Operation Cue (1964 Revision) 

My uncle was a photographer in the military in the 50s/60s. He filmed a lot at these test sites. Im not sure where or when or the subject matter. We lost him in 1968 due to cancer. He was 38 years old.

I swear i can watch Everything from the 40s, 50s and 60s. TV, Movies, Documentations, commercials... Just everything

Remember seeing this when I was a kid. Really freaked me out. It still chills me, actually.

I was hoping to see that refrigerator flying by that Indiana Jones was hiding in.

12:50 What a great Idea having a picnic after the detonation under radioactive fallout

One of my uncles was a soldier who was too young to go into WW2 but joined a couple years after and he showed me photographs of that explosion where they had him and others a distance away with welding goggles and told them to just hang out, take pictures and see what happened. He lived until around the year 2000 and said he started getting worried in the 80's that he might get cancer but none of the guys there seemed to have higher incident rates than anyone else so they must have been quite a ways out. Crazy how often our government just uses soldiers for experiments over the years.

Like Dad always said, “if they drop the bomb, I hope it goes down my chimney”. Nice and quick death.

“ No mannequins we’re injured during the making of this film “

I was a newspaper reporter for many years. The best thing I ever saw in the desert was a Space Shuttle landing. I feel cheated.

The way the blast blew out, then sucked back was eerie.

I wonder how many of the field personnel were exposed to fallout after the blast. At 24 hours, the radiation would still be pretty high near the site.

A Fact- but not a fun fact: The Nevada test sites were not considered to have substantial radioactivity, neither lingering or dangerous to humans who were only visiting on a temporary basis. John Wayne and filmcrew made the movie _The Conquerer,_ based on the Mongolian leader Genghis Khan. Much of the cast and crew (including Wayne, his leading lady Susan Hayward & producer Dick Powell) died of multiple types of metastic cancer in the following decade.

Then after inspection they had lunch at ground zero. I wonder what their lives was like a few years later. I had a good friend in Idaho who has passed. He was what they called an atomic veteran. He had to stand guard at Hiroshima just days after the war was ended. He suffered with many different types of unusual cancers. He could never get help from the VA. The VA didn't think radiation on a huge level had anything to do with his many different out breaks of cancer.

so this is where those iconic house-exploding shot come from

The only winning move is NOT to play.

I like how the painter is putting the finishing touches on a house that’s going to be blown to smithereens😂

"Rows of mannequins are set up in the open, facing the blast." Probably my favourite quote from this, like dry humor

I wonder how many who joined this test are still alive or how many died earlier with cancer?

ive been watching these nuclear vault vids for 40 years. suddenly they are massively popular on youtube

"The power substation was mostly unharmed..." -He obviously meant the one placed "a great distance away". Let's see the one next to the shot tower.- Nope, downloaded the written report from DTIC and that was the close one. 4700 feet from ground zero. Other one was around 2 miles away.

Perhaps the most amazing thing here is at 3:15 with the guy climbing down the entire pole without any safety harness! Geez!

"Well, what if I built my house in..." "It doesn't matter." "But, what if I used..." "It doesn't matter..."

the picnic at the end was pretty wholesome all considered

I love the cheery music played at the beginning - like we're going to watch a documentary about flowers. LOL

It blows everything away but not the camera. 🤔

I love how they bring the civilians and reporters to the "small yield" gadgets. Opinions change when you see the crater a 10 megaton gadget leaves.

The isotopes hitting the film tells me they all died much younger than they normally would have. All of them.

Hey, I saw that one before! Indiana Jones was there and survived in the lead lined refrigerator! 😮

So glad some of the mannequins survived.

If I ever do anything so stupid it ends up on national news, I'd really appreciate it if the narrator of this film was the person explaining to the general public how I was simultaneously electrocuted and drowned while being shot out of a cannon on a bicycle while dressed as a banana.

It past 24 hours, I think it’s good to go in. Few years later all died of some type of cancer or other. Great job guys

Duck and cover is now fuck it's over.

They could have learned all of this for the price of a ticket to Hiroshima. I graduated from high school in 1985 and we all knew we were completely screwed. No digging, no stocking cans, if you’re within 3 miles you’re dead.

Seems like people accepted the nightmare easily back then almost eagerly

"As a wife and mother, my interest was peaked at GROCERIES."

On the test ground after…. 24 hours??? 😮

I remember the CD I remember when the hidden facilities and checking the supplies and rotating out the medications from the VIP bunkers. But most of the bunkers were stocked and never touched after that. The water and food boxes and radiation medicine sat for decades. In some of the bunkers were in active buildings and the people in charge over the years were made aware of the supplies and bunkers but they sat unused and unvisited It was really amazing seeing the doors that had no names. No clue as to what was behind them. Opening these doors and seeing a set of stairs and long hallways and it looked like a scene from the Matrix. And then seeing the bunkers and the supplies and one of the things that I noticed was how little dust there was. This is a testimony of how well they built these facilities. And to have these hidden and kept secret for 50 years is incredible

That guy in the charred suit looked sharper than half of my colleagues on a Thursday afternoon

I can't believe after only 24 hours the just allowed people to go to the site with no protective gear and even ate while they were there.

