Secret Corps of Filmmakers Documented Nuclear Bomb Tests (NYT)

[mike r]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/science/14atom.html

The Bomb Chroniclers
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

They risked their lives to capture on film hundreds of blinding flashes, rising fireballs and mushroom clouds. The blast from one detonation hurled a man and his camera into a ditch. When he got up, a second wave knocked him down again. Then there was radiation.

While many of the scientists who made atom bombs during the cold war became famous, the men who filmed what happened when those bombs were detonated made up a secret corps. Their existence and the nature of their work has emerged from the shadows only since the federal government began a concerted effort to declassify their films about a dozen years ago. In all, the atomic moviemakers fashioned 6,500 secret films, according to federal officials.

Today, the result is a surge in fiery images on television and movie screens, as well as growing public knowledge about the atomic filmmakers. The images are getting “seared into people’s imaginations,” said Robert S. Norris, author of “Racing for the Bomb” and an atomic historian. They bear witness, he added, “to extraordinary and terrifying power.”

As for the atomic cameramen, there aren’t that many left. “Quite a few have died from cancer,” George Yoshitake, 82, one of the survivors, said of his peers in an interview. “No doubt it was related to the testing.”...


Milliseconds after the image, the vehicles beneath the fireball were obliterated.

More pics at
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/09/14/science/20100914_atom.html

[Sherman A1]

1. Great Pics!

Brave individuals who took them.

[Yuugal]

2. K&R

[deutsey]

3. Amazing and, in the case of the school bus sequence, very disturbing n/t

[Phoonzang]

4. Yeah the explosions are cool, but seeing the effects on an everyday object

is rather terrifying. Though I imagine anyone in that bus would die rather quickly. At least I hope they would.

[tk2kewl]

5. pics 5, 6 & 7 are really creepy

:scared: