Have you ever attended the symphony and decided to focus on the percussion section in the back? It’s kind of wild to watch these musicians, who often spend most of the concert with their hands folded, suddenly spring to action with mallets upraised, waiting until the exact moment to hit something with absolute precision.

This is what radio sound effect artists did all day long in network studios during live broadcasts: their instruments might be special doorbell buzzers belonging to each family in a soap opera, or a shallow box filled with gravel for footsteps. The notion that radio was a “theater of the mind” is largely thanks to its live sound effects; and indeed, some of the earliest sound effect artists came to broadcasting from theater or silent movies, where they punctuated the action (or jokes) with sound.

The best sound effects artists got to invent whole worlds: they chewed on wooden berry boxes to evoke a horde of rats attacking a light house; they slowly turned a cast-iron lid to create the sound of an alien spaceship door. Sound effects teams had their own subculture at radio networks, prone as they were to stress and boredom and demands from show directors to create impossible sounds on a moment’s notice.

I had been intending to write a post about all that (working title: Radio SFX Are Lit) — but on the way, I tripped and fell into an adjacent rabbit hole, one in which the world-building power of sound effects bled into the “real” world and affected our understanding of a danger that threatens us all.

I fell into this rabbit hole while reading Radio Sound Effects by Robert L. Mott. If you’ve watched US network TV from the 1980s or earlier, you’ve probably heard a sound effect produced by Mott. He worked on everything from the soap opera Days of our Lives to the kiddie show Captain Kangaroo, back when a lot of television was basically live-to-tape. He had to be quick on his feet and responsive, a skill he got from doing effects for live radio dramas at CBS like Gangbusters and Perry Mason.

No doubt that’s why, early in his career, Mott was assigned to be the sound effects guy for the CBS Six O’Clock News.

This was news to me, that newscasts once had studio sound effects. Mott says on the radio, newscasts shunned SFX. He believes that was thanks to “the notoriety earned by the War of the Worlds broadcast” in 1938, which supposedly alarmed the populace with its faux-news conceits.

“It did not stop the television news people, however,” Mott writes.

So yes, at least some newscasts had sound effects artists in the studio to smooth over the sonic mess of a program that relied on film for its field sound. And one day, Bob Mott says he was given half an hour to prepare for a segment on an atom bomb test. 

I should note here that, as with many of these memoirs by old-time radio veterans, Mott’s books (there are a few) are heavy on lore and free-associated anecdotes, but not so strong on fact-checkable details like dates. So it’s hard to confirm when the newscast in question took place. But it wouldn’t have been earlier than 1951, since that’s when CBS hired Mott. 

The US government started testing atomic weapons in Nevada that same year, and while that devastating practice continued regularly for more than a decade, the newsworthiness wore off after a few years. The way Mott describes it, this was still in the early days.

Mott did not plan to do a “manual effect,” the kind of thing we associate with classic radio drama (clopping coconuts for horse hooves, etc). By this point, most sound effects were pulled from special records, some made by commercial services, some by the network’s own engineers. The job of the SFX artist was to choose the best tracks quickly and cue them up on a console that would make a DJ’s head spin with envy.

Building sonic sequences with these records took creativity and specialized skills. Here’s how the 1951 manual Radio and TV Sound Effects describes the equipment:

You got all that?

Anyway, on the day of the atom bomb-test segment, Bob Mott quickly picked his SFX records, planned the order of his sequence, and adjusted the speed and output levels of each turntable. 

“When the picture showed the sudden billowing cloud, I played the records I had selected and crossed my fingers,” he wrote. “Fortunately, the reaction in the control room to the bomb sounds was good. However, far more importantly, the printed media the next day didn’t suspect that the sounds of the ominous and terrible Atom Bomb had been ‘sweetened.’” (71)

Mott says what saved the day was a recording he and other sound effects artists relied on heavily: a recording of a waterfall in Africa he calls Mogambi (that place name does not actually exist, as far as I can tell). 

Like I said, Mott’s story is not verifiable. I couldn’t find any recordings of the CBS Six O’Clock News from the early 1950s. But his anecdote did make me realize the extent to which sound effects, especially when paired with imagery, can shape our perception of reality in a careless, and ultimately corrosive, way.

“How do you come up with the sound of something that no one has ever heard?” Mott asks. But of course, people had heard the sound of an atomic explosion. Foremost among them, the victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. 

And before them, there were the scientists who witnessed the Trinity Test of the first atomic explosion. 

Here’s where we discover that A-Bomb media artifice has been a thing since the very beginning. What you see above are scientists James Conant and Vannevar Bush pretending to watch the first, top-secret atomic bomb blast in the desert at Alamogordo, New Mexico. In truth, they are lying on a sand-covered garage floor in Boston a year later.

This was all in service of the 1946 newsreel film Atomic Power! (the “!” is part of the title!)

Some context: we’ve dedicated recent posts here to the popular radio news-reenactment show The March of Time. Well, that program had an even more popular film companion, a monthly theatrical newsreel. And those newsreel producers often managed to persuade public figures to perform as themselves. They did that in spades for Atomic Power!

March of Time even got Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein to re-enact themselves. The latter mainly smokes a pipe “like a long-suffering and highly sagacious old yak,” as Time Magazine put it.

Oppenheimer only shows up for a blip, making the whole experience akin to watching a more genuine but cornier version of the Oscar-winning movie Oppenheimer (some sequences from that film seem lifted directly from March of Time tbh).

