Laboratory shares amazing declassified nuclear test films

Between 1945 and 1962, the United States conducted 210 atmospheric nuclear tests over remote sites in New Mexico, Nevada, and both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
With several cameras to capture each detonation, the tests yielded roughly 10,000 recordings which have since been left to be slowly decay in high-security vaults.
Now, researchers are working to scan the decomposing films so the footage can be reanalysed and declassified before it’s too late.
So far, they’ve scanned about 4,200 recordings – and the effort has revealed that much of the original published data on the tests are wrong.The team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been working to track down and declassify the films for the last five years.
Doing so will allow them not only to preserve these important historical materials, but to reanalyse the data for more accurate figures.
But, many of these film canisters have sat unopened for decades.
‘You can smell vinegar when you open the cans, which is one of the by-products of the decomposition process of these films,’ said weapon physicist Greg Spriggs.
‘We know that these films are on the brink of decomposing to the point where they’ll become useless.
‘The data that we’re collecting now must be preserved in a digital form because no matter how well you treat the films, no matter how well you preserve or store them, they will decompose.
‘They’re made out of organic material, and organic material decomposes. So this is it.
‘We got to this project just in time to save the data.’
The team has so far located roughly 6,500 of the films from the atmospheric tests.
Of this batch, about 4,200 have been scanned to date, and 400-500 have been reanalyzed.
And, they’ve declassified 750 of the dramatic tapes.
Some of the footage has now been published on the LLNL's Youtube channel.