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Physicist Declassifies Rescued Nuclear Test Films (llnl.gov)
Eloking quotes a report from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: The U.S. conducted 210 atmospheric nuclear tests between 1945 and 1962, with multiple cameras capturing each event at around 2,400 frames per second. But in the decades since, around 10,000 of these films sat idle, scattered across the country in high-security vaults. Not only were they gathering dust, the film material itself was slowly decomposing, bringing the data they contained to the brink of being lost forever. For the past five years, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) weapon physicist Greg Spriggs and a crack team of film experts, archivists and software developers have been on a mission to hunt down, scan, reanalyze and declassify these decomposing films. The 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. To date, the team has located around 6,500 of the estimated 10,000 films created during atmospheric testing. Around 4,200 films have been scanned, 400 to 500 have been reanalyzed and around 750 have been declassified. An initial set of these declassified films -- tests conducted by LLNL -- were published today in an LLNL YouTube playlist.
There's already one for previously-existing nuclear test footage.
Nuclear weapons explosions always have that strange mix of terrifying and stunningly beautiful.
Aeris Died For Your Sins.
Something very important is missed in the context however.
Before nuclear bombs, did people die from cancer? Was there a lower incidence of cancer? No.
With Chernobyl and Fukushima leaking and irradiating the environment, did they increase the incidents of cancer? Yes.
The more dangerous thing was never the bombs, per se, but unfettered use of the bombs. The Nuclear reactors were always more dangerous, and much more attractive targets. So 1 nuclear bomb + 1 nuclear reactor = uncontrolled nuclear reaction with an unpredictable result.
Which is to say, we can have the bombs, or the reactors. Not both. If the crazyballs idiots like Trump and Kim Jung Un decide to launch one, that is the end of civilization. Game over. As much as Putin is dangerous, he's not an unhinged crazyballs idiot like Trump.