In case you were bored and want to watch some cool nuclear explosions:

https://m.youtube.com/playlist...G166wKRy5z-GlJ_OQND5


http://www.theverge.com/2017/3...-test-movies-youtube

Between 1945 and 1962, the United States conducted over 200 nuclear tests up high in the atmosphere to learn about the power of nuclear weapons. The terrifying explosions were filmed from every possible angle and distance, and the movies — an estimated 10,000 of them — were then stored in high-security vaults scattered across the country.

Now, for the first time, about 4,200 of thee films have been scanned, and around 750 have been declassified by the US government. You can watch about 60 of them on YouTube. Some are in color, some in black and white, and all of them bear the whimsical names of top secret missions: Operation Hardtack, Operation Plumbbob, Operation Teapot.


Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The project is spearheaded by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) weapon physicist Greg Spriggs, who’s hoping to save the films, reanalyze them, and squeeze every bit of data out of them. In fact, there’s still a lot we don’t know about the effects of high-altitude nuclear blasts, and right now they are prohibited by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. By making the movies public and analyzing them, Spriggs hopes to help other nuclear weapon physicists learn more about nuclear explosions.

"We don't have any experimental data for modern weapons in the atmosphere,” Spriggs says in a video about the project. “The only data we have are the old tests, so it gets a little bit more complicated.”

Spriggs has so far reanalyzed about 400 to 500 films over the past five years. It’s key to digitize them because they’re made of old cellulose acetate, so they decompose over time. "You can smell vinegar when you open the cans,” he said in a statement. "We know that these films are on the brink of decomposing to the point where they'll become useless.”

Declassifying the films is a “huge bureaucratic undertaking,” writes Sarah Zhang in Wired. For each film, Spriggs has to fill out a form that then goes over to the Department of Energy for approval. The nuclear test operations are already known, so there’s no reason to keep the films secret, Spriggs tells Wired. It just takes a ton of time to declassify them. Thanks to Spriggs, and his time, we can now enjoy these explosive videos.

It's time to declassify them, it's been a long time.
I love to watch those explosions!

GGF

I grew up in Livermore....

It's nick name is the Rad Lab.

My child hood soccer club was the Atomics and my first team at 4yrs old was the Ions.

I just finished reading 'The Manhattan Project' by Cynthia Kelly

excellent book

Video 54 and 64 are amazing. Stuff we have never seen before.

Cool.

It's not in that lot, but one of my favorite detonation films is from a test where five officers and one photographer agreed to stand beneath a "small" (2 kiloton) blast at 18,500ft AGL. Gives you a perspective that the distantly-shot test films don't.

Sweet! Something to watch when I get bored of watching 10mm effects. I for some reason love watching videos of atomic weapons testing. It's amazing we have learned to harness the power of the atom. I wish physics had continued the progress from then until now. We'd be traveling from London to Tokyo in seconds using Quantum Physics.

quote:

Originally posted by Skins2881:
Sweet! Something to watch when I get bored of watching 10mm effects. I for some reason love watching videos of atomic weapons testing. .

Then you'll love watching the Birdman Nuke 50 demo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_XX2lIT1tQ

quote:

Originally posted by S600MBUSA:
It's not in that lot, but one of my favorite detonation films is from a test where five officers and one photographer agreed to stand beneath a "small" (2 kiloton) blast at 18,500ft AGL. Gives you a perspective that the distantly-shot test films don't.

1. I don't believe I would have done that.

2. I wish khaki trousers like those were still made.

Thanks for the entertainment lead

What a cool project. I'm glad the physicists recognized the need to digitize the film assets before they were lost. And that nitrate film!

It's a little amazing that scientists can still learn things from looking at the previous records.

What's the protocol for naming top secret missions?

Is there a reference list so you don't accidently re-use a top secret name and confuse everyone?

Because, seriously, I'd be hard pressed not to name every single mission Operation Thor's Hammer or Operation Zeus' Fury.

quote:

Originally posted by PR64:
I grew up in Livermore....

It's nick name is the Rad Lab.

My child hood soccer club was the Atomics and my first team at 4yrs old was the Ions.

I was in Livermore in the late 60's, working on a computer at the Sandia Corp. site. In many drugstores of that era, you'd find a big stack of Playboy magazines at the side of the magazine rack (too many to fit on the rack). But the magazine rack in the Livermore drugstore had a big stack of Scientific Americans at its side. I chuckled.

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:

I was in Livermore in the late 60's, working on a computer at the Sandia Corp. site...

Slight thread drift: LLNL was originally a Naval Air Station.

http://www.airfields-freeman.c...anJose.htm#livermore

quote:

Originally posted by S600MBUSA:
It's not in that lot, but one of my favorite detonation films is from a test where five officers and one photographer agreed to stand beneath a "small" (2 kiloton) blast at 18,500ft AGL. Gives you a perspective that the distantly-shot test films don't.

I recall reading that all of these guys subsequently died of cancer.

There are already 70 some videos that have been previously declassified and put on youtube and other places. Go to youtube and search on the term "declassified u.s. nuclear test film #". They are numbered 01 to 72, I think. Some are short with no sound while others are an hour or more in length and are carefully and thoughtfully narrated. Some of these are training films intended to be shown to the personnel who handle and maintain nuclear weapons. Others are overview or summary films intended to brief command staff or civilian officials on the results of various test series. Amazing stuff.

Quite a bit of nuclear history can be gleaned from these videos as well as some surprising tidbits. The Castle Bravo test was supposed to be a 3 to 5 megaton explosion (about 300 times the explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb) but, due to an unknown reaction, the Castle Bravo explosion was about 13 to 23 megatons (1,000 times Hiroshima) and covered around 7,000 square miles of the Pacific with lethal fallout, threatening the crew that oversaw the test some 40 miles away as well as US and native populations on nearby islands. The commander of the task force that oversaw the Castle series of nuclear tests admitted in one now declassified video that the massive amounts of lethal fallout from the Castle Bravo test, "...suggested a tactical use for nuclear weapons that was heretofore unknown..." or words to that effect. They didn't realize until that point that radioactive fallout was itself a weapon effect that could be used against an enemy.

The speed with which the US government developed nuclear weapons is nothing less than staggering. Uranium fission was only discovered in December of 1938. Plutonium was unknown to science until 1942, but by 1945, plutonium was being produced on an industrial scale in reactors built for that purpose at Hanford, WA. From discovering fission to Hiroshima in less than 7 years! Today it can take decades to put a new ship into the water or a new aircraft into the air, and those things aren't exactly nuclear science!

Holy crap, this bomb test is insane. Never seen one like it before

https://youtu.be/uYbNlgQyz84

I am guessing this is a nice way for the government to make some money. Declassify videos. Create and open a youtube account / channel and post the videos there. millions of people watch and subscribe. Google pays them for the ad's. Government makes some $$$$. It would be of no surprise if we found out some way some how that this was Trump's idea. God Bless