As for “suppression,” I doubt they were kept “secret” for any classification reason, but were definitely not passed out as part of the press kits, because of their quality, and because the Manhattan Project at that point had a very tightly coordinated public relations front it was trying to put out there. The fact that there were barely any photographs of the cloud itself from Trinity has always been odd to me — it’s one of the few tests where the “public” photos focus almost exclusively on the fireball.

I’m 65 years old, and grew up three blocks from L.A. International Airport. Which is like living in the black ring of the bulls-eye painted on LA- what with Douglas, North American, Rockwell, Hughes, Rocket-dyne, Northrup, General Dynamics, Motorola, TRW, etx. and the thousands of small job shops supporting the US Aerospace and Defense industries within a five mile radius. I don’t know what you do or don’t know, but there were no secrets about the A-Bomb. Just look at the dates of information and material that was released. There was no conspiracy about suppressing information about fallout from the “mushroom clouds”,or it’s lethality in general, or surviving it in particular. Between Linus Pauling, Robert Oppenhemier, Teller, Bertrand Russell, and the scores of Manhattan Project scientists, the full implication of nuclear war was well known, and well documented, and I might add, also, thoroughly investigated by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and HUAC. I had nightmares about the bomb until I saw Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. But to go to your issue, on that morning in Alamogordo, there was no shortage of motion picture cameras; they were shooting from 16 and 32 Kilometers from point of event. The photos in series you reference were not motion photography- they were still cameras- literally pin hole cameras, with one exposure per camera. Some were heavily fogged from radiation, some disabled by blast, gamma, and emf. The few images of the “cloud” rising in the sky is the result of the brightness of the cloud in the pre-dawn darkness, film speed, and exposure criteria. It was in predawn darkness that the event occurred, and given the exposure latitude of film and aperture, distance and altitude, whether those columnar clouds were recorded, or not, I doubt that they would have been suppressed as much as they were very poor quality images.

Sincerely,

Matt C.