Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

by Annie Jacobsen

In the spring of 1953, for an atomic test series called Operation Upshot-Knothole, soldier volunteers were asked to perform duck-and-cover drills inside five-foot-deep trenches that had been dug into the desert floor several miles from ground zero. The men were specifically instructed not to look at the atomic blast. But curiosity got the better of at least one young officer, a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant identified in declassified records as “S.H.” Instead of facing away from the blast, the lieutenant looked over his left shoulder in the direction of the atomic bomb when it detonated with a force of 43 kilotons. “He didn’t wear his goggles and he looked,” Colonel Pickering told President Clinton’s Advisory Committee in 1994. Because light enters the eye through the cornea and is refracted when it hits the lens, Pickering explained, images are flipped upside down. As a result, the image of an inverted nuclear fireball was seared on the lieutenant’s retina “forever,” leaving what Pickering described as “probably one of the most beautiful images of a fireball you’d ever see in your life.” Pickering said that doctors at the SAM kept a photograph of the man’s eyeball for their collection. The Advisory Committee determined that the SAM continued its classified flashblindness studies until at least 1962 but that most of the records had been lost or destroyed.