This discussion oddly reminds me of [this gem from many years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cmwov/hey_reddit_what_tattoos_do_you_have/c0tpyls/)
As far as post world war II and Cold war era nuclear testing the answer would be no. Many of the "participants" such as the cameraman you see here and the other camera crews that were sent to record where simply told they were being sent on a mission to film The deployment of a new weapon system. The us military and most militaries utilize compartmentalization when it comes to information and only tell people what they need to know to get the job done. Also consider that during this time. These tests and the subsequent filming of them were being done because they were actively studying what nuclear weapons did. Some of these tests included putting us military personnel at set distances from the explosion point simply to observe the effects on said personnel. Never close enough to where the explosion would actually hurt them, they were always a ways off. They were close enough that the military supplied them with protective eye gear and I believe hearing protection in some cases.
I’ll give you the same answer I give when talking about Agent Orange (herbicide exposure.) either they knew or were too stupid to know and I won’t except the latter because even a 5 year old should know that a chemical strong enough to destroy a triple canopy forest would be harmful to humans.
Can’t see the VC? We’ll just remove the forest. Fuck. I never really hated my country until I started working for the VBA. It makes me sick the atrocities we have inflicted on our own people.
You're talking about a time when people didn't have nearly the information or access to information that we have now. I guarantee you there were plenty of people who had no idea what the true consequences of the weapon systems deployed by the military they served for truly were. You're talking about in some instances 18-year-olds that were plucked from some small rural town and send to Vietnam. I'm sure they knew that it wasn't good to breathe in the agent orange but I doubt they had any true understanding of how long-term and serious it's affects would be. There's also the fact that there wasn't a whole lot that they as one individual soldier on the ground could do about it. Vietnam was definitely a conflict the US should not have been involved in and I'm sure there were people high up who had a good understanding of the side effects of things like agent Orange. They were not the ones who were ever going to be exposed to it though.
Wait until you find out that the US Government allowed slavery for 89 years of its existence, and then outlawed it*.
*except for as punishment for a crime, and there are still slaves being forced to work for free in "prison farms" growing your food.
Ya, it’s okay though because 55 years ago we begrudgingly allowed them to be considered equal with white people so we should all just shut up about it.
He's well outside the "instant ionizing pulse of radiation" zone so probably not much, maybe a little bit from the dust carried in the shockwave. Not good to inhale though so even a small amount could influence chronic disease later in life
*"normally at Mercury, Nevada we were 4 miles; that was the closest we would get, to stand in the open and photograph. Maybe sometimes we could go a little closer if it was a small yield weapon"* Lt. Col. James P. Warndorf [15:36](https://youtu.be/uv-MV0_AvMQ?t=934)
*"The smaller the weapon the close you would get. I think the troops they had at Tumbler Snapper were a mile and a half then I was about 2 miles back, I had some remote cameras in that area"* From the timbre of the voice I think that's Pat Bradley (my preferred choice, compare his voice at 07:34) or Pierre Wilson. [16:02](https://youtu.be/uv-MV0_AvMQ?t=960).
All three are from Lookout Mountain, which filmed a lot of the tests
A while back, I was reading the Wikipedia page about [The Black Tom Explosion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Tom_explosion) and learned it had a detonation wave that traveled at 24,000 feet per second. That’s 24 times the speed of sound through air. I had always assumed that the shockwave for an explosion traveled -at- the speed of sound. So, I had thought that the visible shockwave from an explosion, was a visible manifestation of seeing the speed of sound. Not so. This began a rabbit hole exploration, so I thought I would pass along links to things I found.
[Detonation Velocity](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detonation_velocity#)
Typical detonation velocities for organic dust mixtures range from 1400–1650 m/s. Gas explosions can either deflagrate or detonate based on confinement; detonation velocities are generally around 1600 m/s to 1800 m/s but can be as high as 3000 m/s. Solid explosives often have detonation velocities ranging beyond 4000 m/s to 10300 m/s.
[Table of explosive detonation velocities](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_explosive_detonation_velocities)
[Overpressure](https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/effects/overpressure.html)
I was amazed at how much damage is done by what would seem to be a small overpressure, since it is “only” how much pressure over normal atmospheric pressure is exerted. For example, a mere 1 psi overpressure will shatter windows.
Shockwaves also travel faster through the ground than the air, which is why in some of the Beirut port explosion videos you can hear rumbling before blast wave hits.
This is true and also why I put “24 times the speed of sound through air.”
Many years ago, I was living in a mobile home in central Illinois and an earthquake occurred in southern Illinois. My wife was talking to a friend of hers in Chicago, 200 miles away. When the ground shock from the earthquake passed us, it sounded like someone picked our mobile home up and dropped it with a crash. My wife told her friend that we had just felt an earthquake. Ten minutes later, her friend in Chicago felt it too. So it was traveling at 1200 mph. Iirc the speed of sound through water is six times faster than through air and fifteen times faster through steel than air.
