Hi /r/askhistorians I love lurking around here. I hope you can help.
I'm writing a fictional novel set in Las Vegas at the start of the testing at the NTS dealing with atomic parties and general atomic culture in the US.
I am trying to find out when people first saw actual footage of the atomic bombs from Nagasaki and Hiroshima like on the television news or a real picture of a mushroom cloud in the newspaper, not just text descriptions of it so that I can get a feel for what context they may have had seeing them live from Vegas/how novel it really was.
Most all of the images and video I have seen don't make it clear when they were released to the public just when they were taken, regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the newspaper articles I have found from that time tend not to include photographs which tells me people probably weren't seeing much.
There was definitely a shift from keeping nuclear explosions secret to using them as propaganda about patriotism and using the tests to stoke fear and obedience and whatnot as we went through the 50s. I also know there was lots of purposeful and some accidental disinformation on fallout and safety and such.
Additionally, I know that Ranger Charlie was the first televised bomb test and Ranger Easy was the first LIVE broadcast televised bomb test, but I wondered if there were any resources on viewers reactions to seeing the tests on TV (not people at the NTS site, I have read many accounts from people present at News Nob and such). I found one account that said television viewers were not impressed because the TVs at the time didn't really convey the power of the bomb and they couldn't figure what they were looking at, but that's it.
I just want to know to what extent everyday people had been exposed to actual real images of the bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the dawn of testing at the NTS. Like, what would the general citizen have seen up to 1951?
Thanks!
Photographs of the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were released shortly after the attacks, as were photographs of the Trinity blast (some of which were mushroomy, but it is of interest to me that the idea that the cloud was what was interesting was not at all obvious to the photographers of Trinity, who took MANY more photographs of the fireball). By mid-1946 they were very common — the hype surrounded the Crossroads tests (which were visible to not only to the public but even had international observers) contributed to this. Here's TIME magazine from July 1945 — a merging of the Trinity cloud and the Nagasaki cloud, both of which were well-known at that point.
The place to look for images it not newspapers, whose ability to print good images was very limited, but newsmagazines, which were extremely popular in the mid-20th century, in part because of their color printing capabilities. Fortunately the king of all of them for the time period, LIFE, is fully available online. Here's the Hiroshima cloud, August 20, 1945. Nagasaki's is on the next page.
There were more reports on test series than you might have expected in place like LIFE. Remember that there were only three test series (Trinity, Crossroads, Sandstone) prior to Ranger — the first two were highly publicized and public after they were conducted. Sandstone was a weapons-development series and so was more secretive, but even it was in LIFE within a year!
Just a tip for researching with LIFE: if you click on any of those Google Books links, put in a search term at the left ("atomic" works better than "nuclear" — you have to think rather middlebrow), then select "search all issues" and it'll ONLY search LIFE magazine. It's a great resource; I find LIFE is a great way to gauge how the "general public" at the time might have known or understood something, as it is very middle-of-the-road publication (not highbrow, etc.).
