This video shows footage of US military high-altitude nuclear tests conducted over the Pacific Ocean in the 1960s. Watch (after enjoying the middle school film strip aesthetic intro) as bizarre fireworks result from the explosion and resulting auroras, captured via specially adapted slow-motion cameras.
These are not just any cameras. While some of these images are from standard photographic equipment, taking a photo of nuclear detonation requires a special sort of camera, known as the Rapatronic camera.
photo via the Edgerton Digital Collections, MIT
The Rapatronic camera took this photo to the left, of the 1952 “Tumbler-Snapper” nuclear test at the Nevada Test Range. The camera has no mechanical shutter, but instead detects the presence of radiated energy with an electromagnetic coil, and can collect an image of an exposure of ten nanoseconds. With a bank of such cameras, films of the instants after detonation can be captured, like this video of the “Rope Trick Effect“. The Spikes coming out of the bottom of the nuclear blast are energy traveling down the guy wires of the actual bomb assembly derrick, vaporizing the ropes as they energy travels.
(See the Rope Trick Effect happen in sequenced video by clicking on this link.)
The Rapatronic camera was invented by the military consulting company of Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, or EG&G. Edgerton is for Harold Edgerton, the MIT professor and electrical engineer who invented the stroboscopic camera. The stroboscopic camera gives us no less impressive photographs of less destructive actions, such as the popping of soap bubbles, shattering glasses of milk, and the famous bullet-through-an-apple shot. These photos delight and mystify us, as we see the momentary beauty in our physical world that our eyesight cannot capture alone.
These images give us a peek at what the philosopher Henri Bergson called “duration”. The qualitative substance between quantitative measurements. Using the arrow of Zeno, or other such examples, it is possible to convince ourselves that if we divide the time of the arrow’s flight in half, and half again, and half again, eventually we get to a minuscule moment during which the arrow ceases to move, stopped in the air. But this is not true. The arrow is always moving, there is just a point at which we cease to notice the forward progress. The motion of the arrow from the bow to the tree is total, of the duration, which is a qualitative motion that can be compared to itself, but never frozen into isolated components.
EG&G’s photographic work documenting nuclear tests lets us see this even now. Every moment from the point of explosion in the height of Cold War fervor to the present day is documented in those films. The capture of nanoseconds at the moment of detonation represents not just that moment, but the entire military-industrial apparatus that mobilized to make those photographs. The historicity of these images is not simply in the light that they captured, but what they mean, declassified and assembled for us today. In the Rope Trick Effect we see the entire chain of human temporality, written in the language of war. The qualitative duration of these photos is not of the short time span, but of the entirety of our species’ history.
Harold Edgerton died in 1990, and today, the company that was EG&G still is a government contractor, conducting secret work in both engineering and administering top secret US Government test sites. The company runs a terminal at the Las Vegas airport, ferrying employees to secret sites across the Southwest. Perhaps there will never be images released of what the company is doing now, but history doesn’t stop just because the cameras do.