16 ms·

Weapon physicist declassifies rescued nuclear test films

399 points by mxfh 10y ago

gumby 10y ago
By the way, the spring Trinity test site open house is coming up on the first of April. You can only visit two days a year (1 April and 1 October). It's a really good trip. Here's the web site all about the site (note: this site may be inaccessible from outside the USA): http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/Trinity/Pages/Home.aspx http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/Trinity/Pages/Home.aspx . The national parks service has a page too -- I guess it's a national park encapsulated within a classified military base?
ceejayoz 10y ago
This one's pretty remarkable: https://gfycat.com/WeirdPoisedFairybluebird https://gfycat.com/WeirdPoisedFairybluebird
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  Many of these are remarkable and downright creepy. Some look like gaping skulls. IIRC the spikes you see coming out of the fireball are the guy wires securing the mast that the bomb was mounted on, which initially ignite faster than the fireball expands.
- _greim_ 10y ago
  I like how you can see the both the suspension wire vaporizing and the shockwave reflection off the ground in close detail.
M_Grey 10y ago
"You can smell vinegar when you open the cans, which is one of the byproducts of the decomposition process of these films," Spriggs said. "We know that these films are on the brink of decomposing to the point where they'll become useless. The data that we're collecting now must be preserved in a digital form because no matter how well you treat the films, no matter how well you preserve or store them, they will decompose. They're made out of organic material, and organic material decomposes. So this is it. We got to this project just in time to save the data." That's... incredible. Then it sounds like they used a DNN or something similar to analyze the rate of fireball expansion in the films to refine their earlier estimates of yield. What a beautifully subtle use of tech.
- random3 10y ago
  It makes you wonder what other valuable films are decomposing elsewhere
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    Absolutely. If we had a functional government I'd say they should form a branch of the LoC to digitally preserve it all, post hast. It's hard to know what we'll be losing until it's lost otherwise.
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      I wonder how much the Archive team could do on their own, with donations from us and cooperation of the "better to ask forgiveness" kind from the LoC librarians.
      - M_Grey 10y ago
        That would be an excellent outcome, but given the climate around IP in this country I wouldn't want to be the one the government decided to make an example out of.
    - cwingrav 10y ago
      It's the Library of Congress's job to do just this. They are doing it. People submit huge volumes of film to them and they sort through it, digitize it, and preserve it, just like books and media.
  - jwarren 10y ago
    There are untold thousands of unlabelled canisters in film archives all around the world. Some of them are undoubtedly very important, but until they're catalogued we won't even know. Unfortunately, most film archives are enormously under-funded. Here in the UK, arts funding (which is where this normally comes from) has dropped dramatically since the financial crisis. When Jeremy Hunt axed the UK Film Council[1], most regional film archives totally lost their funding. When their money disappeared, so did any chance of employing cataloguers. A proper archive will at least be storing their film in environments with the proper humidity and temperature to reduce decomposition as much as possible. The other side of it is that the more decomposition that's happened, the more time you need to invest into restoration. See the 11 year restoration of the 18 minute Voyage dans la Lune for an extreme example[2]. That kind of effort is only possible for a film of enormous historical importance and at least some commercial value. Source: My partner's a film archivist and moving image historian. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jul/26/uk-film-council-axed https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jul/26/uk-film-coun... [2]: http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/chromatic-frankensteins-monsters-restoration-colour-and-variants-of-georges-meliess-voyage-dans-la-lune/ http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/chromatic-fr...
patorjk 10y ago
Should these films be marked as public domain? I noticed the license was "Standard YouTube License" for all of the ones I checked on the playlist.
- fnordfnordfnord 10y ago
