.
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Science in the Cold War: Cloud: CORONA & Convergence of Earth Sciences
251
John Cloud received an MS in Geography from the University of California
at Santa Barbara for his explorations of the history of Space Shuttle Earth
Observations Photography (SSEOP). He received the PhD in Geography from
the same institution for his research on the geographic and geodetic
applications of the CORONA reconnaissance satellite system. He is
continuing his investigations of the Cold War-era earth sciences as a
member of the Exploratory Essays Initiative of Volume Six: The History of
Twentieth-Century Cartography Project, and is spending the 2000–2001
academic year as a postdoctoral associate in the Peace Studies Program, at
the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, at Cornell University.
Address: Peace Studies Program, 130 Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca,
New York 14853–7601, USA; fax: +1 607 254 5000; email: [email protected]
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