[All speech is from the original newsreels]
Five
Four
Three
Two
One
Fire!
The new French nuclear testing base in Moruroa atoll
and the countdown well advanced for their first A-Bomb explosion.
French scientists have moved from their Sahara test ground to this atoll
500 miles from Tahiti.
After the explosion, a number of countries protested
but the French plan many more tests.
Cassidy airfield, on Christmas Island in the far Pacific,
waiting to make history...
for Britain's first hydrogen bomb is about to be exploded.
Not until 10 seconds after the flash may anyone turn
and look at huge fireball - even through goggles -
for so intense is this man-made sun that people ten miles away,
with their backs turned and their hands over their eyes, are conscious of its fantastic brilliance.
As the heat spreads outwards, clouds are evaporated in a fraction of a second
and new ones created.
Here is another view of the tremendous explosion taken from a Shackleton aircraft for the task force.
We're flying over the Marshall Islands in the Central Pacific.
Here on the atoll of Enewetak, on a tiny island named Elugelab,
the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Department
are preparing to explode the world's most fearsome weapon: the first hydrogen bomb.
The building which houses the device, nicknamed Mike,
is called the cab. The island of Elugelab itself is referred to as the shot island.
Built to collect scientific data, a plywood tube,
looking like boxwood cars, runs two miles to a detection station on Bogen Island.
Look at the shockwave as it rolls towards the flagship.
From Bikini atoll on the other side of the world.
This is the first peacetime test of atomic energy.
To test the effect of the deadliest nuclear weapon yet,
boxes will snap open fifteen seconds before the explosion
containing samples of wood, paper, cloth, grass and tree branches.
Skiffs are launched at predetermined spots bearing instruments which will measure
radioactive fallout.
Bomb gone.
And at once the supersonic giant banks sharply to race for safety.
It'll be fifty miles away when the bomb explodes at 10,000 feet.
From another plane 50 miles away, we watch the terrifying site of a manmade sun
searing the atmosphere with a force equal to 10 million tons of TNT.
Fallout levels from Russia's nuclear explosions
thus far do not warrant undue public concern.
Soviet government recently detonated
a large nuclear device in their Arctic proving grounds in Novaya Zemlya.
Although the largest proportion of debris from this device was injected into the high stratosphere,
some part was left behind in the lower atmosphere to contribute to the immediate fallout.
They will kill all of us before they are done.
Makes you wonder...
what's going to happen to the kiddies in 20 years time?
I don't wonder.
I know.