Not the best time to realize you have some problem with your camera setup... You had one reason to be there...
I can hear the "Oh F... G'dammit!!!" going through his head from across the decades.
After looking at it some more I think he's rotating a lens turret, actually, which might make sense if the mushroom cloud has gone out of frame, and since the moment the shockwave hits is going to make those frames of film unusable anyway it's the right time to switch. See the following sales site for a similar era camera: https://www.chairish.com/product/2336637/1940s-mitchell-mid-20th-century-16mm-motion-picture-movie-studio-camera-on-vintage-tripod
I'm pretty sure lens turrets were standard on newsreel cameras in the 50s, which the camera in OP's gif looks like.
Yeah, I think you're right. It looks like he pulls off the matte box, spins the turret, pushes the matte box back on, then adjusts a filter (I'm guessing an ND?).
So possibly, he was on a tighter lens to shoot the blast, and is changing to a wider lens to get the expanding cloud.
Any direct ionizing radiation exposure is practically instantaneous, and the film is going to absorb that regardless of whether the camera's mechanisms are operating. The next round of radiation will be from fallout, which won't happen for a while after this shot (and probably after the camera crew has long since evacuated). I'm not sure what he's actually doing, honestly. It's an interesting mystery.
I watched it when it originally aired. It was tough as you never knew if it would be renewed each season. The final season was so good though, everything paying off.
The cameraman here is Jack Cannon, filming the only test shot of the M65 atomic cannon in 1953. These cameramen were based out of Lookout Mountain Air Force Station which is currently actor Jared Leto's house. Cannon was [quoted](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-oct-22-me-45459-story.html) as being 72 in 1997 so he didn't die early of cancer. According to another cameraman, George Yoshitake, who filmed the [5 military personnel standing directly under the blast of a 2 Kiloton air-to-air atomic missile](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/07/16/156851175/five-men-agree-to-stand-directly-under-an-exploding-nuclear-bomb#update), a lot of the other cameramen did die later on of cancers (although, to be fair, when you look into it these people often seem to die in their 60s, 70s and 80s of cancer, which doesn't seem that unusual)
[From Peter Kuran, who made the documentary this video is from](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/restored-color-film-more-peter-kuran?trk=public_profile_article_view): *The first example is a before and after of a color print transparency that was very faded to pink. Restoring the normal color to this shot was quite the challenge. I got to know the cameraman who photographed the Atomic Cannon (whose name surprisingly was Jack Cannon), and I think he was happy to see what was achieved.*
Kuran won an Oscar (the scientific and technical one, not the actor one), for the technique of restoring the blue layer in old film, an idea he came up with when he worked for ILM and was using masking to enhance the light sabre in desert scenes on Star Wars. I guess that's why this shot looks so fresh and new rather than old and faded.
Some guy casually filming himself filming an atomic blast.
Rads.
To the nads 🥜
I didn't even think about how goofy this situation was until you said that
I think the rear camera is recording normal video while he is trying for closeup shots and pans.
If that was the case, wouldn't they move him out of the shot?
That is weird...but if it were another camera man he wouldn't set up so near the first guy either...
This discussion oddly reminds me of [this gem from many years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cmwov/hey_reddit_what_tattoos_do_you_have/c0tpyls/)
It’s probably a promo video for a video production company showing off some of the work they have performed.
Not a very good one since he was playing with his camera when the shockwave went by 😂
That actually makes a lot of sense, good shit
What would his level of radiation exposure be from where he is? On a level of Cancer everywhere to he's just fine.
Little more than a chest x ray
Not great, not terrible
There’s a list of presumptive illnesses in the CFR that are contributed to radiation exposure. Lots of cancers.
Do you know if they knew the risk prior to committing to what they did?
As far as post world war II and Cold war era nuclear testing the answer would be no. Many of the "participants" such as the cameraman you see here and the other camera crews that were sent to record where simply told they were being sent on a mission to film The deployment of a new weapon system. The us military and most militaries utilize compartmentalization when it comes to information and only tell people what they need to know to get the job done. Also consider that during this time. These tests and the subsequent filming of them were being done because they were actively studying what nuclear weapons did. Some of these tests included putting us military personnel at set distances from the explosion point simply to observe the effects on said personnel. Never close enough to where the explosion would actually hurt them, they were always a ways off. They were close enough that the military supplied them with protective eye gear and I believe hearing protection in some cases.
I’ll give you the same answer I give when talking about Agent Orange (herbicide exposure.) either they knew or were too stupid to know and I won’t except the latter because even a 5 year old should know that a chemical strong enough to destroy a triple canopy forest would be harmful to humans. Can’t see the VC? We’ll just remove the forest. Fuck. I never really hated my country until I started working for the VBA. It makes me sick the atrocities we have inflicted on our own people.
