Atomic Tests: Experimental Filmmaking in the Nuclear Era

©2021 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois on july 16, 1945, a group of scientists led by J. Robert Oppenheimer gathered in the aptly named Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico to test the experiment they had been working on for the past five years: the world’s first atomic bomb. Armed with simulations and speculations but never having seen the results of their work, the scientists took measures to document this test detonation in every way they could. It was filmed by multiple cameras serving different scientific purposes and by three newsreel cameras whose footage was intended for mass consumption. The footage from these cameras has become iconic. Each camera was nearly six miles from the site of detonation and used varying lenses and frame rates to capture the tests. One such test, filmed at a frame rate of 119 frames per second, presents an image of thick, billowing clouds illuminated dramatically from behind. Slow-motion cinematography reveals the morphology of the forms, whose profoundly elemental quality evokes the wonders of creation. The scientists, when witnessing the initial test bomb firsthand, described a visual force that utterly overwhelmed their senses: they were “completely blinded by the flash”—as if “the whole world was gone up in flames”—and then came an “unearthly hovering cloud” (Bob Serber, James Conant, and Oppenheimer, qtd. in Bird and Sherwin 307–08). A verse from the Hindu text the Bhagavad-Gita came to Oppenheimer’s mind: “If the radiance of a thousand suns / were burst into the sky, / that would be like / the splendor of the Mighty One. / Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds” (qtd. in Jungk 210). The atomic bomb had seemingly harnessed the divine power of the cosmos, creative but also spectacularly destructive, and the vision inspired in Oppenheimer a sense of his own godliness. He immediately knew that “the world would never be the same” (Bird and Sherwin 309). Remarkably, as scientists began to discuss whether or not to implement the “gadget” they had created, they focused most intensely on the visual impact of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer wrote that “the visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous” (qtd. in Bird and Sherwin 296), and the other scientists speculated that such an image would serve to incarnate an absolute power in the face of which any enemy could only surrender (Bird and Sherwin 296–99). There was some discussion of simply filming an atomic test as propaganda to provoke surrender of the Axis: the visual impact alone, some postulated, would be enough to end the war. Although politicians soon resolved to use the bomb itself instead of its visual record, this discussion leaves lingering questions about how film could be used to document and convey the cosmic scale and power of the bomb. The enormity of the bomb’s visual impact also prompted new thinking about space and time at the level of cosmology. As Secretary of War Henry Stimson declared, the bomb had brought about “revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe” (qtd. in Bird and Atomic Tests: Experimental Filmmaking in the Nuclear Era