Declassified Video Of 60 US Nuclear Bombs Exploding Warns Us Of Their Epic Destructive Scale

If you get a high out of setting off fireworks, or burning random items in the occasional party bonfire, you¡¯re probably going to like this. The US has just declassified video of nuclear tests carried out in the 1940¡¯s to 1960¡¯s, and it¡¯s available on YouTube in all its destructive power.

Mushroom cloud of the first Hydrogen bomb test, Ivy Mike - Reuters

Some men just want to watch the world burn. Others want to stop the world from burning by threatening to burn it if someone else tries. That¡¯s pretty much what nuclear armament entails, and the US was in the thick of it during the Cold War

Between 1945 and 1962, the US conducted 210 nuclear tests in its arms race with Soviet Russia, only a fragment of the over 1,000 nuclear tests carried out during the Cold War. Each of these were captured at 2,400 frames per second, from multiple camera angles, in order to analyse later. Now, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has recovered film of some of these tests, with the intention to study and preserve the test data therein.

Ivy Mike test on Enewetak Atoll - National Nuclear Security Administration

Many nuclear tests were carried out on land targets, like the 1945 Trinity test near Alamogordo in New Mexico, where the heat from the blast melted sand and stone and fused it into a new element later named Trinitite. Others, like the tests at the Bikini Atoll between 1946 and 1958 were much more severe. After 23 nuclear explosions, detonated both in the air above the islands as well as underwater, eventually left the them uninhabitable until at least 2015.

Eventually, video evidence of the 210 airborne nuclear blasts were analyzed and locked away in high-security vaults, with no one laying eyes on them for decades. Now, 65 years later, 750 of the recordings have been declassified by the government (standard practice that lets the public peruse government and intelligence information once an appropriate time frame has passed) and have made their way online.

The government just declassified (and put on YouTube!) a bunch of Cold War-era nuclear test films I wrote about https://t.co/KVnbaIc9tk

¡ª Sarah Zhang (@sarahzhang) 15 March 2017

LLNL scientists spent the last five years tracking down and recovering the films which, made of nitrate cellulose, have begun degrading over time. ¡°This is it. We got to this project just in time,¡± nuclear weapon physicist Greg Spriggs said in an introductory video. ¡°We know that these films are on the brink of decomposing, to the point where they will become useless.¡±

The push from LLNL to study and digitize these films is because the world in general lacks critical information on the destructive capabilities of modern nuclear weapons, especially in high-altitude blasts. The data recovered will help scientists better understand how nuclear powers like the US need to manage their stockpiles and ¡°to help certify that the aging US nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure and effective.¡±

¡°We found out that most of the data published was wrong,¡± Spriggs added. ¡°We decided we need to re-scan and reanalyze all of the films.¡± Of the 10,000 videos recorded, LLNL has managed to locate close to 6,500 films, and digitize 4,200 of those so far. Yet, only approximately 400 of the films have yet been analysed.

You can watch all the videos made available on YouTube in the playlist below.