New footage of U.S. nuclear tests released
The previously classified footage looks straight out of a nuclear apocalypse. See more on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's YouTube channel.
It's terrifying to watch.
The sight of an ominous mushroom cloud from a nuclear blast brings with it horrifying visions of a nuclear winter and the apocalypse.
Cameras capturing that imagery were rolling at 2,400 frames-per-second when the United States detonated 210 nuclear bombs between 1945 and 1962. But until now, about 10,000 of the never-before-seen films were sitting in high-security facilities decaying and being lost to history.
Nuclear weapon physicist Greg Spriggs from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, Calif., decided these films needed to be digitized, declassified, publicized and analyzed.
"It's just unbelievable how much energy's released," said Spriggs in a press release from the laboratory. "We hope that we would never have to use a nuclear weapon ever again."
So far, Spriggs and his team have found about 6,500 of the 10,000 films. Sixty-four of them were released on YouTube on Thursday after a painstaking process of analyzing frame rates and determining blast radius and other data from the nuclear tests. Their studies showed that previous measurements were off by as much as 30 percent.
"That's a big number for doing code validation," said Spriggs. "One of the payoffs of this project is that we're now getting very consistent answers. We've also discovered new things about these detonations that have never been seen before. New correlations are now being used by the nuclear forensics community, for example."
The data that Spriggs and the LLNL gather is meant to set a benchmark for future studies of nuclear tests. "I think that if we capture the history of this and show what the force of these weapons are and how much devastation they can wreak," said Spriggs. "Then maybe people will be reluctant to use them."