How do they film nuclear blasts showcasing the wreckage on a fake town & retrieve the footage?
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Im guessing that the footage is broadcasted to the control centre, live. They can record it or whatever. Then, they won’t have to physically retrieve the camera.
For those particular shots, they used both interior (inside the houses) and exterior (outside the houses) footage.
The exterior cameras were on steel towers that would stand above the dust, anchored in a lot of cement. They were heavily shielded so that the radiation did not fog the film, and used very small cameras with very wide angle lenses, very close to the houses being destroyed. If your only goal is to make basically a pole that can survive a nuclear attack, you can do this — a nuclear blast will not destroy _everything_ at that distance (it tends to destroy things that humans live in, but not necessarily bunkers and steel and things specially constructed to survive the amount of blast and heat).
The interior cameras could not be as shielded from radiation so they used radiation-insensitive films. They had some shielding but it was assumed that if the house got destroyed they’d just pick through the wreckage to find the camera. Presumably they put it in some kind of steel box or something so it would have a high chance of survival.
In terms of retrieving the footage, the radiation from a nuclear explosion drops pretty quickly. This can be monitored of course with radiation detectors. Once it was safe to go get the footage, they went and got the footage. Nothing special about that.
[This report](https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA995330.pdf) describes the camera setup used in these kinds of tests.
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