  I asked, and they responded with this: >Copyright and Reuse Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory grants certain permissions to reuse content created by Lawrence Livermore. These permissions are governed by Creative Commons copyright license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (link is external), more commonly referred to as "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike." Under this license, Lawrence Livermore permits others to remix, tweak and build upon original works created by Lawrence Livermore, as long as appropriate credit is given to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, any reuse is not for commercial purposes, and any remixed works are shared under identical copyright terms. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. Source: https://www.llnl.gov/copyright-and-reuse https://www.llnl.gov/copyright-and-reuse
  - patorjk 10y ago
    It seems strange to me that a government organization would grant a CC license for their content, especially restricting it's use to non-commercial stuff (not that I have any intention to use there stuff commercially). Glad that it's at least available under a CC license though, thank you for asking!
    - fnordfnordfnord 10y ago
      Maybe they ticked the best option with the least friction (not sure what license terms are even available at YT).
ghaff 10y ago
I don't know about these ones specifically but a lot of the nuclear test photography was done by Doc Edgerton and EG&G. http://edgerton-digital-collections.org/ http://edgerton-digital-collections.org/
- Zigurd 10y ago
  I had the great good fortune of being able to take the Strobe Lab course when I was an undergrad. Edgerton explained some of the engineering that went into high speed filming and how the cameras were protected from the blast and radiation. It was a great look into a multidisciplinary engineering project. Everything was purpose built for a unique task.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    I did as well. Great guy. Also the sort of hands-on tinkerer and practitioner that I suspect there are a whole lot fewer of at top research universities today.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
jacquesm 10y ago
"It's just unbelievable how much energy's released," Spriggs said. "We hope that we would never have to use a nuclear weapon ever again. I think that if we capture the history of this and show what the force of these weapons are and how much devastation they can wreak, then maybe people will be reluctant to use them." That's exactly why they likely will be used. So it serves as a deterrent right up to the point where it serves as an advertisement. Interesting bit of un-intended poetry in there: The nitrate film used to store the images is itself rather explosive, so here is one explosive used to record the effects of another: http://www.atomsandnumbers.com/2013/why-the-golden-age-of-cinema-was-also-its-most-dangerous/ http://www.atomsandnumbers.com/2013/why-the-golden-age-of-ci...
- mirimir 10y ago
  They smelled acetic acid in the cans, so that means cellulose acetate film, right? Degraded cellulose nitrate film will smell of NO2.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Some of the cans were labeled clearly 'nitrate' in the video.
    - mirimir 10y ago
      Oops. I tend not to watch much video. There's no sound on this VM host. Because there's too much risk of compartment leakage, with so many family smartphones lying about :(
      - i336_ 10y ago
        I am very curious what you mean by "compartment leakage", and I don't know how to unambiguously interpret "so many family smartphones lying about". Are these smartphones you refer to compromised? Clarification would be highly appreciated :)
linkmotif 10y ago
This is amazing work. Thanks for posting. Reminds me of the people who rescued the lunar orbiter tapes from a McDonalds. I just don't understand why every little 3 minute video needs car commercial music in the background. (re: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWpqGKUG5yY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWpqGKUG5yY)
rangibaby 10y ago
I'm not surprised these were kept classified for so long. No one could watch these and not be moved. That beautiful beach with a mushroom cloud on the horizon. The birds fleeing. What a juxtaposition! Nuclear weapons are humanity's shame. That we used our best minds and science to build these things. "I should have become a watchmaker" - Einstein
- infinitone 10y ago
  I never heard/read that quote by Einstein; interesting. Here is the full quote for the curious: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17014-the-release-of-atomic-power-has-changed-everything-except-our http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17014-the-release-of-atomic-...
