Among the Paperclip scientists who carried out the initial flashblindness studies were Heinrich Rose and Konrad Büttner. Both men had been working for the U.S. government since the fall of 1945, when Dr. Strughold first recommended them for employment at the Army Air Forces Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg. And like so many of Strughold’s close Luftwaffe colleagues, Rose and Büttner had been Nazi ideologues during the war. Both men were long-term members of the Nazi Party and also members of the SA.
For the first set of flashblindness studies, Rose and Büttner’s test subjects were large pigs. The two doctors calculated that the flash of a 20-kiloton atomic bomb could produce retinal burns as far as forty miles from ground zero. As the atomic tests progressed, the Atomic Energy Commission sought more specific data regarding humans. In the fall of 1951, for an atomic test series called Operation Buster-Jangle, soldier volunteers were asked to stare at a nuclear explosion from varying distances. Crew flying in C-54 aircraft approximately nine miles from ground zero were told to look out the windows of the airplane when the bomb went off. Some wore protective eye goggles while others did not. “No visual handicaps” were reported, according to Pickering. In the spring of 1952, for an atomic test series called Operation Tumbler-Snapper, a trailer was set up on the Nevada desert floor, with porthole-like windows at viewing range. Soldier volunteers were asked to sit in front of the windows and stare at the nuclear explosion. The distance from ground zero was also approximately nine miles, only this time the soldiers were at blast level. One of the volunteers in the viewing trailer was Colonel Pickering, who said that some of the human test subjects were given protective eye goggles to wear but others were asked to observe the fireball with the naked eye. Two soldiers had their eyeballs burned and the trailer tests were suspended.
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.