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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One way they took some of the earliest photos were taken by using a series of mirrors that redirected the light from the image down into a bunker that was protected from the blast. IIRC, that’s how [this image](https://edgerton-digital-collections.org/techniques/rapatronic-shutter) was created. The mirror assembly that was above ground *was* destroyed, but the camera was protected in the bunker as the vast majority of the energy is directed by the ground to bounce upward and blast over the bunker. And, of course, there was thick glass protecting the camera from the energy that did go in the direction of the camera.
The film was protected against overexposure by using exceptionally fast shutter speeds – in the case of the image linked above, they used a [special camera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera) capable of exposing the film for *nanoseconds*. Cameras were also kept behind very dark tinting and filters to reduce the amount of light to something manageable. That’s why photos of nuclear explosions always look like they happen at night – the explosion itself is *so bright* that to capture that they had to dim everything down so much that the background looks dark like it’s nighttime.
The mirrors have an added benefit that a lot of the ionizing radiation that might damage the film will pass through the mirror instead of being directed towards the camera. That also helped protect the film and create cleaner images.
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