Thank you for saving this piece of film history. "The Day We Bombed Utah" book. The prevailing wind currents took radiation from those above ground tests over Utah. The government knew Mormons were famously patriotic and likely not to complain during the 1950's "heated" cold war testing to protect the nation. 2000-2010 driving near Cedar City, Utah the car radio warned of a blowing wind storm increasing the dust radiation level and recommending persons to stay indoors.

Getting a big Fallout 3 vibe from that introduction. Scary.

8:20 Fact: Never volunteer for anything for the government or military

So was that "feed" from those irradiated groceries they laid in the trenches? Those people had no idea how being there 24 hours after an atomic blast, how much damn radiation they were exposed to. That's nuts.

The sinister way that houses take fire from the intense radiation before being annihilated

I toured this site a couple years ago. It was a blast!

Funner Fact: The movie The Conqueror was filmed in Utah mostly at the Snow Canyon state park. John Wayne was a chain smoker for his entire life. He had a lung removed from lung cancer. Trying to imply that radiation caused Wayne's cancer is specious at best.

9:46 Pegasus makes a very brief appearance before being obliterated by the blast wave.

they had no idea the entire area is absolutely swimming with radiation, they are picking things up and smelling it lol wow

All of the people you see examining the aftermath of the explosion probably died from radiation exposure some time after this film was made.

How did the cameras and more importantly film survive!?

these tests proved the futility of surviving a blast in a surface building!

I'm wondering if a halved oblate spheroid, low to the ground, would be the the best shape to withstand such blasts?

I love how they say a 'small 30 kiloton device'😂

12:25 ... .Max Headroom!

you only had to duck and cover back then or hide under a school desk... or even hide in a lead lined fridge... amazing technology

Wonder how the cameras survived to show the blast as it happened. The house and electrical tower had awesome footage. That must have been a powerful long range lens 😂

I don't think any of the information gained from this test has been used in construction of any of the infrastructure that has been constructed after the test. My parents and grandparents paid a lot of taxes for nothing.

"This is a relatively small bomb at 30 kilotons, whereas bombs today are in excess of 20 megatons". Ummm..I eagerly await your test on house construction for that one! And they won't because they could not pop one off that big on the mainland and are attempting to scale it up. My Dad said that they used to have drills at school in the 50's, then after the HBOMB in 1957 people caught on and knew it was a waste of time and ridiculous and stopped doing it. We were so ignorant back then. Hindsight is 20/20. We are ignorant about other stuff today and don't see it and will look like fools in a few decades.

Re: Small group of civil defense volunteers that were close to ground zero - what happened to them after blast?

How did the cameras and film survive?

Did you ever wonder why the camera wasn't destroyed by the blast? Or why the film wasn't damaged by the radiation?

Those manikins are frigging terrifying.

The opening narration states that the nuclear tests starting in 1955 used relatively small yield nuclear weapons of 30 kilotons. As of 1990 the U.S. Army training referred to the most likely size nuclear weapon a soldier might expect to encounter on the battlefield would have a yield of 20 kilotons with a ground zero blast radius of 5 miles. It is unlikely that the early tests would have used larger payloads than the more modern weapons of 35 yrs later.

The mannequins added that creepy touch that is so crucial for nuclear bomb testing.

Golly gee, those cameras sure stayed steady.

