Camera Atomica

In the summer of 1946, ‘more than half the world’s supply of motion picture film... was loaded aboard US Army Air Force planes and dispatched to Bikini Atoll’ where it was used to photograph Operations Able and Baker – the second and fourth nuclear bomb explosions respectively – generating over a million still images and several million feet of moving image matter.

Some of these pictures are reproduced in this collection of essays and photographs, which ranges widely over the last 69 years of nuclear history, taking in, among other things, Nevada H-bomb tests, 1950s ‘duck and cover’ drills, and a cardboard ‘bomb damage effect computer’ produced by the RAND corporation (‘Simple and clean. No more guesswork’).

One of the most striking pictures is Paul Shambroom’s photo of a military technician using a broom to sweep dust from the floor around a line of B83 one-megaton nuclear gravity bombs at a US air force base in Louisiana in 1995. At least 10 bombs can be seen in the photo – any two of which would have a destructive force equal to all of the explosives used in WW2.