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    I live my life by that single insight: technology and progress do not change human nature. Behavior, sure, but not our nature. Human nature and nuclear weaponry are not compatible.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      > Human nature and nuclear weaponry are not compatible. Here's the problem though: most interesting and useful technologies of the future are not compatible with human nature. E.g. any interesting interplanetary drive that would give us reasonable transit times is at the same time a powerful WMD, simply because of the energies we'll be working with. Or bio/nanotech, dream of so many industries, is also potentially much worse than nukes. Makes me worry if we grow up in time, or end up killing ourselves with our toys.
      - M_Grey 10y ago
        You've hit on why I don't see humanity's long-term survival as very likely, and why I find the Great Filter hypothesis so compelling.
mixermf 10y ago
The closing quote: "The legacy I'd like to leave behind is basically a set of benchmark data that can be used by future weapon physicists."
- kevando 10y ago
  hahah I know, right! I have such mixed feelings about this. There's no changing our actions during the cold war, and we should certainly better understand what happened, but doing so to help future makers of nukes? Very unsettling to say the least.
  - positr0n 10y ago
    I went to the museum at LANL a few months ago and in a lot of the videos the scientists and engineers expressed similar sentiments. They feel that the work they are doing is instrumental in the relative peace humanity has had since the end of WWII. I don't know a ton about that subject but it is hard for me to to disagree that without nukes and MAD the world would have a net increase in bloodshed. Relevant SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-04-15 http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-04-15
- DashRattlesnake 10y ago
  > The closing quote: "The legacy I'd like to leave behind is basically a set of benchmark data that can be used by future weapon physicists." That's a misleading selective quotation: here's a fuller quote: > When asked why this project is so important to him, he voiced the dominant perspective among weapon scientists at LLNL: He doesn't want nuclear weapons to be used and passionately believes the key to ensuring they aren't is to making sure the U.S. stockpile continues to be an effective deterrent. > "We need to be able to validate our codes and trust that the answers that are being calculated are correct," Spriggs said. "The legacy that I'd like to leave behind is a set of benchmark data that can be used by future weapon physicists to make sure that our codes are correct so that the U.S. remains prepared."
overcast 10y ago
This footage is always so scary, and beautiful at the same time. Amazing stuff. I can't imagine what it was like seeing the first test go off. The feeling those people must have had about the future.
- coldcode 10y ago
  It amazing to think how something so small can produce so much energy. Yet I look around where I live and try to imagine every last bit being vaporized and it's very sobering.
random3 10y ago
Wow! Watch starting from 1:07 in slow motion (0.25) and as it goes you can see (I believe) the shockwave expanding starting at ~1:11 the ground gets gradually lighter colored and when it reaches the camera it shakes it.
hamburglar1 10y ago
I wanted more explosions. SAD
soneca 10y ago
Coincidentally, I am just 15 minutes away from finishing listening the 350 minutes podcast episode of Dan Carlin's Hard History: The Destroyer of Worlds(1), which is all about how the advent of nuclear weapons changed everything regarding international politics and the war itself. The podcast covers the political and military landscape and events between 1945 and 1962, culminating at the Cuban Missile Crisis, focusing on the American side of the Cold War. If you know Dan Carlin's work, and take a hint from the episode's length, you know that it is a profound analysis, thoroughly studied from a variety of sources and with a real, intelligent effort to understand all sides, all parties, all individuals, and all context of the events. A real historian work. Of particular interest is the glimpse on what was passing through all those brilliant scientists minds throughout and after the development of the tech. This is concentrated in the first half of the podcast if you are interested. (1): http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-of-worlds/ http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-o... EDIT: just finished it, I think the final words of the episode are worth sharing: "As I said, human beings are 70+ years into an on-going experiment to see if they can adapt or evolve to handle their weapon's technology. So far, so good. But let's remember that we are a long way from the edge of this tightrope. These might not even be the most powerful weapons we are creative enough to invent. And the systems we have in place still have human beings involved, which is one of those variables that makes it tough to think that we can go another 100, 30 or so years, and have the human story end with the words '...and we lived happily, ever after.'" Dan Carlin
