The Beginning of the End of the World
An American physicist had the unsettling task of documenting the first nuclear explosion July 16, 1945, an event "brighter than a thousand suns."
Seconds before the world’s first nuclear explosion on July 16, 1945, Julian Mack smelled smoke — the machine gun turret he converted into a camera tripod had caught fire. Mack’s assistant yelled that he was cutting the power. “No, no!” Mack shouted. “The cameras are still running, let it burn!”1
Then, at 5:29 a.m., there was a blinding flash. As the massive fireball reached into the dark sky, Mack’s assistant, in awe, said, “My God, it’s beautiful.”
“No,” Mack responded, “It’s terrible.”2
Mack was head of G-11, the photography group in the Weapons Physics Division on the Manhattan Project. Mack and his chief photographer, Berlyn Brixner, were responsible for “spectrographic and photographic measurements” of Trinity — the nuclear test led by J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Under the code names “Aches” and “Pains,” Mack and Brixner meticulously installed these 52 cameras across four photo bunkers in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico.
3 Fastax 8mm cameras
3 Fastax 16mm cameras
3 Slow Fastax 16mm cameras
3 Fastax Primocard 16mm cameras
4 Mitchell 35mm cameras
24 Kodak Cine “E” 16mm cameras
2 Fairchild K-17B Aero cameras
4 Fairchild K-17B Aero cameras with stereographic capabilities
3 Shock Switch Cameras
2 Pinhole Cameras
1 Still Camera
A surprisingly unscientific handwritten description of the cameras and results appeared in Mack’s 1946 report, July 16th Nuclear Explosion, Space-Time Relationships.
Brixner designed the camera bunkers with “very thick lead glass windows.”
Cameras were also mounted on top of the bunker, positioned 10,000 yards north of the detonation site.
“At the left, a 35mm Mitchell camera and four 16mm Kodak Cine E cameras are seen mounted on a panoraming turret,” Brixner wrote in Photographing the First Atomic Explosion.
It’s a good thing they set up so many cameras. Of the 52, only 11 produced usable images. Some comments from the report: “Film badly fogged.” “Camera motor failed to start.” “Poor results.” “Fades out rapidly to nothing.” “No image until daylight.” “Film blank. Reason unknown.”
Despite the challenges, Mack and Brixner managed to captured over 100,000 images of the test. The results are disturbing.
“I was temporarily blinded,” Brixner told the Albuquerque Journal in 2008. “I saw this tremendous ball of fire, and it was rising. I was just spellbound! I followed it as it rose. Then it dawned on me. I'm the photographer! I've gotta get that ball of fire.”
“There was no sound. It all took place in absolute silence,” Brixner recalled.
Berlyn Brixner is most often credited for the Trinity photos and videos, despite the cameras being remotely triggered. The exception is this photo by Julian Mack, taken with a pinhole camera.
Mack said much of their film was solarized and blistered by “what was perhaps the greatest photographic over-exposure ever made.”3
Yet, the pinhole photos survived — despite what Mack’s report says (“film blank, reason unknown.”)
Mack and Brixner had the foresight to position another photographer, Neil York, twenty miles northwest of the detonation. York, a civilian, shot this haunting image with a still camera, capturing cloud rings caused by the shock of the explosion.
Mack used York’s photos in his report, Semi-Popular Motion-Picture Record of the Trinity Explosion, to depict the size of the explosion relative to the Empire State Building.
It’s quite possibly the most bizarre and twisted PowerPoint ever created.
The only color photo that survived was taken by Jack Aeby, a 21-year-old amateur photographer. Aeby was a civilian employee on the Manhattan Project, working under Nobel Prize-winning physicist Emilio Segrè.
“Film was hard to come by during the war,” Aeby recalled. He’d gotten his hands on some Anscochrome color film but had only four frames left by the time of the detonation. Aeby donned his government-issued welding goggles, not realizing they were cracked. He set his shutter to “bulb” and waited.
At 5:29 a.m., an explosion of light leaked through the crack in Aeby’s goggles. “I released the shutter, cranked the diaphragm down, changed the shutter speed and fired three times in succession,” Aeby recalled in Craig Nelson’s The Age of Radiance. “I quit at three because I was out of film.”
Had Aeby not been temporarily blinded by the crack in his goggles, he wouldn’t have known to stop down and the photos would have been overexposed, ruined.
Read more about Jack Aeby in The Only Color Photo of the First Nuclear Explosion.
During my research I stumbled upon these fascinating employee badges from the Manhattan Project, taken by an unknown photographer. Pictured left to right is Julian Mack, Berlyn Brixner, and Jack Aeby. There’s no ID badge for Neil York because he wasn’t an employee of the Manhattan Project.
The most captivating of the ID badges is, of course, the portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer — the “father of the atomic bomb” who led the Manhattan Project.
But this photo of Oppenheimer by the legendary Alfred Eisenstaedt is the definitely most well-known. Eisenstaedt photographed Oppenheimer’s piercing gaze and signature porkpie hat for LIFE magazine in 1947.
Eisenstaedt photographed Oppenheimer again in 1963. The color palette is sublime. His expression feels...beleaguered.
After the test, Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Twenty-one days later, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, another atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki. Over 200,000 people were killed — the deadliest act of violence in human history.
Lansing Lamont, Day of Trinity (London: Hutchinson Limited, 1966), 230.
Lansing Lamont, Day of Trinity (London: Hutchinson Limited, 1966), 242.
Rachel Fermi and Esther Samra, Picturing the Bomb (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995), 148.
Imagine the disappointment of opening 41 cameras and finding no usable images but still getting 100,000 images!