Joe Rogan amplifies conspiracy theory that nuclear tests were faked

Joe Rogan and a guest on his top-ranked Spotify podcast suggested in a July 2023 episode that US nuclear tests captured on video were faked, arguing that cameras could not sustain the forces that blew up model houses, cars and electrical structures. This is false; the Cold War-era experiments used film setups built to withstand atomic blasts and radiation, experts told AFP.

“Boy, that does look fake,” Rogan said as billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen rolled tape of nuclear test explosions during a July 19, 2023 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which reaches millions of listeners.

Rogan’s response came after Andreessen floated a conspiracy theory about experiments the United States conducted to expand its nuclear arsenal after detonating two atomic bombs over Japan during World War II.

“You’ve seen all the grainy footage of nuclear test blasts,” Andreessen said. “Well, there’s always been a conspiracy theory that those were all basically fabricated at this facility, that those bombs actually were never detonated. Basically, the US military was basically faking these bomb tests to freak out the Russians.”

Asked how the explosions were faked, Andreessen told Rogan: “So, what happened to the camera? How is that happening yet the camera is like totally stable and fine? And by the way, the film is fine. The radiation didn’t cause any damage to the film.”

Acknowledging the theories could be false, Andreessen said the footage may have involved miniature, table-top models or been “faked at Lookout Mountain,” a former California-based military installation that produced films and photos documenting nuclear tests.

Videos from Rogan’s podcast rocketed across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms in the days after the episode’s release, with one TikTok clip drawing more than 7.4 million views. The post’s caption: “Did The United States Fake These Nuclear Test Videos?”

Other posts have gone further, claiming atomic bombs themselves are fake.

The discourse comes as moviegoers flock to see “Oppenheimer,” a blockbuster about American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was pivotal in the development of nuclear weapons.

But the history of atomic photography is well documented. More than half a dozen experts told AFP the Cold War-era tests were not faked — they were recorded with equipment built to withstand nuclear blasts.

“The type of film used was very slow and not very sensitive to radiation, yet these cameras still needed a couple of inches of lead around them,” said Peter Kuran, author of “How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb.” “The camera setups were designed to stay in place and handle the blast pressure.”

Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, told AFP he has seen conspiracy theories about the test footage circulating online for some time.

“To imagine this conspiracy to be true is to imagine that essentially all scientists in the world are in on it, and none have bothered — for any reason — to dispute it. It is stupid,” he said.

“It is also offensive. There are people who were deeply injured by the use and testing of nuclear weapons.”

AFP contacted Spotify for comment, but no response was forthcoming.

How nuclear tests were documented

After dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese people, the United States entered an arms race with the Soviet Union.

Testing was needed to ensure new designs detonated properly. Many experiments in the 1950s took place in a stretch of desert north of Las Vegas, Nevada known as the Nevada Test Site.

The compilation displayed on a recording of Rogan’s podcast includes footage from two tests at the Nevada Test Site, Kuran and other experts said.

One of the blasts shows Annie, a test that was part of Operation Upshot-Knothole, on March 17, 1953 (archived here). Other clips show Apple-2, conducted under Operation Teapot on May 5, 1955 (archived here and here).

Both tests involved mock American cities — so-called “doom towns” complete with houses, automobiles, paved streets and mannequins — to gauge the weapons’ impact on civilians.

Kuran said crews employed 35mm cameras for the Annie test and 16mm cameras for Apple-2. Alan Carr, a senior historian at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which was instrumental to the first atomic bomb’s development and first led by Oppenheimer, said exterior cameras were stationed “beyond the blast radius.”

For Operation Teapot, remotely operated cameras were mounted on towers 10 or 18 feet tall (about three or five meters) and positioned 2,750 to 10,500 feet (about 838 to 3,200 meters) away from ground zero, according to a 1955 report (archived here).

The towers — which used 8-inch (about 20 cm) steel poles sunk into concrete bases — steadied the cameras and helped them film over rising dust clouds, said James Stemm, curator of the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in New Mexico. Atop the towers, lead-lined steel encasings and armored glass also guarded the technology against radiation fogging.

The cameras themselves were “more rugged than a normal movie camera,” having been originally developed as gun cameras for fighter planes during World War II, Stemm said.

Some cameras were also set up inside the “doom town” structures.

In footage from Operation Teapot that Kuran restored on his YouTube channel (archived here), an internal camera can be seen illuminated and operating after the house is demolished.

Still, despite the precautions, Kuran told AFP that dust obstruction remained a problem — and not every camera made it through the tests.

Disappearing car?

Andreessen and Rogan claimed one video — a shot of the Annie test — shows a vehicle suddenly appearing behind a house moments before the explosion, suggesting the blast footage was faked.

But Wellerstein of the Stevens Institute of Technology told AFP this may be attributable to “muddy footage” from YouTube.

“Things like ‘magically appearing cars’ are artifacts of the lighting and poor compression of the footage,” he said.

Another explanation, according to the Nuclear Testing Archive’s Rishikesh Shukla, is that the video in question may have spliced together an “establishing shot” of the house with footage of the blast.

“The car was likely not in place at the time establishing shots were filmed and was in place when the test happened,” Shukla said.

Tests were documented

People across the United States tuned in to watch experiments at the Nevada Test Site, while journalists and other observers witnessed the detonations in person.

An estimated eight million TV viewers watched Annie live, according to the US Department of Energy (archived here). A hill far from the blasts, known as “News Nob,” provided a lookout spot for journalists such as CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite (archived here).

Research has also uncovered health effects on communities living “downwind” from the Nevada Test Site.

“We have global evidence of nuclear testing through the radioactive effluents they released,” Wellerstein said.

AFP has fact-checked other misinformation stemming from Rogan’s podcast here and here.