Just how powerful are nuclear explosions? We want to hear what you think about this article.The Top 10 Largest Nuclear Explosions, Visualized “It haunts me to think of what I had witnessed,” says a man in the film, “and not realized at the time the import of what we were doing … serving as guinea pigs.” Most went on to believe that they were not allowed to talk about their experiences, even to seek help for their health problems. “Most of the atomic veterans didn’t even know the oath of secrecy was lifted,” Knibbe said. One of the few studies conducted on atomic veterans found that the 3,000 participants in a 1957 nuclear test suffered from leukemia at more than twice the rate of their peers.īill Clinton relieved the veterans’ oath of secrecy in 1994, but the announcement was eclipsed by news from the O. atomic veterans, all of whom share similar stories of the government’s intransigence. Knibbe said he has spoken with more than 100 U.S. “For 10 years now, I’ve been trying to get compensation, but the government does not want to admit that anybody was harmed by any radiation,” says one man in the film. “The veterans are consistently denied compensation.” “Until this day, a lot of what has happened-and the radiation-related diseases the veterans have contracted and passed on to the generations after them-is still being covered up,” Knibbe said. What appalled Knibbe the most was how the U.S. It was something really difficult for them to describe.” They were confronted with an enemy they could never defeat. “It was like they saw the creation of the universe. “They were confronted by such an incredible destructive power that they were immediately shocked into an existential crisis,” Knibbe said. He was stunned and saddened by what he learned. Knibbe began trying to contact veterans through the National Association of Atomic Veterans, eventually traveling across the United States to meet them and hear their stories. “I was baffled by the lack of recorded testimonies available,” he said. civil-defense footage of soldiers maneuvering in the glare of the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb, he was “absolutely amazed and wanted to learn more about their stories.” His efforts to dig deeper were curtailed by the fact that most of the information about the nuclear tests was classified-including reports on the illnesses the veterans suffered and the radioactive pollution that was released into the environment around the test sites. Knibbe told me that he has long been fascinated with the self-destructive tendencies of mankind. There’s no need for archival footage the story is writ large in the faces of the veterans, who struggle to find the right words to express the horror of what they saw during the tests and what they struggled with in the decades after. Knibbe’s spare filmmaking approach foregrounds details and emotion. They talk about how they’ve been haunted-by nightmares, PTSD, and various health afflictions, including cancer. They recount the terror in their officers’ faces and the tears and panic that followed the blasts. They describe how the blast knocked them to the ground how they could see the bones and blood vessels in their hands, like viewing an X-ray.
In Knibbe’s film, some of these atomic veterans break the forced silence to tell their story for the very first time. Breaking it even to talk among themselves was considered treason, punishable by a $10,000 fine and 10 or more years in prison. They were told to cover their face with their arms.Īfter the tests, the soldiers, many of whom were traumatized, were sworn to an oath of secrecy. For protection, they wore utility jackets, helmets, and gas masks. government conducted more than 1,000 nuclear tests, during which unwitting troops were exposed to vast amounts of ionizing radiation. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an estimated 400,000 American soldiers and sailors also observed nuclear explosions-many just a mile or two from ground zero. Many tales of the atomic bomb, however, weren’t told at all. “It was completely daylight at midnight-brighter than the brightest day you ever saw,” says another. “The colors were beautiful,” remembers a man in Morgan Knibbe’s short documentary The Atomic Soldiers. Nearly everyone who’s seen it and lived to tell the tale describes it the same way: a horrifying, otherworldly thing of ghastly beauty that has haunted their life ever since.
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