These photos remind me of my own experience with the A-bomb testing in Nevada. We lived for a time in Henderson, NV, just south of Las Vegas. My parents would wake us up in the very dark pre-dawn hours to see the blast some 90 miles away. At the prescribed time the entire sky would light up and stay bright for what seemed to be minutes. Then it dropped to a duller red glow for quite awhile. We waited outside until the shock wave came through, turning the stillness of the desert night into a brief but strong windstorm. And quite the boom. And that was it.
I asked my dad later in life how he knew when to get us up to see the explosion. He said that the truckers all knew when it was going to be, because the road closings were announced well in advance. My two uncles ran the AEC com link from a mountain top where they could have seen the blast directly but they couldn't look at it and had to face away. And they didn't give away the blast time, because it was "classified". Go figure.
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