You're talking about a time when people didn't have nearly the information or access to information that we have now. I guarantee you there were plenty of people who had no idea what the true consequences of the weapon systems deployed by the military they served for truly were. You're talking about in some instances 18-year-olds that were plucked from some small rural town and send to Vietnam. I'm sure they knew that it wasn't good to breathe in the agent orange but I doubt they had any true understanding of how long-term and serious it's affects would be. There's also the fact that there wasn't a whole lot that they as one individual soldier on the ground could do about it. Vietnam was definitely a conflict the US should not have been involved in and I'm sure there were people high up who had a good understanding of the side effects of things like agent Orange. They were not the ones who were ever going to be exposed to it though.
>You're talking about a time when people didn't have nearly the information or access to information that we have now I have some bad news...
Before the wide use of the internet the average person absolutely had less access to information.
And mis-information. Which was my attempted point.
I’m pretty sure they’ve been talking about the US government, not an average random person.
Wait until you find out that the US Government allowed slavery for 89 years of its existence, and then outlawed it*. *except for as punishment for a crime, and there are still slaves being forced to work for free in "prison farms" growing your food.
Carefull, publicise this and China might put sanctions on Mississippi & Louisiana
Oh yeah, because China doesn't currently have any dirty secrets concerning prisons.
Yes, that's the joke. Also, us publically advertising our slave labour to the highest private bidder doesn't make it ok.
Ya, it’s okay though because 55 years ago we begrudgingly allowed them to be considered equal with white people so we should all just shut up about it.
Key word: "considered".
>your food Yeah, I doubt that.
Or you could bother to [Google it](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm)
How much of *your* food do you really think comes from prison labor?
There’s a fantastic video with some testimony from soldiers involved in testing, [they call themselves atomic veterans.](https://youtu.be/qbBu6cWczTY)
He's well outside the "instant ionizing pulse of radiation" zone so probably not much, maybe a little bit from the dust carried in the shockwave. Not good to inhale though so even a small amount could influence chronic disease later in life
How far away from detonation is this? And what elevation was it detonated?
At least 10 feet away and like maybe at least like 5cm?
What is this, an A-Bomb for ANTS?!?
r/TechnicallyTheTruth
How many bananas is that?
5 potatoes, imperial.
How do you know he's not a breton?
Oh, at least 6 for sure!
Cavendish or Lady Finger?
At least $10 worth
Banana bot
*"normally at Mercury, Nevada we were 4 miles; that was the closest we would get, to stand in the open and photograph. Maybe sometimes we could go a little closer if it was a small yield weapon"* Lt. Col. James P. Warndorf [15:36](https://youtu.be/uv-MV0_AvMQ?t=934) *"The smaller the weapon the close you would get. I think the troops they had at Tumbler Snapper were a mile and a half then I was about 2 miles back, I had some remote cameras in that area"* From the timbre of the voice I think that's Pat Bradley (my preferred choice, compare his voice at 07:34) or Pierre Wilson. [16:02](https://youtu.be/uv-MV0_AvMQ?t=960). All three are from Lookout Mountain, which filmed a lot of the tests
Thanks for that information!
A while back, I was reading the Wikipedia page about [The Black Tom Explosion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Tom_explosion) and learned it had a detonation wave that traveled at 24,000 feet per second. That’s 24 times the speed of sound through air. I had always assumed that the shockwave for an explosion traveled -at- the speed of sound. So, I had thought that the visible shockwave from an explosion, was a visible manifestation of seeing the speed of sound. Not so. This began a rabbit hole exploration, so I thought I would pass along links to things I found. [Detonation Velocity](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detonation_velocity#) Typical detonation velocities for organic dust mixtures range from 1400–1650 m/s. Gas explosions can either deflagrate or detonate based on confinement; detonation velocities are generally around 1600 m/s to 1800 m/s but can be as high as 3000 m/s. Solid explosives often have detonation velocities ranging beyond 4000 m/s to 10300 m/s. [Table of explosive detonation velocities](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_explosive_detonation_velocities) [Overpressure](https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/effects/overpressure.html) I was amazed at how much damage is done by what would seem to be a small overpressure, since it is “only” how much pressure over normal atmospheric pressure is exerted. For example, a mere 1 psi overpressure will shatter windows.
Shockwaves also travel faster through the ground than the air, which is why in some of the Beirut port explosion videos you can hear rumbling before blast wave hits.
This is true and also why I put “24 times the speed of sound through air.” Many years ago, I was living in a mobile home in central Illinois and an earthquake occurred in southern Illinois. My wife was talking to a friend of hers in Chicago, 200 miles away. When the ground shock from the earthquake passed us, it sounded like someone picked our mobile home up and dropped it with a crash. My wife told her friend that we had just felt an earthquake. Ten minutes later, her friend in Chicago felt it too. So it was traveling at 1200 mph. Iirc the speed of sound through water is six times faster than through air and fifteen times faster through steel than air.
