Top secret footage of nuclear tests from the Cold War have been revealed on YouTube where the U.S. government declassified these hundreds of nuclear tests for the first time ever. The United States completed a total of 210 nuclear tests from 1945 to 1962 in the Mojave Desert in Nevada and across very remote Pacific islands.
Due to dangerous nuclear fallout, the U.S. government was forced to execute these tests underground or in the Earth's lower atmosphere. Tensions between the Soviet Union prompted this nuclear arms race as the two nations developed more massive and deadly weapons.
As these nuclear explosions detonated, U.S. government officials filmed them on high speed cameras, where they captured the events at 2,400 frames per second. For 65 years, 10,000 of these films have been kept away in a government archive. Now, thanks to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is a federal research facility in California, these films are now seen via YouTube.
In order to edit these films, nuclear weapons physicist Greg Spriggs along with archivists, film experts and software developers have uploaded many digital scans from 750 films which were also declassified for the public. Spriggs explains that these films were on the brink of decomposition which has been so timely for this project.
At the time of recording, the films were made from nitrate cellulose that reeked of a vinegar-like smell when the researchers opened the films cans, due to degradation. Spriggs also revealed that the first few years of the project were devoted to hunting down these film cans.
The team found 6,500 films, scanned 4,200 of them but to date, around 500 films are analyzed. A United Nations Treaty passed in 1996 banned nuclear testing however, this still needs to be ratified by several nations including the United States.
In total, data obtained from these derelict films are from high altitude nuclear blasts that were carried out in the 1950s. Spriggs explains that data recorded by scientists during that time was not highly accurate, where the team re-examined this films to set this new benchmark data for future weapons physicists.