User Reviews

Because 90% of the things found on the Periscope Films Youtube channel don't have a page on this website, I really have to scrape the bottom of the barrel in order to locate something suitable to talk about. It's rare to find a public domain film that is both on IMDB and actually manages to be decent, but I thought this short from the 1950s was good enough. It's really similar to another short I talked about some weeks ago because they both involve nuclear weapons, but this one is different in the regard that it only examines their use when it comes to testing and not as part of an attack. The film focuses on an atomic test site in the US state of Nevada, which back in the late 40s and early 50s, was the government's go-to place for testing nukes because of its wide open and barely populated desert landscapes. We see huge explosions, as well as spectators observing an atomic test from an uncomfortably close distance. By this point, people were aware of the fact that radiation is cancerous, so planes sent to observe mushroom clouds and track their movements with instruments are hosed down after their sorties. I thought this was pretty interesting since it's not often we hear about clouds being tracked, let alone atomic ones. We also learn how special sunglasses are made to shield your eyes from the effects of an extremely bright explosion. Without them, you can be easily blinded and the brightness is so intense it's possible to see right through your skin for a few seconds. Later on, they do an experiment to find out how aircraft, both new and obsolete, will be affected by a nearby nuclear blast in order to better understand how to shelter them against an enemy attack. Finally, we see a B-50 bomber drop a nuke onto a target from an altitude of about 6 miles, or 32 thousand feet. Because this film was only 14 minutes, I try not to criticize that much, but it doesn't contain much I haven't seen already. At least it went over some things I wasn't aware of, like the plane washing process to get rid of radioactive particles, or how to track a mushroom cloud in a plane. Apart from this, there's not much to say. I'm just curious to know the total number of all these atomic bomb films made during that decade, since there must be thousands of them. The fear of them back then just devoured everything around it.

Carey Wilson narrates this short subject about the atomic bomb testing carried out in Nevada. At the time this movie was made, about twenty nuclear bombs had been detonated in the Silver State. Over the course of this short, about half that number of mushroom clouds arise on the screen.

The movie makes clear -- within, as Wilson notes, the issue of security -- that the purpose of running these tests is to ascertain the effects on structures, including the planes which release the bombs, and those within the blast and radiation perimeters. Here is discussion of the safety procedures taken for those who participate.