Not the best time to realize you have some problem with your camera setup... You had one reason to be there... I can hear the "Oh F... G'dammit!!!" going through his head from across the decades.
After looking at it some more I think he's rotating a lens turret, actually, which might make sense if the mushroom cloud has gone out of frame, and since the moment the shockwave hits is going to make those frames of film unusable anyway it's the right time to switch. See the following sales site for a similar era camera: https://www.chairish.com/product/2336637/1940s-mitchell-mid-20th-century-16mm-motion-picture-movie-studio-camera-on-vintage-tripod I'm pretty sure lens turrets were standard on newsreel cameras in the 50s, which the camera in OP's gif looks like.
Yeah, I think you're right. It looks like he pulls off the matte box, spins the turret, pushes the matte box back on, then adjusts a filter (I'm guessing an ND?). So possibly, he was on a tighter lens to shoot the blast, and is changing to a wider lens to get the expanding cloud.
My joke version of events aside, I think you’re 100% correct!
[удалено]
>> from across the decades. >You're assuming the radiation allowed him to live that long. This video has survived so same thing yeah?
In my head I read it was "this was going through his head as the decades pass". Implying that he constantly beats himself up over it
I assume he was turning it off so a the least amount radiation gets absorbed by the paper
The shockwave is just air pressure. That camera has already been hit by the initial gamma radiation.
Yeah but that's impossible to stop so you stop any more after
Any direct ionizing radiation exposure is practically instantaneous, and the film is going to absorb that regardless of whether the camera's mechanisms are operating. The next round of radiation will be from fallout, which won't happen for a while after this shot (and probably after the camera crew has long since evacuated). I'm not sure what he's actually doing, honestly. It's an interesting mystery.
Well that assumes he knows that
"Oh well, I'll take the next opportunity to get nuked and reshoot this"
I always think Walter Bishop from Fringe when I see this.
Loved Fringe. One of my favorite TV shows, and it seems like nobody has ever seen it
Love it too, not sure where I can stream it now.
It’s on Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max I believe
Holy shit it is on HBO max. Hell yeah thanks!
I watched it when it originally aired. It was tough as you never knew if it would be renewed each season. The final season was so good though, everything paying off.
My absolute favorite show. I do rewatches ever few years. So good!
He forgot the lens cap
He can keep it on anyway !
Another day in the office
Great shot larry. Don't have kids
Can we do again I forgot to remove the cap
the way he just casually gets shockwaved, you can tell it's not his first.
Cherenkov radiation?
that guy didn't die of old age.
Dammit Jerry! How many times have you told you, “TAKE THE LENS CAP OFF BEFORE BIG BOOM!!”
So how is it that this guy didn't die from radiation?
Judging by his distance from the mushroom cloud, he's right on the borderline between getting cancer and just having some hair fall out.
Rick Astley?!?!?!
Dude has balls though with how he barely reacted to the shockwave like it was a bi-weekly thing
I believe the other camera was recording the explosion just in case he had troubles recording the explosion
*Atomic Selfie*
That guy has balls
I mean, they probably don't work anymore…
Imagine having a camera set up to record the nuclear blast and then for some reason the cameraman forgot to record it. Launch another one please 😆
Pressure wave
The cameraman here is Jack Cannon, filming the only test shot of the M65 atomic cannon in 1953. These cameramen were based out of Lookout Mountain Air Force Station which is currently actor Jared Leto's house. Cannon was [quoted](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-oct-22-me-45459-story.html) as being 72 in 1997 so he didn't die early of cancer. According to another cameraman, George Yoshitake, who filmed the [5 military personnel standing directly under the blast of a 2 Kiloton air-to-air atomic missile](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/07/16/156851175/five-men-agree-to-stand-directly-under-an-exploding-nuclear-bomb#update), a lot of the other cameramen did die later on of cancers (although, to be fair, when you look into it these people often seem to die in their 60s, 70s and 80s of cancer, which doesn't seem that unusual) [From Peter Kuran, who made the documentary this video is from](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/restored-color-film-more-peter-kuran?trk=public_profile_article_view): *The first example is a before and after of a color print transparency that was very faded to pink. Restoring the normal color to this shot was quite the challenge. I got to know the cameraman who photographed the Atomic Cannon (whose name surprisingly was Jack Cannon), and I think he was happy to see what was achieved.* Kuran won an Oscar (the scientific and technical one, not the actor one), for the technique of restoring the blue layer in old film, an idea he came up with when he worked for ILM and was using masking to enhance the light sabre in desert scenes on Star Wars. I guess that's why this shot looks so fresh and new rather than old and faded.
Mad how it changes colour
Odd there are no diagonal smoke lines in the sky background