The Nuclear Video Truther Problem

An unserious post: Where were the cameras that filmed things blowing up in nuclear tests?

In which: Brian attempts to explain how famous footage of things destroyed by nuclear bombs was obtained (it was just braced pole-towers).

Tyson’s Green New Bomb

Last October, Neil deGrasse Tyson delivered a (literally) unbelievable aside in which he claimed to Bill Maher that “modern” nuclear weapons don’t cause fallout. I only discovered this clip today, perhaps because I usually tune out anything with his name attached.

In case you are wondering, this is false. Hydrogen bombs, unlike atomic bombs, employ fusion, which does not create the fission products primarily responsible for fallout, but still also employ fission (which does create… fission products). A given hydrogen bomb may exceed the highest-yield atomic bombs in fission-doing and therefore fallout. Wikipedia agrees, stating “All nuclear explosions produce fission products.”

Wither the fact check?

What’s also amazing is that this extraordinary error seems not to have been followed by any mainstream objection or correction; perhaps because it simply went unnoticed. I hate to think that Bill Maher is still walking around with this erroneous belief, liable to go for bike rides or have a picnic in a just-cooled-off ground zero at any moment.

Did the fact checkers simply decide to back their guy? Have the fact checkers all left the building? Why hasn’t anyone checked this fact? Again, it would seemingly have to be because of low attention on the comment itself, but it still seems like an important reflection of the current media’s wholesale surrender of the claim to authority that it defended so aggressively for two years. It’s tired of trying to get us to believe it knows the truth. What’s the point? Every day a new universal, government-endorsed truth, all the things on the news and in the schoolbooks that everybody has always known 100%, turns out to be a lie.

The Nuclear Problem

In this context, I wanted to make an unserious post about a problem that is potentially going to fix itself anyway, when those “modern” fallout-free nuclear weapons are used in Ukraine.

The problem: Among the many “things on the news and in the schoolbooks” that have fantastic and previously unquestioned elements are nuclear bombs.

I myself realized the problems in a conversation with a long-time loon in 2022: 1) The most famous nuclear bomb videos could simply be fakes. 2) Isn’t it absurd that only two bombs have still been actually used after all this time? 3) And doesn’t the specter and terror of nuclear bombs conveniently align with government interests against the public? But after watching a bunch of more obscure and modern test footage on youtube, I became quite satisfied that the standard narrative is valid. The best supercut seems to have disappeared from youtube, but this one contains examples of later footage.

Besides which, when one simply reads just how many test programs (all with multiple tests) were constructed in the US alone, the idea of these programs repeating themselves forever simply to perpetuate “a hoax” is complete overkill, and some more elaborate and implausible conspiracy theory is required. No thanks.

Still, the fact that open-air nuclear testing ended when most people alive today weren’t yet born, and that the topic of testing refers to an entire series of incredibly complicated operations with evolving designs, it isn’t hard to make a convincing case that nuclear bombs are not real if one simply limits discussion to a few key points of evidence which exploit gaps in knowledge. Enter comedian and commentator Owen Benjamin:

26.2 million views. source: @OwenBenjamin (twitter.com)

I have enjoyed following Benjamin’s combative bomb tirades over the last few days, and most of the pleasure stems from the fact that the knee-jerk “Community Notes” correction offered for his argument seems to have introduced obvious mistakes. Again, to spoil the reveal, the footage above was probably just taken from braced pole-towers.

But in response to Benjamin’s claim that cameras could not have produced that footage and survived, twitter users crafted a Note that claimed the cameras were “5 miles away, with telescopic lenses, in bunkers.” This is an obvious error (from the ground, the horizon of the Earth is 3 miles away). Regarding footage from the interior of a house, users claimed that periscoped lenses stuck out from the floor while the cameras themselves were subterranean. In general Benjamin, who has worked in film, seemed more literate than those who assumed they could quickly produce an explanation, as some hecklers failed to understand that the film in a camera also needs to survive in order for footage to be retrieved; though at the same time he seemed to totally underestimate the state of mid-Century photographic technology.

The photography story

There is substantial documentation about footage directed at test bombs themselves, though I couldn’t locate a good, centralized official source in text form. This allows me to offer a general overview of “normal bomb footage” with hopefully no errors.

Long distance shots, sometimes well over a horizon’s distance, require no special shielding and could use normal cameras on tripods, as in 1953 when reporters brought their own cameras to Upshot-Knothole Annie (the source of the house footage).

