Just musing over 2001 with its rather pitiful obvious models (and incidentally starless skies...think of the 'moon landings'). I wondered if Kubrick might have been in on the story about nuclear weapons - could this be the explanation for his casual frivolity? I don't know how well up he was on special effects - maybe he knew all about them; maybe on the other hand he just got underlings to do the work*. At any rate he surely must have been able to examine nuke test footage in great detail And he seems to have never been short of money - red light warning there, that he was probably funded apart from his work. Spielberg's film on the Crystal Skull (or something) has a Spielberg version of a nuclear test in a US desert; and of course Spielberg is notorious for the 'Shoah' fraud - there's a brilliant youtube exposing the breathtaking fraudulence of fake witnesses as directed by Spielberg. I mention Hanks because he holds something of a record in deception - Forrest Gump (lies about Vietnam), the moon thing (lies ditto), Philadelphia (lies about AIDS), Private Ryan (lies about WW2).
*Added later: Yes, he used underlings. The colour effects at the end of 2001 were suggested to him - he was called from his office to inspect the computer graphics, and gave his approval.