I would think that cameras would be damaged or destroyed at such distances, especially old ones from the 50’s/60’s that didn’t have the kind of zoom lenses we do now.
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a) Zoom lenses are not at all new, and any camera tech they did not have for this kind of thing, they had the money to invent — they did, in fact, invent several new kinds of cameras to photograph nuclear explosions, not because of the distance issue, but because they wanted very precise photos of the earliest stages of the fireball
b) The distance at which a camera can survive a nuclear detonation is closer than a human can
c) The destruction forces of a nuclear detonation drop off quicker than you probably think
d) They built special bunkers for the cameras (an example: during the Trinity test, they built concrete bunkers with the cameras pointing _up_ inside of them, through a hole that went to a mirror at a 45º angle that was the direction of the blast; bunker could get seared with heat, and eventually the mirror could get knocked over (the blast wave is much slower than the heat effects), but the camera was deep-enough inside a bunker that it could get footage of the explosion until the blast arrived — these were used for photos of the initial fireball, where having a camera closer was useful)
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