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:
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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