So radiation will expose film, just like normal light. Hence why you are told to have airport screeners hand examine your your film instead of passing to through the x-ray machine. Many other forms of radiation will likewise pass through most metals and destroy film.
Yet from the 1940's through the 70's, nuclear tests were regularly done and they were photographed and filmed.
How were they able to allow just light to pass through to the film?
I have a couple ideas, like a lead lined camera with leaded glass for a lens. Or shoot through a periscope type device, in which the mirrors would reflect the light down to a protected camera, but the radiation would just pass through the mirror.
Does anyone have a definitive answer on how this was done?
More useless trivia for you... The EMP blast from a nuke made recording the sounds with magnetic media impossible, so they cut the sound waves into a copper wire, similar to recording in wax for making phonographs. While the sound quality is not the best, it is extremely stable. So stable that it was used to record cockpit sounds in airplanes blackboxes for several decades.
Actually, If I could make a cheap hand held wire player, I thought it would be fun to set up some poles at Burning Man, and stretch out the sound wires between the poles, with famous speeches or poetry, and then have cheap hand held players that people could walk along the wire and listen to the recorded sounds. I image a paper cone with a bit of metal to run along the wire would be enough.
I would have to include one wire of Rick Astley, of course...
[Note: There might be some factual errors. I remember seeing a history channel show describing the sound record process above, but I now can not find any web pages to back it up.]