From 1945 to 1962 the American government detonated more than 210 nuclear bombs while cameras captured each test explosion at nearly 2,400 frames per second.
Since the legislative halt of atmospheric testing in 1963, 6,500 out of an estimated 10,000 films have been located with 4,200 scanned and now 750 declassified. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California set the project in motion in hopes of extracting all lost data that nuclear weapons physicists will use to analyze the magnitude of past and possible future atomic damage. The project launched out of necessity, has led to the best possible restoration of Cold War bomb footage that the Livermore National Laboratory has now made public on YouTube. (more…)