The United States conducted the nuclear tests to learn about the effectiveness and awesome power of these weapons of mass destruction. The tests were high up in the atmosphere and were filmed from every conceivable angle and distance.
The incredible footage is like something out of a doomsday movie, beginning with the eye-searing bright flash that seems to hang in the sky and the malignant and monstrous mushroom cloud that blocks out the sky and the ocean, as the camera’s eyes recorded the events at 2,400 frames a second.
Since that time, the 10,000 or so films have been stored in security vaults across the country, gathering dust and slowly decomposing, bringing the historic footage to the brink of being lost forever. However, for the last five years, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) weapons specialist, Greg Spriggs, along with a team of film specialists, archivists and software developers have been tracking down, scanning, reanalyzing and declassifying these decomposing films.
To date, about 6,500 films have been located and of those, 4,200 have been scanned, with 400 to 500 reanalysed and 750 of them declassified. An initial group of 60 or so of these films was published on the Internet in an LLNL YouTube playlist.
Now this id a frightening film.
Some of the films are in black and white and some are in color, but they all bear whimsical names like Operation Hardtack, Operation Plumbbob, Operation Teapot, according to the Verge, but don’t let the light and airy names fool you – The films are very real.
Spriggs explains in a video about the project that “We don’t have any experimental data for modern weapons in the atmosphere.” And this is one reason the project was started. The films can help post-testing-era scientists who use computer codes to help certify that the aging U.S. nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure and effective.
In the 1950s and 1960s, scientists and analysts used a tool called a kodagraph to enlarge the image of a single frame, then shine it onto a grid. Then the measurements of the size of the fireball were “eyeballed” to get an estimate of the size. With so many frames to analyze, it took thousands of analysists to accomplish what can be done today by a handful of people.
And utilizing the expertise of software producers, measurements of the size of the fireball and resulting cloud, as well as reading the size of the shockwave from frame to frame, something that could take days to complete manually for each film, can be done in a matter of a few minutes.
Spriggs was asked why the project is so important to him. His answer is that he doesn’t want nuclear weapons to ever be used, however, he also believes the key to ensuring they aren’t is to making sure the U.S. stockpile continues to be an effective deterrent. “We need to be able to validate our codes and trust that the answers that are being calculated are correct,” Spriggs said.
“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.”
