I. Bikini


Relatively few people have actually seen any amount of uranium with their own eyes, and presumably, for the majority of those who haven’t, that is just fine. Yet for a thing so seldom encountered, this ultimate and heaviest of the naturally-occurring elements exerts an extraordinary power over our imagination; it enjoys, rather like the devil, a baleful fame extravagantly out of proportion to our direct experience of it. Of course, there are good reasons for this, and here photography has played a critical role. For most of us, perhaps even mores than in the heroic years of the atomic age, when peaceful applications of uranium were touted with somewhat more insistence and innocence, uranium has become synonymous with the most drastic and terrible expressions of its remarkable properties, atomic weapons and the uncanny suite of destructive forces they are capable of unleashing. And what we know of atomic weapons is almost exclusively a consequence of photography and motion pictures.

The devil may be notoriously hard to capture on film, but the bomb is doable. For all the difficulties involved in photographing a nuclear explosion, and they are legion, some if not all of the world’s 527 known atmospheric detonations rank among the most exhaustively photographed and disseminated events in history. Of the two early postwar tests at Bikini Atoll undertaken as Operation Crossroads in 1946, it was officially reported that more than 50,000 stills and 1,500,000 feet of movie film were taken. The Army Air Force roster alone counted 328 cameras, including what was then the world’s largest aerial camera, with a 48” telephoto lens capable of resolving the dial of a wristwatch from a quarter of a mile away, and high-speed movie cameras with top ends around 10,000 frames per second.

Particularly in these early tests, when the reality of nuclear weapons was as yet only vaguely grasped by the general publics of the world and perhaps as poorly by their leaders, the photo-op presented by a successful test was not merely a propaganda moment to be seized. As nuclear doctrine began to coalesce during the stirrings of what would become the Cold War, it was seen to be vital to the efficacy of the weapons themselves. Many decision makers had begun to believe that these weapons had no actual military use. And so because they could never or must never be used, it had to be made abundantly clear what would occur if they were. Gun emplacements in boats and planes were refitted with camera mounts and were prepared to receive a new type of weapon in a war, it was beginning to be understood, would largely be fought as far as possible with images of explosions rather that the explosions themselves.

For this reason, early nuclear tests often assumed a theatrical dimension perversely resembling major prêt-a-porter shows, where vast walls of lenses wait at the end of the runway to absorb in a sudden eruption of flashguns a torrent of images from each approaching model. Images which almost as quickly are fed to television screens, magazine covers and newspapers, in a brief, radial burst of pictures across the world. Many thousands of individuals witnessed the Bikini Blasts, but the opening of the foreword to one of the many PR products of Operation Crossroads, a 224 page illustrated book entitled Operation Crossroads: The Official Pictorial Record makes it clear the special emphasis Joint Task Force One placed on photography. Already ornate with the theological nuance that would become the hallmark of talk of the bomb, it opens:

“No man really saw what happened at Bikini. Approximately 42,000 persons, drawn from the four corners of the globe, travelled thousands of miles to stage and witness the tests. But an atomic bomb defies scrutiny. It shuns publicity. It shields its intense life-span in a flash of light many times the brilliance of the sun. It dazzles human eyes […]…Itself the result of man’s intellect, the bomb defies examination by its creator.
And yet, the Bikini tests were thoroughly observed. Supplementing human onlookers were 10,000 instruments, and among them cameras, constructed to record what the human eye could never see. Cameras are inquisitive instruments with long memories. In the field of atomic research they are indeed star witnesses. Their story may appear differently to the scientist and the layman. But all may grasp its general significance.”

The stream of images pouring out of the processing labs at the U.S. Naval Photographic Science Laboratory at Anacostia, D.C. were quick to find their places on the covers of LIFE magazine, the front pages of Pravda and countless newsreels narrated in dozens of languages. Spread before the eyes of the world, these images nourished the fear and credibility of a threat whose incredible proportions themselves might otherwise undermine its military value. Not because a victory derived from using the bomb might involve so much destruction as to be Pyrrhic, but simply because its effects were so incredible that without some strong visual aids, people had a hard time getting their mind around the scale of the new weapon. And from there the Bikini pictures went on to become part of the endlessly circulating visual “proof” of what nuclear weapons are capable of, here making an appearance in movies like Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, there in a Civil Defense film, and now in these uranotype prints, which look back to an entirely different period in the history of this remarkable metal.

II. URANIUM DAYS: Notes on Uranium Photography

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