- koreyb 10y ago
  Hope you used Overcast on 2x :)
  - 33W 10y ago
    I normally listen to all podcasts on 2x speed, but I usually slow Dan Carlin down to 1.5x. He has such a great storytelling style that gets degraded at higher speeds, IMO.
  - soneca 10y ago
    Lol no! I always use 1x on podcasts. In this case specially because i am no native english speaker and the content is very dense (on the more interesting parts I would even rewind to listen twice). On top, I agree with the other comment that his storytelling skills are great and worth savoring. But even on brazilian, humorous podcasts i dont speed up. I listen while doing chores and the ocasional commute. No hurry. I took about a month to finish this one.
chrisper 10y ago
How did they keep these tests secret? Surely you could see these clouds from far away?
- Malic 10y ago
  Sometimes they DID fail to keep it a secret for that very reason! http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/atomic-tests-were-a-tourist-draw-in-1950s-las-vegas/375802/ http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/atomic-tests-were-a-...
epalmer 10y ago
My dad was 10 miles away from the explosion at Bikini Atoll. He was on a ship. I wish I had spoken to him more about it. He just did not want to talk about his work on the Manhattan Project or as a civilian at Bikini Atoll. I did find out he measured radiation levels on the Atol 24 hours after the explosion. He did not get cancer and lived a healthy life to 82 years old. Many of the people he was with did get cancer at a relatively young age.
taude 10y ago
I highly recommend everyone watch the two part series on PBS on Uranium - Twisting the Dragons Tail [1]. I found it really interesting the amount of money we spent to develop the Atomic bomb, and I think about today, if we invested the same percentage of GDP budget and went all in with alternative energies... [1] http://www.pbs.org/program/uranium-twisting-dragons-tail/ http://www.pbs.org/program/uranium-twisting-dragons-tail/
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
So, he is able to himself declassify them or he is able to get them declassified?
cr0sh 10y ago
Is it me, or does it piss anybody else off when stuff like this happens, especially with something of this magnitude? I mean - as terrible and stupid as it still is - it is one thing to lose the original video footage of the first moon landing (GAH!). But here we have data, about the most destructive weapons ever created, that just sits gathering dust, decomposing, becoming useless. Meanwhile, the computer models, being developed and designed by people who likely weren't even alive at the time of these tests, are relying on data and assumptions that don't match up with the data in those tests! What does that mean? I don't know - but it doesn't sound good on the surface - not good at all. Would these weapons work if needed (let's hope that is never the case!)? Would they fail? Are they failing now? And why wasn't this stuff digitized a long time ago? Why do we not seem to care about this crap? Lastly - we are in an era that are so far away from that time period of testing. It bothers me and frightens me that so many people - most who either weren't alive at the time, or were children with no access - these people have no idea about the destructive power of these weapons, having not experienced first-hand the nuclear tests that did occur. These men and women who were "there" are dying or dead already. And those replacing them seem to be getting bolder about wanting to use these weapons, without having the gut affirmation of what they would unleash. I have an opinion - which may be unfounded and false - that one of things that have kept us (humanity) from nuclear annihilation thru war has been the fact that there are still people who remember those tests. Those who remember - at a gut level - that the power of these weapons, from witnessing (or having other close-knowledge of other witnesses) these tests - have stuck with them in a way that can only be akin to that of say, seeing the earth from the moon, or from space. It's a primal thing - the knowledge from seeing these weapons and their capabilities - a single one which can destroy an entire city - and knowing we and "them" target many to many to cities and other places... Yet - here we are, people wanting to use them. And the data that could help make these weapons "safer" rotting away. I'm not sure if that is a good or bad thing overall... Fuck these weapons.
vernie 10y ago
Why do the YouTube videos have such low resolution?
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
