200 Haunting Videos of U.S. Nuclear Tests Now Declassified and Put Online

Last month, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory put on YouTube 200 now-declassified videos documenting American nuclear tests conducted between 1945 and 1962. According the Lab, “around 10,000 of these films sat idle, scattered across the country in high-security vaults. Not only were they gathering dust, the film material itself was slowly decomposing, bringing the data they contained to the brink of being lost forever.”

In the first video above, weapon physicist Greg Spriggs discusses how a team of experts salvaged these decomposing films, with the hope that they can “provide better data to the post-testing-era scientists who use computer codes to help certify that the aging U.S. nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure and effective.”

If you click the forward button, the playlist will skip to the next video, the first of 63 nuclear tests. Several of those clips you can watch below:

Operation Hardtack

Operation Plumbbob

Operation Teapot

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Related Content:

Kurt Vonnegut Gives a Sermon on the Foolishness of Nuclear Arms: It’s Timely Again (Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 1982)

Haunting Unedited Footage of the Bombing of Nagasaki (1945)

53 Years of Nuclear Testing in 14 Minutes: A Time Lapse Film by Japanese Artist Isao Hashimoto

How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Survive the Atomic Bomb: A Cold War Film from 1954


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