The Bomb Chroniclers

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

September 13, 2010 

N.Y. Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/science/14atom.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&hp

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."

Two new atomic documentaries, "Countdown to Zero" and
"Nuclear Tipping Point," feature archival images of the
blasts. Both argue that the threat of atomic terrorism
is on the rise and call for the strengthening of
nuclear safeguards and, ultimately, the elimination of
global arsenals.

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."

The cinematographers focused on nuclear test explosions
in the Pacific and Nevada.

Electrified wire ringed their headquarters in the
Hollywood Hills. The inconspicuous building, on
Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon, had a sound stage,
screening rooms, processing labs, animation gear, film
vaults and a staff of more than 250 producers,
directors and cameramen -- all with top-secret
clearances.

When originally made, the films served as vital sources
of information for scientists investigating the nature
of nuclear arms and their destructiveness. Some movies
also served as tutorials for federal and Congressional
leaders.

Today, arms controllers see the old films as studies in
gung-ho paranoia.

"They have this very odd voice," said Mark Sugg, a film
producer at the World Security Institute, a private
group in Washington. "You and I would be appalled that
some hydrogen bomb vaporized a corner of what used to
be paradise. But they've got a guy bragging about it."

A 2006 book, "How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb,"
explores the nature of the cameramen's secretive
enterprise, its pages full of declassified photographs
and technical diagrams.

"They're kind of unrecognized patriots," said Peter
Kuran, the book's author and a special-effects
filmmaker in Hollywood. "The images that they captured
will, for a long time, be a snapshot of what our last
century was like."

After inaugurating the nuclear age and dropping two
atomic bombs on Japan in World War II, the United
States threw itself into expanding its nuclear arsenal.
New designs required test detonations to make sure they
worked properly. Between 1946 and 1962, the nation set
off more than 200 atmospheric blasts.

The secret film unit, established in 1947 by the
military, was known as the Lookout Mountain Laboratory.
Surrounded by the lush greenery of Laurel Canyon, just
minutes from the Sunset Strip, the lab drew on
Hollywood talent and technology to pursue its
clandestine ends.

"The neighbors were suspicious because the lights were
on all night long," Mr. Yoshitake recalled.

Film historians say the unit tested many technologies
that Hollywood later embraced, including advanced
lenses and cameras, films and projection techniques.

The cameramen fanned out from Wonderland Avenue to
governmental test sites in the South Pacific and the
Nevada desert, their job to chronicle the age's fury.
It put them as close as two miles from the blasts.

The visual records helped scientists do everything from
estimating the size of nuclear detonations to measuring
their destructive power. Mock towns went up in flames.

Mr. Yoshitake recalled documenting what a fiery
explosion did to pigs -- whose skin resembles that of
humans.

"Some were still squealing," he said. "You could smell
the meat burning. It made you sick. I thought, 'Oh, how
terrible. If they were humans they would have suffered
terribly.' "

The cameramen were allowed to simply witness, not
photograph, their first hydrogen bomb explosions, which
were roughly one thousand times more powerful than
atomic blasts. The goal was to get them accustomed to
the level of violence.

"The purple glow in the sky -- that was so eerie," Mr.
Yoshitake recalled. "And we were not even close, about
20 miles way. It filled the whole sky."

Hollywood stars appeared in some of the films. Reed
Hadley, star of the 1950s television show "Racket
Squad," portrayed a pipe-smoking military observer who,
in 1952, witnessed the world's first hydrogen blast.

"As you can imagine, feeling is running pretty high,"
he said, standing aboard a warship in the Pacific. "And
there's reason for it. If everything goes according to
plan, we'll soon see the largest explosion ever set off
on the face of the earth."

Official Washington saw many of the films. Members of
Congress, who controlled the appropriation of atomic
funds, got special viewings.

Atomic leaders "put on their best shows" for Congress,
Charles P. Demos, a former classification official with
the Department of Energy, which runs the nation's
nuclear weapons program, recalled in an interview.
"They probably affected a lot of the decisions."

The guarded enterprise lost its subject matter in 1963
when the superpowers agreed to move all testing of
nuclear weapons underground, ending the spectacle of
atmospheric blasts and what governments had come to
regard as serious risks to human health from
radioactive fallout.

In 1997, Hazel R. O'Leary, the secretary of energy
under President Bill Clinton, sought to declassify the
old movies.

At a news conference, Ms. O'Leary called the archive "a
treasure trove" and promised to release the films after
they had undergone any needed redactions for purposes
of national security. Nuclear specialists say the shape
and size of a weapon -- especially a hydrogen bomb -- can
reveal design secrets.

The department's goal was to make public up to 20 films
a month and complete the declassification project in
five to seven years.

Late in 1997, an event in Hollywood at the American
Film Institute honored the atomic filmmakers. Present
were some two dozen of the survivors.

"You had to have the cameras running before the
detonation," Douglas Wood, 75, a cinematographer, told
a reporter at the gathering. If not, he said, the
blinding flash "would burn the film and jam the film
gate."

Mr. Kuran, the filmmaker, organized and filmed the
Hollywood event. Impressed with the skill and courage
of the cinematographers, he mixed the event footage
with declassified bomb imagery to produce "Atomic
Filmmakers," a video he sells on his Web site,
www.atomcentral.com.

The declassifications stopped in 2001. The arrival of
the Bush administration, and an outbreak of atomic
jitters after the terrorist attacks on New York City
and the Pentagon, combined to bring about the program's
demise.

Today, the Energy Department says it has released
publicly some 100 movies from the vast stockpile, which
the military controls. "What you see is what we have,"
said Darwin Morgan, a department spokesman in Las
Vegas.

A page on the department's Web site features links to
clips from the atomic films that visitors can view free
of charge and sells full versions as videodiscs for
$10, plus shipping. It calls them "an enduring, awesome
visual documentation of the power and destruction of
nuclear weapons." Many are available free on YouTube
under the search heading "declassified U.S. nuclear
test film."

Mr. Kuran continues to work on the old movies, using
high-tech methodologies to improve their clarity and
restore faded images to their original glory.

"He fixes things pixel by pixel," said Mr. Sugg of the
World Security Institute. "He's this fanatical quality
guy."

"My passion is to find ways of fixing them up," Mr.
Kuran said in an interview. "The whole point is not to
lose something that needs to be preserved. I doubt very
much that they're going to be shooting off these bombs
again in the atmosphere."

Viewers include President Obama.

In April, he hosted a White House screening of "Nuclear
Tipping Point." The documentary profiles a bipartisan
group of former atomic officials who are promoting a
vision of the world free of nuclear arms -- an objective
in line with Mr. Obama's own policies.

Mr. Yoshitake, the atomic cameraman, said the release
and restoration of the images were healthy developments
because their disclosure improved public understanding
of the nuclear threat.

"It's a good thing to show the horror," he said.

And he wondered -- now that the cold war is over -- why
advanced nations still retain more than 20,000 of the
deadliest of all weapons.

"Do we need all these bombs?" Mr. Yoshitake asked.
"It's scary."

_____________________________________________

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