| This dissertation is an historical ethnography of Cold War era stealth airplane projects. For American military planners, these airplanes---machines designed to have a minimal radar signature---held the promise of covert reconnaissance in an era of dominant radar networks. Stealth airplanes also potentially negated a Soviet numerical advantage in conventional forces by offering an option to strike first with a conventional or a nuclear payload. This project attempts to answer the following questions: How were stealth aircraft engineered to be less visible? And how were the design and assembly of these aircraft made socially invisible, or only selectively visible, in order to maintain a strategic advantage? Answering these questions, I argue, requires examining how American cultures of commerce and security merged in the making of large-scale, technologically dependent weapon systems like stealth.;Weapons systems of the late Cold War took years to design, and their manufacturing processes employed thousands and fostered their own cultures of production. In this case, making stealth technology required making a stealth economy. More specifically, overlapping calculative processes---those required to engineer technological objects and manage military industrial programs, navigate commercial markets, and address the politics of the Cold War---produced "a stealth effect." Some actors, objects, and processes appeared socially translucent because making stealth required movement across seemingly stable categorical distinctions such as visibility/invisibility, assembled/disassembled, military/civilian, public/private, open/secret and industrial/artisanal.;The mechanics of stealth as a military and social technology point to some of the ways in which Cold War security practices were infused and diffused into the everyday. The labors of tens of thousands of defense workers produced a disarticulated constellation of actions and imaginaries that ran parallel to, and was at times contingent with, the articulated public spheres of threat generated by the Cold War. The effort to harness and organize security through military industrial joint ventures shows some of the ways in which the Cold War haunts the present as a culture of practice. |