I realize that the article indicates that these old films were just lying around untouched for decades, but what you are missing is that this data is "declassified." That doesn't mean it wasn't analyzed between the 50's and today, or that it doesn't exist in other media forms in classified channels - which it does. The US government does a lot of replication of effort because most agencies don't know what the other agencies are doing. The DOE/CIA/DOD/DOS NBC program is massive, and the simulations and modeling teams have all of the extracted RAW data that exists on past tests, including the ones shown here. I think this is a great effort, but all the teeth gnashing about how all of this data would be otherwise lost if not for this effort is - at least in this case - misguided.
matthewmcg 10y ago
This is important work. I would also recommend any of the Peter Kuran documentaries (Trinity and Beyond, Nukes in Space, Hollywood's Top Secret Film Studio). What's really interesting about these is that there is a visible frame count on some of the videos and that you get to see a few frames before the detonation. E.g. the Androscoggin test opens on frame "-8" with the first flash visible at frame 0. You can see this by pausing the youtube videos and advancing frame by frame with the "." key. There are a whole bunch of really interesting but rarely-seen effects that occur in those first one or two frames. Here's an example from a different source of the "Teller Light" that immediately follows the initial release of gamma radiation from the initial nuclear fission in the bomb core: http://www.americancrisis.us/images/2013_08_30_013709_1_teller_light_2.jpg http://www.americancrisis.us/images/2013_08_30_013709_1_tell... There's a neat description of this in a paper from 1958 here: "The glow is known begin immediately (well within a shake) after gamma irradiation of the air, and has an apparent brightness of the order of that of the sun." https://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/4814701 https://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/4814701 It would be really interesting to see the first few high speed frames of a detonating multi-stage weapon. Presumably this would reveal details about the sequence of energy flow from the exploding fission stage to the compressed fusion stages. Indeed, there were diagnostic pipes like this fitted to some of the early H-bomb test devices, e.g. http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/IvyMikeDevB1600c20.jpg http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/IvyMikeDevB1600c20... Sadly, all of the multi-stage tests I have seen in public sources begin a few frames after detonation, or, like these, they are shot from far enough away that you just see a single diffuse glow.
- JoeDaDude 10y ago
  I second the recommendation. Peter Kuran, a film maker, was responsible for restoring a lot of atom bomb test footage that was rotting away and making the restored versions publically available. [1] http://www.atomcentral.com/about-Peter-Kuran.aspx http://www.atomcentral.com/about-Peter-Kuran.aspx
DonHopkins 10y ago
Tom Jennings is going to love this. He collected these device test images from wxvax7.esa.lanl.gov: http://worldpowersystems.com/J/wxvax7.esa.lanl.gov/index.html http://worldpowersystems.com/J/wxvax7.esa.lanl.gov/index.htm... "In the late 1990's LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratory) had a public web server running on what later turned out to be a classified machine. I don't think any security breach occurred, but one day the machine simply disappeared. I wrote to the webmaster (back when you could do such a thing) who told me an audit discovered this alarming state and it was shut down. Luckily I'm a packrat and occasionally use 'wget' to snarf down the contents of a website. This is one of those times. The images aren't anything exclusive, just a good set directly from the horse's mouth..." Tom has a thing for cold war nuclear and computing machinery. He also created FidoNet and Homocore. http://worldpowersystems.com/Projects/index.html http://worldpowersystems.com/Projects/index.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings
j2kun 10y ago
I interned at LLNL and went to a few talks where they discussed small-scale physics first-principles about how the interior of a star works, and I was shocked to discover that these videos were basically all that they had to go off. (And NIF, though each firing of the laser is extremely expensive and contained to a tiny chamber)
saycheese 10y ago
Animated GIF of video: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/hsknc3dfszboff6pqirm.gif https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/hsknc3dfsz... YouTube of it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XnrLY-phipw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XnrLY-phipw
mathgenius 10y ago
Does anyone else think we need a remake of the 1983 movie "The Day After" ?
amai 10y ago
They used cameras that could do 15 million frames per second: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQp1ox-SdRI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQp1ox-SdRI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera

