Cards Against Humanity

The story of America’s nuclear program, one business card at a time.

Aurora Tang was rummaging through the Black Hole, a museum-slash-second-hand store in the back of an old Lutheran church in New Mexico, when she stumbled on something interesting.

Finding interesting things in the Black Hole was not, technically speaking, hard. The place was full of arcane science equipment that had been thrown out by the nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the Black Hole’s owner, Ed Grothus, had once worked on building the atom bomb. Collecting atomic-era gadgets was Grothus’s way of reflecting on what he came to see as America’s nuclear folly, and when he died in 2009, all 450 tons of the stuff was sold off to the public.

Sensing the opportunity to snare some rare artefacts for her employer, a non-profit called the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Tang joined the throng of curious buyers. Most were drawn to the showy items – the cryogenic tanks and detonator cables – but it was something far more banal that caught her eye: a box of old rolodexes, each filled with hundreds of business cards.

The cards had been acquired by workers at the lab between 1967 and 1978, and represented the businesses both big and small that kept America’s nuclear program running during the height of the arms race. They may have seemed boring to the other collectors, but Tang knew her boss, Matthew Coolidge, would find them anything but.

The official history of the bomb is usually told in snapshots focusing on a big player or moment – Einstein, the Manhattan Project, the Trinity nuclear test. But flicking through the rolodexes, it became clear there was another way to frame the story: the arms race as an office job. The ‘heroes’ of the project weren’t big-name scientists and politicians in this retelling, but the everyday salespeople and clerks of America.

Back in their L.A. office, Tang and Coolidge got to work sorting the cards in chronological order. This wasn’t difficult – an employee at the lab had helpfully recorded the date each card was acquired on its reverse side – but a trained eye would likely have been able to sequence them, too: tell-tale changes in fashion and graphic design indicate the passage of time, as crew cuts give way to mutton chops, and clean sans-serif fonts morph into the flashier logotypes of the hustling ’70s.

At first glance, the cards provide little information beyond the basics: name, occupation, address. Visually, though, they capture the psyche of a different era: an enthusiasm for all things nuclear is evident in the company logos, many of which feature dancing atoms and soaring rockets. Tellingly, perhaps, the collection stops just one year before the Three Mile Island meltdown cast a pall over the U.S.A.’s once unwavering belief in nuclear power as risk-free.

Tang and Coolidge slowly whittled the thousand-or-so cards down to their favourite 150, and published them in a photo book titled Los Alamos Rolodex: Doing Business with the National Lab, 1967-1978,. Fans of mid-century graphic design have praised the collection, but it’s more than an aesthetic time capsule: the cards are a reminder that, no matter how awe-inspiring (or existentially vexing) the endeavour, it’s the humdrum of everyday life – the quotidian services doled out by David’s Gloves and Hale Sanitary Supply – that gets us anywhere.

Today, many of the businesses listed on the cards no longer exist. Most were swallowed up by larger military companies; others simply shut up shop as the atomic period wound down. The personal cards, with their dated portrait photos, belong to the past as well. It’s unknown whether the people on them are still around – neither Tang nor Coolidge could track any down – though it’s safe to assume they’re no longer in the bomb business.

“In this way,” Coolidge says in the book, “the cards today represent the opposite of what they originally were meant to do – connect people to people, seller to buyer.” They’re dead ends, now, rather than starting points. But what dead ends they are.

From Smith Journal vol. 22