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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.
The 50 years of post WWII peace and stability in the world that these tests have blessed us with is well worth the 'poison' it generated, which has had minimal measurable impact on the world. In exchange, millions of lives have been saved that would have otherwise been lost in wars.
The instability of both WWI and WWII was fostered and profited from by the global elite. During WWII American interests sold fuel, Aluminum (straight from Alcoa!) and other war supplies to the Nazis. The Bush family fortune is based upon a corporation that Prescott Bush operated whose purpose was to launder money and funnel it to Hitler's S.S. The corporation was shut down but Prescott was allowed to retain over one million dollars in ill-gotten goods, and the rest is history. We knew the holocaust was occurring but our precious leaders felt that our people had little stomach for another war so soon after WWI and actively profited from the state of affairs instead of intervening. The USA has been at war with someone (whether properly declared or not, we're talking deployments, boots on the ground, shots fired) ever since.
TL;DR: There has been no era of peace and stability. There have only been proxy wars fought in other countries.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Thanks for the alternative-history fiction. Do you have anything to say about the real world?