399 points by mxfh 10y ago

gumby 10y ago

By the way, the spring Trinity test site open house is coming up on the first of April. You can only visit two days a year (1 April and 1 October). It's a really good trip. Here's the web site all about the site (note: this site may be inaccessible from outside the USA): http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/Trinity/Pages/Home.aspx http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/Trinity/Pages/Home.aspx . The national parks service has a page too -- I guess it's a national park encapsulated within a classified military base?

ceejayoz 10y ago

This one's pretty remarkable: https://gfycat.com/WeirdPoisedFairybluebird https://gfycat.com/WeirdPoisedFairybluebird

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
Many of these are remarkable and downright creepy. Some look like gaping skulls. IIRC the spikes you see coming out of the fireball are the guy wires securing the mast that the bomb was mounted on, which initially ignite faster than the fireball expands.
_greim_ 10y ago
I like how you can see the both the suspension wire vaporizing and the shockwave reflection off the ground in close detail.

M_Grey 10y ago

"You can smell vinegar when you open the cans, which is one of the byproducts of the decomposition process of these films," Spriggs said. "We know that these films are on the brink of decomposing to the point where they'll become useless. The data that we're collecting now must be preserved in a digital form because no matter how well you treat the films, no matter how well you preserve or store them, they will decompose. They're made out of organic material, and organic material decomposes. So this is it. We got to this project just in time to save the data." That's... incredible. Then it sounds like they used a DNN or something similar to analyze the rate of fireball expansion in the films to refine their earlier estimates of yield. What a beautifully subtle use of tech.

random3 10y ago
It makes you wonder what other valuable films are decomposing elsewhere
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Absolutely. If we had a functional government I'd say they should form a branch of the LoC to digitally preserve it all, post hast. It's hard to know what we'll be losing until it's lost otherwise.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    I wonder how much the Archive team could do on their own, with donations from us and cooperation of the "better to ask forgiveness" kind from the LoC librarians.
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      That would be an excellent outcome, but given the climate around IP in this country I wouldn't want to be the one the government decided to make an example out of.
  - cwingrav 10y ago
    It's the Library of Congress's job to do just this. They are doing it. People submit huge volumes of film to them and they sort through it, digitize it, and preserve it, just like books and media.
- jwarren 10y ago
  There are untold thousands of unlabelled canisters in film archives all around the world. Some of them are undoubtedly very important, but until they're catalogued we won't even know. Unfortunately, most film archives are enormously under-funded. Here in the UK, arts funding (which is where this normally comes from) has dropped dramatically since the financial crisis. When Jeremy Hunt axed the UK Film Council[1], most regional film archives totally lost their funding. When their money disappeared, so did any chance of employing cataloguers. A proper archive will at least be storing their film in environments with the proper humidity and temperature to reduce decomposition as much as possible. The other side of it is that the more decomposition that's happened, the more time you need to invest into restoration. See the 11 year restoration of the 18 minute Voyage dans la Lune for an extreme example[2]. That kind of effort is only possible for a film of enormous historical importance and at least some commercial value. Source: My partner's a film archivist and moving image historian. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jul/26/uk-film-council-axed https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jul/26/uk-film-coun... [2]: http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/chromatic-frankensteins-monsters-restoration-colour-and-variants-of-georges-meliess-voyage-dans-la-lune/ http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/chromatic-fr...

patorjk 10y ago

Should these films be marked as public domain? I noticed the license was "Standard YouTube License" for all of the ones I checked on the playlist.

fnordfnordfnord 10y ago
I asked, and they responded with this: >Copyright and Reuse Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory grants certain permissions to reuse content created by Lawrence Livermore. These permissions are governed by Creative Commons copyright license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (link is external), more commonly referred to as "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike." Under this license, Lawrence Livermore permits others to remix, tweak and build upon original works created by Lawrence Livermore, as long as appropriate credit is given to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, any reuse is not for commercial purposes, and any remixed works are shared under identical copyright terms. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. Source: https://www.llnl.gov/copyright-and-reuse https://www.llnl.gov/copyright-and-reuse
- patorjk 10y ago
  It seems strange to me that a government organization would grant a CC license for their content, especially restricting it's use to non-commercial stuff (not that I have any intention to use there stuff commercially). Glad that it's at least available under a CC license though, thank you for asking!
  - fnordfnordfnord 10y ago
    Maybe they ticked the best option with the least friction (not sure what license terms are even available at YT).

ghaff 10y ago

I don't know about these ones specifically but a lot of the nuclear test photography was done by Doc Edgerton and EG&G. http://edgerton-digital-collections.org/ http://edgerton-digital-collections.org/

