View of Armageddon: Footage of Nuclear-Weapons Tests Declassified

A mushroom cloud forms after a nuclear weapons test dubbed Operation Hardtack-1 - 
Nutmeg in May 1958 on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Credit: LLNL

After decades spent slowly disintegrating in high-security vaults, thousands of historic films of U.S. nuclear weapons tests have been salvaged, including some that have been newly declassified. The incredible footage shows enormous mushroom clouds ballooning over the horizon in what could be a doomsday flick.

In total, an estimated 10,000 films were created of nuclear weapons tests between 1945 and 1962, according to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). For the past five years, a team of researchers led by LLNL weapon physicist Greg Spriggs has been collecting the footage to scan, reanalyze and declassify, before the films fully decompose.

About 6,500 of the films have been located so far, and now, an initial collection of 64 videos, all showing tests conducted by the LLNL, have been made available online.

After five years of work, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), led by physicist Greg Spriggs, managed to digitalize and declassify some of these archival films.

“The goals are to preserve the films’ content before it’s lost forever, and provide better data to the post-testing-era scientists who use computer codes to help certify that the aging US nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure and effective,” LLNL said in a press release.

So far, the LLNL team has managed to locate around 6,500 of the estimated 10,000 films created during the period. Out of that number, around 4,200 films have been scanned, while around 750 have been declassified. The declassified footage has been published on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s YouTube channel.

“One of the payoffs of this project is that we’re now getting very consistent answers,” Spriggs said. “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 team working on the project estimates that it will take another two years to scan the rest of the films. Spriggs hopes that the Armageddon footage will dissuade nations from ever using their nuclear arsenal.

“It’s just unbelievable how much energy’s released,” Spriggs said. “We hope that we would never have to use a nuclear weapon ever again. 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, then maybe people will be reluctant to use them.”

Source: rt.com | livescience.com
Video Credits: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory