American Cartographic Transformations during the Cold War
نویسنده
چکیده
A great convergence of cartography, secrecy, and power occurred during the Cold War. In the American case, a complex series of interactions between secret and classified programs and institutions and their publicly accessible counterparts accomplished both traditional and novel objectives of military geographic intelligence. This process also yielded the World Geodetic System, a masscentered “figure of the earth” at accuracies adequate for warfare with intercontinental ballistic missiles. A structural and institutional separation developed between enterprises charged with overhead data acquisition systems, which were classified at increasingly high levels of secrecy, and those responsible for data reduction, analysis, and mapping systems, which remained largely unclassified and publicly accessible, in part to conceal the classified data acquisition systems. This structural separation destabilized photogrammetric mapping by displacing systems that privileged dimensional stability with systems that privileged novel sensor types more appropriate to Cold War geo-political objectives and constraints. Eventually, photogrammetric mapping systems were re-stabilized by successfully implementing analytical solutions imposed in digital mapping and data management systems. This achievement re-privileged dimensional stability, now redefined to the new media of geo-referenced digital data. In the early 1970s these developments culminated in advanced research projects of Military Geographic Intelligence Systems (MGIS). Their deployment in the Vietnam War was both their apex and their undoing. In the aftermath, classified mapping and database systems diverged from civilian versions of MGIS, which became known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
منابع مشابه
American Policy in Persian Gulf Region: Continuity or Change at the Trump Era
United States power in Persian Gulf has risen since the end of Second World War. Dividing U.S. presence in the Region into the Cold war and post-Cold war era, the principle policy in first period was narrowing the impact of Soviet Union in the Region and in latter, Access to Persian Gulf region’s oil and controlling the major threats which can disrupt the flow of oil to global energy market. Fo...
متن کاملRewriting High Noon: Transformations in American Popular Political Culture During the Cold War
High Noon (1952) was a landmark artifact of American popular political culture of the high Cold War. Screenwriter Carl Foreman intended it as a commentary on Hollywood capitulation to HUAC. Director Fred Zinneman and star Gary Cooper saw it as a film about the nobility of the individual in the face of a failure of public morality. John Wayne, the film star and conservative archetype of the peri...
متن کاملGeopolitical Factors of Conflict between the Superpowers during Post-Cold War Era
Aims & Backgrounds: The US and the Soviet Union led the east and the west camps during the cold war and the geopolitical order was laid on the foundation of the rivalries between these two superpowers. But, after the collapse of the bipolar system, the US became the undisputed power in the international arena and the geopolitical order underwent changes during three decades after that and the c...
متن کاملWar, Peace, and Cinema: Excerpts from the Foreign Policy of the USA with a Look at Stanley Kubrick’s Cinema
The notion of peace, regardless of theorizations accepted in th field and since the Enlightenment Period, and the era known as Modernism, has, constantly, been one of the challenges of mankind, and also scientists in the field of political sciences and international relations. Contrary to the presentation of the idea of peace and respect to the human rights in some of the fore...
متن کاملEditorialAmerican geography , social science and the Cold War American geography , social science and the Cold War Trevor
This article argues that the history of geography should be written from an externalist perspective; that is, its history should be directly related to the larger historical context in which it is embedded. My example is American human geography during the early Cold War period. The argument is that as a result of America’s experience during the Second World War, the USA mobilised its academy t...
متن کامل