1951: For the first time, television viewers witness the live detonation of an atomic bomb blast, as KTLA in Los Angeles broadcasts the blinding light produced by a nuclear device dropped on Frenchman Flats, Nevada.

One of a hundred above-ground nuclear tests conducted between 1951 and 1962 in the Nevada desert, the A-bomb telecast found its way into the history books (and blogs) when cameramen secretly positioned on top of a Las Vegas hotel focused on the blast. The images were relayed to the station’s transmitter on Mount Wilson Observatory about 200 miles away, and early-bird viewers saw their television screens fill with white light at 5:30 in the morning.

Witnessing the blast telecast first-hand was KTLA reporter Stan Chambers. In a YouTube interview, Chambers described how station manager Klaus Landsberg pulled off the unauthorized broadcast. “We couldn’t get near the field, because it was all top secret. Klaus sent a crew to Las Vegas and put them on top of one of the hotels…. They kept the camera open for the flash of light that would come on when the blast went off.”

Los Angeles viewers tuned in for the one-off event. “We had a rating that was very large for 5:30 in the morning,” Chambers recalled. In the pre-videotape era, there were of course no replays as newsmen Gil Martin, anchoring from Las Vegas, and station staffer Robin Lane at Mount Wilson reported the incident. Chambers continued:

We stayed on the air, they waited for the right time, and all of a sudden there was the flash. The people watched it, Gil described it, Lane talked about it, and that was our telecast. That one flash. You just see this blinding white light. It didn’t seem real. We didn’t have videotape. You couldn’t say, “Let’s look at it again.”

1951’s Ranger Easy bomb was designed to test compression against critical mass in the Demon core, so-called because the plutonium mass became unstable and caused the radiation-poisoning death of a Los Alamos scientist. A B-50 bomber plane dropped the test weapon above the Nevada Test Site about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Part of the Department of Energy’s Operation Ranger program, “Easy” delivered a 1-kiloton payload.

In the decade that followed Operation Ranger, A-bomb tests from Buster-Jangle, Tumbler-Snapper, Upshot-Knothole, Plumbbob, Nougat, Sunbeam and other programs became so commonplace that watching mushroom clouds turned into a Las Vegas tourist attraction.

In 1952, KTLA set up the first live, national feed for a Nevada atomic bomb explosion. That one was carried by the major networks.

Source: Various

Photo: The Buster Easy atomic test blast at the Nevada test site took place later in 1951, on Nov. 5.

Courtesy Archive.org

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