Weapon physicist Greg Spriggs and a crack team of film experts, archivists and software developers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have declassified around 750 videos from 210 atmospheric nuclear tests conducted by the U.S. between 1945 and 1962.

According to Spriggs, the team has been on a mission to hunt down, scan, reanalyze and declassify these decomposing films for the last five years, and their 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 U.S. nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure and effective.”

The team, so far, has located around 6,500 of the estimated 10,000 films created during atmospheric testing. Spriggs estimates it will take another two years or more to retrieve the rest of the films. Here’s an initial set of the declassified films published by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

[Source: LLNL]

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