Fun Fact: There were over 100 radiation sites in the Southwest Area 51 was just one of these. The underground base was built after a huge nuclear weapon was tested there, creating a huge crater I don't remember the years that were the concrete pouring of the base at area 51 but I remember the two sons of the concrete company owners from Las Vegas The one son was a kid in his pre-teens He said that the government men came one evening and they asked how much concrete his dad could make if they were running full 24 hours a day with unlimited amounts of materials for making it His dad did some math and he gave them a number and said he had a specific number of trucks and they said from this point on, you are not pouring any concrete anywhere for anyone except us You will hire whoever you need and we will bring you materials if you can't get them from your suppliers but you will not stop product from rolling out every hour of every day. The 2 companies would l9ad and drive north out if Vegas to Grooms Lake Road and down to the base and through the gate and down the ramp and pour. The son said he would ride with his dad on weekends and on holiday breaks and during the summer. He said he saw this incredible hole in the earth and he saw the 2 earth ramps going down into the holes and the structure being built over the months and years. The two companies were extremely profitable and the quality of life was very good and the son remembers how they had all these new things that they wanted and they would go out to dinner and he enjoyed riding in the truck with his dad. After the first year they were about halfway done. He continued each month a few times a month riding up to the base and he watched this massive building deep in the hole rise floor by floor over the year. The end of the second year he said he went with his dad and they had increased the buildings above ground and the number of people who were not working on building but were in suits and uniforms and not nice like the workers were. One if these men came over and told his dad that he could not bring his son to the site anymore. He said that last time at the beasts that the one side had been finished where the ramp was a concrete tunnel and they had stairs and elevator shafts poured out and they were backfilling that end with trucks and bulldozers He also said that he remembered they're being too concrete plants that were at each end of the site It sounded to me like the military was building it and they realized that they didn't have enough capacity to make it as fast as they wanted, so they recruited the 2 companies, the only 2 companies. The only proof I have of this story is during that 30 month period of time, there were no buildings of concrete made in Vegas, and people who bought land that were supposed to have houses built, they remember having to get the raw materials for the concrete and to pour their own slab over a series of weeks. Doing a small section at a time. And if you talked the people back in the 80s that had houses that they remember this. And they remember having to do their own concrete pads. I don't know how deep or how many stories were what the measurements were but the kid said it looked like a casino in the hole. Like a hotel. And I don't think he made this up. I think this site was made to be a VIP bunker and command and control center in the event of a nuclear war. There are sites on the east coast and in the middle of the country from ND to Texas, but when it came to the southwest there wasn't anything like this. And when you look at the old nuclear silo facilities, they are huge on a scale that I still cannot believe how big they are and that they built these things in secret. They take up a 1/2 mile by 1/2 mile. And I have seen 3 of them and there are more. They were mostly filled in and covered over, but some were sold. I saw a video of one that was recently found and the people dug through about 40 feet of dirt and the surface had trees that I estimated to be 20 to 30 years old. So the late 90s thru must have shut down and covered it over. They went down the stairs 10 stories and there were four levels that they could walk around and below that was flooded and they could see at least three levels below that water level. It is crazy to think these places were built in secret and still to this day the information is so guarded that you only hear about it from a relative. When you have people that worked at one of these places and they retire and you're a grandson and you're talkin with your grandfather and nobody else is paying attention to him and probably nobody is going to visit him at the nursing home and you go and you talked to him and he tells you this incredible story of this place he worked and you go and check it out with some Urban explorers and you find the landmark see tells you about and over the course of a month you dig up this entrance. It is the type of thing that unless you actually saw it you would never believe it

Somehow I don't think they realized just how toxic radiation really was at that time, nor the real half life of radiation decay on these sites over the decades......

The continuous thunder when the bomb exploded is terrifying and the destruction of everything in seconds.

I remember that from my childhood. There's a lot to question now. Tuck, duck and roll was the big thing and their all just standing there fully exposed. I bet they all got cancer.

5:50 This guy's doing a detailed job for something that's going to be ash soon. Must take pride in his work.

I love how the utility poles go flying back in unison at 9:47

Operation Cue was also know as Teapot Apple 2, as a apart of Operation Teapot

I grew up outside Detroit in the 50s an 60s. In retrospect, this is horrifying.

We have seen parts of this footage on many TV shows from the 60s when they show a nuclear bomb go off like “The Outer Limits” episode: “Destruction and Decay of Radioactive Particles”

Can't believe they were examing stuff twenty four hours later !

this with Dave clark's "any way you want it" at background shockwaves scenes its fun

“One of the biggest problems after a blast will be the loss of power” ….😂

I couldn't tell the real people from the mannequins.

It's refreshing to hear someone correctly pronounce "nuclear"

I can't believe they would go into the area 24 hours later without radiation protection and eat there.

Directed by Wes Anderson

I don’t understand how the researchers could possibly go and investigate the Blast site 24 hours after the fact. There should be extremely high levels of radiation. Why wouldn’t they be wearing radiation suits??

I wonder if any of those homes were rebuilt and sold on? You wouldn't need to use much electricity for lighting as I am pretty sure they would glow in the dark!

I liked how the truck with the painted logo used quotes: "Operation Cue". Seems legit!

Респект оператору Сане что он заснял весь сам процес!

Something to ask;.why does no one talk about the "3 Mile Island" disaster as far as radiation is concerned, but if it was a certain place in Russia or, maybe what was said about the "leak" from the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, you'll still hear people talk about those places, more so Chernobyl. 3 mile Island was where again? New York?? You can also add in places like Fukishima although that doesn't get mentioned as often anymore for some strange reason.

The way the telephone poles get blown away in unison at 9:48 is amazing!

It looks just like a movie Camera never shakes. No dust or smoke near the camera.

These people are wandering around in shorts and t-shorts at nuclear explosion site. I wonder how many of them developed cancer in the following years.

They did NOT show the various Animals that were involved in the testing.

"Cue" in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls.

When I was in elementary school, all we needed was a school desk..............................

Keep up the videos man👍🏽

eating a radioactive contaminated food and lingering around on ground zero.those were the tough days

Why do I feel like so many videos on youtube nowadays is propaganda for a wanted nuclear war...???

Operation Cue 54...Revision 64 differences..Blast detonation sequence sound included..Woman reporter does not mention roast beef cooked to perfection? Narrator music has been changed..

The reality of the blinding flash in deathly silence is even more terrifying. Like a thunder storm there's a delay before the shockwave roar hits you. It's reassuring that nuclear war is as normally survivable as any other natural disasters

look at that prepper's pantry at 7:13, pretty well stocked

Not gonna lie ..That manequin is kinda cute...

It’s not lost on anyone that these kinds of films fed into the fear and hysteria of the Cold War.