Movie Bombs

Tuesday, June 16, 1998 | 9:02 a.m.

Cameraman Al O'Donnell of Las Vegas remembers being nervous when the big, burly man lumbered near his camera equipment set to capture a top-secret nuclear weapons blast.

Thinking the dark, bushy-haired stranger planned to clean his photo perch, O'Donnell asked him to leave. But the man was no janitor.

He was physicist Edward Teller, father of the U.S. hydrogen bomb, the super weapon of the Cold War that locked the United States into a tense nuclear arms race with the former Soviet Union for almost 40 years. Teller had come to Enewetak Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, to observe how well one of his atomic designs worked.

O'Donnell had gone to Enewetak as a photographer for EG&G Inc., a company that did high-tech monitoring of nuclear weapons tests. Based in Boston, EG&G had set up a Las Vegas office in 1953, on what is today Commerce Street, to film nuclear weapons exploding above ground at the Nevada Test Site.

"I can assure you, Dr. Teller surely knows me now," O'Donnell said, remembering when Dr. Harold Edgerton (the E in EG&G) ordered him to move from Boston to Southern Nevada for a year. O'Donnell -- whose son, Bill, is a state senator -- has been in Las Vegas ever since.

At the Clark County Library last week, O'Donnell shared his story with about 120 people who viewed films once kept secret by the government.

Before the new era of openness displayed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Defense Department, O'Donnell refused to talk about his work at the Nevada Test Site or anywhere else. He praised the new breed of DOE workers dedicated to declassifying information.

"This is a part of our history," Pat Bodin, who is in charge of opening the DOE's files at the Nevada Operations Office, explained. "This is the first time the films have ever been edited for public release."

EG&G's Edgerton, Kenneth Germeshausen and Herbert Grier met in the 1930s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Edgerton, a professor and inventor of the modern stroboscope -- a motion measuring device -- teamed up with Germeshausen and Grier to pioneer electronic flash equipment. Edgerton was called "Papa Flash" by underwater adventurer Jacques Cousteau.

O'Donnell went to work for EG&G in Boston. He learned the art of capturing on film images of objects traveling eight times the speed of sound. That talent came in handy when photographing nuclear weapons explosions.

When filming began at the Nevada Test Site, Las Vegas boasted a population of 20,000, and there were no high-rising buildings. Only Fremont Street's neon signs pierced the night sky.

Unlocking the mysteries

Bodin noted that the films were used to provide information to the public, for training and for analyzing the effects of the weapons tests. Some have been lost or destroyed, while others have been stored under conditions less than ideal.

DOE's Albuquerque Operations Office and Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico are transferring old, deteriorating films to videotape.

The DOE began freeing information buried under a national security blanket in 1994. Then, President Clinton and former Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary announced the opening of the most secret files of nuclear testing and human radiation experiments.

Much of the films, photographs and documents are available at the Coordination and Information Center at the DOE's headquarters in North Las Vegas on Losee Road, Bodin said.

It will take five to seven years to release 6,500 known films, 2 million documents and 250,000 photographs once kept under lock and key, said Byron Ristvet, program manager for the Defense Department's Nuclear Information Analysis Center in Albuquerque, N.M.

The only material removed from films, photos or records is any information regarding the nuclear elements contained in the actual weapons, Ristvet said. "The rest of it is all there," he said.

The major task for the DOE and the DOD is restoring 16mm and 35mm films that will disintegrate in 100 years, Hollywood producer and director Peter Kuran said.

Kuran, who began his career at George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic, heads his own special effects studio, Visual Concept Engineering. He has worked on "Star Wars," "Star Trek II," "Star Trek V" and "Beetlejuice."

He completed his own 92-minute documentary, "Trinity and Beyond," which used previously classified government footage of the creation and tests of atomic and hydrogen bombs since the first blast exploded on July 16, 1945 in Alamogordo, N.M. The weapon was called "Trinity."

Kuran, of Sylmar, Calif., brought to light the fact that the United States tested 331 atomic bombs above ground. He also captured a few detonated in space as a defense against an incoming nuclear attack from Russia.

Record of destruction

Early color films of Nevada's above-ground nuclear tests, where mushroom clouds grew hundreds of feet tall in the dry desert air, are often scratched and pock-marked.

Kuran mounts the films or photos on computer, then painstakingly removes the defects bit-by-bit using a mouse. He also restores the natural colors of sky and atomic fireballs.

He uses a new system called Restored Color Image (RCI) to re-create and preserve the original negatives of the government's films rescued from the archives.

The footage Kuran has brought to light appears surreal. Take "Doom Town," a 1953 black-and-white film using the 3-D Dunning Process. The narrator is a reporter who is sent to Las Vegas for an atomic test. The reporter/actor is shown wandering the Test Site with a two-story colonial house, stuck in the middle of the desert.

"It was all make-believe until dawn the next day," the actor said. "Dawn can come up like thunder."

The atomic bomb explodes. The blast tears the cozy house to bits. A family of mannequins is buried in the rubble. The reporter marvels at the power of the nuclear blast, as the film ends on an ironic note: "No man has ever come up with a plan for a blade of grass."

The Civil Defense Agency film tried to calm nuclear fears among the public. In one clip, a woman enjoys a can of roast beef cooked by the heat from an atomic blast.

The secrecy shrouding nuclear weapons and their experiments extended to the photographers and filmmakers brought in by the U.S. Air Force.

When the United States began testing atomic weapons, the government went to Hollywood for help. The federal record was a blank after the 1945 destruction of Japan's two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- no film of nuclear tests existed. So military officials went to the best in the business during the early tests in the Pacific.

In top secret, the top filmmakers in the world formed a shadow studio. They came and went under lock and key. They kept their work as secret as summer's blockbusters.

Kuran produced and directed a documentary on this aspect of the secret bomb project called "Atomic Filmmakers." The secret Lookout Mountain Studio perched in Hollywood's hills lasted from 1945 to 1963.

Videos: Video courtesy of Department of Energy and Vegas Deluxe. You will need the Quicktime plug-in to see these videos. You can download it free at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/.

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