Nuclear flashes and retinal flash burns
Motion-picture stills from the film Operation Hardtack – Military Effects Studies (Part Two: High Altitude Tests), 1958.
© U.S. Department of Defense, 1958 (film declassified by U.S. Department of Energy in 1997)
The sun rose twice on the night of July 31, 1958. Sixty years ago today, at 11:50 PM, a missile carrying a thermonuclear warhead launched into the black sky above Johnston Atoll, American outpost in the Pacific Ocean and hallowed ground for nuclear weapons testing. The warhead detonated a few minutes later, forty-five miles above the island, in a flash of nuclear fusion.
Motion picture cameras trained on Johnston’s launch pad recorded the before- and during-effects of the explosion, one that momentarily illuminated its surroundings as brightly as the sun does at high noon. The weapon test, codenamed “Teak,” triggered an aurora in the high atmosphere that could be seen from Hawaii, some 900 miles away, for hours. It disabled radio communications between parts of the United States and Asia for half a day.
The United States conducted 216 outdoor nuclear weapons tests between 1945 and 1963, when it signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty. The explosions had many purposes. Some were arranged to see if a new bomb design would successfully detonate, others to prove a scientific principle, and still others to demonstrate the American nuclear deterrent and to warn enemies of retaliation if they attacked. The Department of Defense orchestrated Teak, at least in part, to understand how a high-altitude nuclear explosion looks—both through camera lenses and through the eyes of human observers.
Motion-picture stills from the film Operation Hardtack – Military Effects Studies (Part Two: High Altitude Tests), 1958.
© U.S. Department of Defense, 1958 (film declassified by U.S. Department of Energy in 1997)
EG&G
Teak’s organizers hired the firm Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, Inc. to generate the test’s photographic record. EG&G’s scientists installed dozens of high-speed motion picture cameras on the ground at Johnston and as far away as Maui’s Mt. Haleakalā. The company also flew two photographic observation aircraft below the detonation. Each plane was a strategic bomber in a former life, now loaded with seven photographers, twenty-three aerial reconnaissance cameras, and an onboard darkroom. EG&G’s cameras yielded vast amounts of data on the blast not obtainable by other means, least of all by human observation. Scientists used the photographs captured aboard the bombers to measure the size of Teak’s fireball, the heat of its blast, and the intensity of its radioactive fallout.
But Teak’s photographic project was also, itself, something of an experiment. In their secret post-detonation report, EG&G’s scientists stressed that their photographic tools limited the quality of the data they could gather. “For future high-altitude tests,” they write, “photographic coverage should be greatly expanded, with emphasis directed to obtaining better time resolution and additional significant phenomenological data by using more cameras and a wider variety of film types and lenses.” In the hands of the EG&G scientists, the camera served as more than a mere receptacle for visual data; it also served as a malleable tool for generating new scientific knowledge.
Watching through the rabbit's eyes
The military also wanted to find out if it could use high altitude explosions like Teak to damage the light-sensing retinas in the eyes of human observers—to blind enemies instead of bombing their bodies outright. Atomic bombs that detonate higher in the sky release their energy, partly in the form of visible light, in a shorter amount of time. Teak, which exploded in the upper mesosphere, released nearly all of its visual energy in its first fifty milliseconds, faster than the fastest human blink reflex of one hundred milliseconds. The light of Teak, therefore, could not not be seen.
Physicists estimated that Teak’s detonation might cause retinal flash burns as far as 460 miles away from Ground Zero. If the warhead had detonated directly above Washington, D.C., onlookers in Boston would have been wise to wear their sunglasses.
To assess the damage that resulted from looking directly at Teak, military scientists shipped rabbits to Johnston and forced them to watch the explosion with their naked eyes—a Cold War-era update, perhaps, to the pseudoscientific “optogram” methodologies that German physiologist Willy Kühne developed in the late nineteenth century. Kühne, who also used rabbits as substitutes for human bodies in his experiments, believed that the retina would “fix” the eye’s final vision at the moment of death, and that the retina could be “developed” like a roll of photographic film to reveal this terminal image.
Motion-picture still of a rabbit retina from the film Operation Hardtack – Military Effects Studies (Part Two: High Altitude Tests), 1958.
© U.S. Department of Defense, 1958 (film declassified by U.S. Department of Energy in 1997)
Here, too, the camera served a valuable purpose. In its ability to replicate the visual experience of the eye, photography allowed military men, newspaper reporters, and casual witnesses to communicate the appearance of the Teak shot to the rest of the world. The (literally) blinding light of the detonation looks all too obvious—and frighteningly dangerous—in the photographs of Teak’s white-hot fireball.
Seeing, imagining, photographing
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, August 1, 1958.
© Honolulu Star-Bulletin
Nuclear detonations were the ultimate theaters for visual spectatorship. The Teak test was meant to be witnessed by human retinas as much as it was to be recorded and analyzed on photographic film. Teak was not unique in this respect. The world’s first atomic bomb detonation, in July of 1945, was, at its time, the most photographed event in human history. And in the late 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission organized its bomb detonations at the Nevada Test Site around peak tourist seasons. Families taking a road trip across the American West and “interested in seeing a nuclear explosion,” wrote Gladwin Hill for the New York Times in 1957, “can adjust their itineraries accordingly.”
Photographs are therefore crucial for shaping the cultural significance of the nuclear weapons testing era—that is, for affirming the atomic bomb’s ability to detonate on demand, or to demonstrate a scientific achievement, or to guard against another nuclear attack. And photographs are so central to nuclear weaponry’s legacy precisely because they both do and do not bear a clear correspondence with the eyewitness testimony of the same event.
Photography’s ability to record visual traces that are too subtle for human observers is exactly what makes the camera useful for scientific discoveries. Indeed, many of the most important scientific achievements of the twentieth century were made with a camera in hand. EG&G certainly conceived of photography in this way when the company arranged its photographic project for Teak. But photography’s ability to capture the things that human observers can also see helps to fulfill another crucial purpose of the nuclear arsenal, even today. That purpose is for the bomb to be seen, visualized, and imagined in the mind’s eye.
The photographs of the Teak detonation carry many responsibilities. They function now and again as trustworthy substitutes for what human eyewitnesses saw, as unbiased records of what human eyewitnesses could not see, and as flexible tools for generating new scientific understanding. Nuclear weapons testing is not exceptional in placing these diverse demands on photography. Newspapers, television screens, scientific journals, and social media streams alike are now awash with images bearing the imprints of scientific subjects under close photographic scrutiny—of phenomena too slow (like global climate change), places too distant (like Martian landscapes), and objects too miniscule (like gene editing tools) for human observation.
These photographs may be conceived and born in the hermetic arena of the scientific experiment, but they are raised and used in a much messier world of political agendas and social liabilities. Understanding what we can and cannot see in them is essential for contenting with the legacies of the subjects they examine.