Closer bomb-directed footage could be attained with bunkers. I found some mention of 90 degree mirrors (so that the camera and film survive even if the blast takes out the scope). “Close” would be defined based on test yield i.e. bigness. At Trinity, the first test, Berlyn Brixner reports that the close camera bunker was at 800 yards.

A still of the camera bunkers:

The close bunker appears to correspond to the close-up footage in the following gif from Wikipedia -

Trinity’s long-distance cameras were at 10,000 yards, stationed in either the north or west bunkers, where some of the closest humans also watched (more in this video; there were staffed 10,000-yard bunkers in all four directions, and Atomic Heritage’s reports disagree about which housed the long-distance cameras). 10,000 yards is over 5 miles, a fact which seems to be the source of the knee-jerk twitter Notes explanation for the house footage cameras. As a note regarding long-distance cameras, only light from very near the ground would have been missed, so overall it would seem that the explosion and cloud is just at the edge of the horizon even when in fact it was well beyond it.

Various cameras were used at multiple bunkers, and high-speed cameras selected for the test in planning were replaced by the time of the test itself, to give an idea of the progress in technology and the tailor-making of the camera system to the nature and novelty of the bomb.

This gives us a general idea of the first test’s rules for cameras.

Upshot-Knothole’s Strong Tall Poles

The “stuff sploding” footage was generated in 1953 in the Upshot-Knothole test series. Some facts about the Annie test, with the houses, are available on this contemporary newsreel and confirmed elsewhere. Of concern for filming:

• One model house was at 1,170 yards from ground zero, another was 2,500 yards.

• Soldiers were positioned in a trench 2 miles away; other observers including civilian reporters who brought their own cameras (who may be responsible for the only footage with audio accompaniment) were a full 7.5 miles away.

• 50 cars were scattered throughout the site at various distances. Damage was minor as long as windows were open, and almost all could still drive afterward.

So where were the cameras that produced footage like this? (The newsreel, interestingly, doesn’t say or appear to show anything that answers the question.)

Wouldn’t anything hovering above the house, not secured in a bunker using mirrors, have been obliterated, leaving no film record of whatever preceded obliteration? And, all arguments about telescopic filming are unsatisfactory for the reasons Benjamin has pointed out (the angle is wrong for a bunker, etc.).

But of course not “anything” would have been demolished by that point - in the bottom right, we can see that a metal pole is doing just fine, and up to the point when it is obscured by wreckage. Perhaps it does not survive in the end. However, it is not braced. Unlike the camera pylons which produced another famous video from Upshot-Knothole (the trees).¹

Narrator: “As on many of these projects, camera stations were set up to provide high speed motion picture coverage of blast effects.” (youtube.com)

A higher pole would have been required for the house footage in Annie, and this seems to be what is captured at 7:34 in the same video:

And so this answers the question of how the US government produced the famous nuclear bomb “sploding stuff” footage we have today. They stuck cameras on poles. Witchcraft.

In post-test inspection, house 1 was partially demolished, and house 2 was mostly in tact. There is no reason not to expect that if multiple cameras were filming inside the houses, at least one would have been able to produce the footage of the boy near the window, even had it been in house 1 (judging from aftermath shown in 8:02 of the DoE video and 8:20 of the newsreel).

House 1, exterior.

House 1, second floor. No elaborate periscope system would have been required for some interior cameras and footage to survive.

In verifying that an anchored pole would not be disintegrated, we can also take the example of the cars - which were not heavily damaged, and almost all of which could still drive.

Thus there is nothing implausible about shielded cameras and film on braced poles surviving, nor at least one interior film, and so all of Benjamin’s critiques of the video record are a dud.

So that’s the solution to the nuclear video truther problem. I hope the most powerful government on Earth appreciates that I am the only one still bothering to stick up for it. U - S - A! U - S - A!

If you derived value from this post, please drop a few coins in your fact-barista’s tip jar.

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1. Digression: The Department of Energy video describes the trees in conjunction with test 9, which would have been Harry. Other sources seem consistent in claiming the tree experiment took place during Encore, which was the previous test chronologically.

Harry later wound up being famous due to an unfortunate slip in the atmosphere, which resulted in the test’s relatively enormous fallout footprint.

still from Atomic Heritage (youtube.com)