The atom bomb also starred as itself in the newsreel, thanks to government footage, but that footage came without sound. So The March of Time cooked some up, presumably by turntable methods similar to what Robert Mott would do a few years later at CBS News. (Go read this book by Raymond Fielding for more on the fascinating history of the newsreel March of Time.)

When it comes to actual recordings of the atom bomb exploding, you have to hunt a long time for sound. The US government has declassified hundreds of films and uploaded them here, and most are silent.

Much of the sound that does exist is either drowned out by airplane engines (if recorded from a bomber). Or, as in this recording from 1953, the films also capture the reactions of onlookers. 

One thing is for sure, as nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein points out: most popular depictions of atomic explosions are “shifted in time so that the explosion and the sound of the blast wave are simultaneous.” But, he notes, “the speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound, and the cameras are kept a very healthy distance from the test itself, so in reality the blast wave comes half a minute or so after the explosion.”

Wellerstein suspects most films of nuclear explosions that contain sound are using “a stock blast effect.”

In 1951, when the Department of Energy produced a film about nuclear tests, it mainly settled for a sonic hint of explosion, followed by generous helpings of Wagner’s overture to The Flying Dutchman. And honestly, a similar impulse seems to have seized broadcasting’s finest directors when faced with the question of how to illustrate this massive weapon.

In 1950, producer Fred Friendly and his sound engineer Bob Schwartau went through a lot of trouble to manufacture an explosion for their NBC radio documentary series on the atom bomb called The Quick and the Dead.

These guys were not yet their future semi-famous selves: Friendly would go on to work with Edward Murrow at CBS and later become president of the network before quitting in disgust. Schwartau would become a legendary music recording engineer for the likes of Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. 

But in 1950, they just wanted to concoct and record their best version of a megaton blast for this radio doc. There actually was a recording of the underwater Bikini Atoll test available to them, but that sound apparently didn’t match the ambition of what they wanted to depict — and anyway, the Trinity Test happened on land. 

Matthew Erlich’s book Radio Utopia led me to this incredible account in the New York Times of the production:

You can hear the sequence about six minutes into the first track of this digitized recording of The Quick and the Dead. Who knows if young Bob Mott heard this broadcast, but it surely set the standard for all fake atom bombs to come.

Perhaps because The Quick and the Dead was audio only, it actually takes advantage of the narrative tension in the delay between the sight of the blast and the sound of the explosion. 

But what all of these productions — The March of Time, The Quick and the Dead, the government films, and the CBS newscast — have in common is their unexamined need to concoct a big bomb-ey sound, the bigger the better. The actual recordings of test explosions were not good enough because the “theater of the mind” got there first.

This blending of manufactured sounds and narrative truths is something film critic Michael Chion calls synchresis: he invented the word to describe the power of sound (usually combined with visuals) to help us fully enter the conceits of an imaginary world. Lightsaber sounds in Star Wars are one famous example — but basically all sound effects in audio drama rely on synchresis.

Nonfiction audio producers also lean on synchresis in subtle ways. Consider how a piece of ambient sound might prolong the sense of being out in the field, when you are actually narrating the scene in a studio. Or the way a scratchy-record effect can persuade us to forgive the bad sound quality of “old stuff.” Or even the way we “sweeten” our own voices to become nobler, more equalized versions of ourselves.

But this atom bomb sound effect is on a whole other level, so much so that it makes me more skeptical about the provenance of archival sound effects in general. When Charles Maynes and I made the Cold War history series Spacebridge, we used archival sound of a nuclear explosion near the top of one of the episodes. Do we know where that sound came from or how it was recorded? We do not.  

“Although recording equipment today is much more sophisticated, I wouldn’t be surprised if the sound used for the bomb that night is now stored in a post-production department’s sound computer’s microchip,” Mott wrote.

I don’t think he is actually that surprised (I mean that rhetorically — Mott died in 2016). His entire sound effects library is available for purchase here for $495. And look what shows up on the second line of this screenshot from an alphabetized spreadsheet of the effects. 

It was not Bob Mott’s call whether or not to manufacture an atom bomb sound for the CBS Evening News — he was just doing his job. That decision was on the CBS show director. But imagine if that director had decided to break this pattern of fakery?

What if he had made the call to be honest with the audience and explain that the sound they had wasn’t great, and made up for it by having the anchor read from eyewitness accounts instead? Some viewers might have stopped to think that there is a good reason why the detonation of this massive weapon, built to incinerate cities and sicken millions, wasn’t easy to record.

There are much better ways to evoke the real horror of the atom bomb than the four-holer treatment. 

At the end of Kaneto Shindo’s 1952 film Children of Hiroshima, the characters notice the menacing sound of low-flying airplanes — after all they have been through, that sound is enough. 

Or consider the long silence at the beginning of Morgan Knibbe’s documentary The Atomic Soldiers, about the surviving US veterans of nuclear tests. 

These men simply stare into the camera for minutes on end, saying nothing. When they do speak, you understand why. They explain how the military ordered them never to speak about the test explosions they witnessed. They talk about the emotional and physical costs of what they’ve endured. 

For a long time, these veterans had to keep the whole terrible experience to themselves — as have downwinders, former residents of ruined Marshall Islands chains, and the people who grew up near the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan. So mighty was the mighty-sounding bomb that for the sake “nuclear security,” all of its victims had to shut up about what these explosions had done to them and their communities.

When you get down to it, the sound of the atom bomb is the sound of death. And no one can sweeten that.

P.S. Bob Mott’s full interview with the Television Academy is here. It’s fascinating!