Zigurd 10y ago
I had the great good fortune of being able to take the Strobe Lab course when I was an undergrad. Edgerton explained some of the engineering that went into high speed filming and how the cameras were protected from the blast and radiation. It was a great look into a multidisciplinary engineering project. Everything was purpose built for a unique task.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I did as well. Great guy. Also the sort of hands-on tinkerer and practitioner that I suspect there are a whole lot fewer of at top research universities today.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

jacquesm 10y ago

"It's just unbelievable how much energy's released," Spriggs said. "We hope that we would never have to use a nuclear weapon ever again. I think that if we capture the history of this and show what the force of these weapons are and how much devastation they can wreak, then maybe people will be reluctant to use them." That's exactly why they likely will be used. So it serves as a deterrent right up to the point where it serves as an advertisement. Interesting bit of un-intended poetry in there: The nitrate film used to store the images is itself rather explosive, so here is one explosive used to record the effects of another: http://www.atomsandnumbers.com/2013/why-the-golden-age-of-cinema-was-also-its-most-dangerous/ http://www.atomsandnumbers.com/2013/why-the-golden-age-of-ci...

mirimir 10y ago
They smelled acetic acid in the cans, so that means cellulose acetate film, right? Degraded cellulose nitrate film will smell of NO2.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Some of the cans were labeled clearly 'nitrate' in the video.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    Oops. I tend not to watch much video. There's no sound on this VM host. Because there's too much risk of compartment leakage, with so many family smartphones lying about :(
    - i336_ 10y ago
      I am very curious what you mean by "compartment leakage", and I don't know how to unambiguously interpret "so many family smartphones lying about". Are these smartphones you refer to compromised? Clarification would be highly appreciated :)

linkmotif 10y ago

This is amazing work. Thanks for posting. Reminds me of the people who rescued the lunar orbiter tapes from a McDonalds. I just don't understand why every little 3 minute video needs car commercial music in the background. (re: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWpqGKUG5yY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWpqGKUG5yY)

rangibaby 10y ago

I'm not surprised these were kept classified for so long. No one could watch these and not be moved. That beautiful beach with a mushroom cloud on the horizon. The birds fleeing. What a juxtaposition! Nuclear weapons are humanity's shame. That we used our best minds and science to build these things. "I should have become a watchmaker" - Einstein

infinitone 10y ago
I never heard/read that quote by Einstein; interesting. Here is the full quote for the curious: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17014-the-release-of-atomic-power-has-changed-everything-except-our http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/17014-the-release-of-atomic-...
- M_Grey 10y ago
  I live my life by that single insight: technology and progress do not change human nature. Behavior, sure, but not our nature. Human nature and nuclear weaponry are not compatible.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > Human nature and nuclear weaponry are not compatible. Here's the problem though: most interesting and useful technologies of the future are not compatible with human nature. E.g. any interesting interplanetary drive that would give us reasonable transit times is at the same time a powerful WMD, simply because of the energies we'll be working with. Or bio/nanotech, dream of so many industries, is also potentially much worse than nukes. Makes me worry if we grow up in time, or end up killing ourselves with our toys.
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      You've hit on why I don't see humanity's long-term survival as very likely, and why I find the Great Filter hypothesis so compelling.

mixermf 10y ago

The closing quote: "The legacy I'd like to leave behind is basically a set of benchmark data that can be used by future weapon physicists."

kevando 10y ago
hahah I know, right! I have such mixed feelings about this. There's no changing our actions during the cold war, and we should certainly better understand what happened, but doing so to help future makers of nukes? Very unsettling to say the least.
- positr0n 10y ago
  I went to the museum at LANL a few months ago and in a lot of the videos the scientists and engineers expressed similar sentiments. They feel that the work they are doing is instrumental in the relative peace humanity has had since the end of WWII. I don't know a ton about that subject but it is hard for me to to disagree that without nukes and MAD the world would have a net increase in bloodshed. Relevant SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-04-15 http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-04-15
DashRattlesnake 10y ago
> The closing quote: "The legacy I'd like to leave behind is basically a set of benchmark data that can be used by future weapon physicists." That's a misleading selective quotation: here's a fuller quote: > When asked why this project is so important to him, he voiced the dominant perspective among weapon scientists at LLNL: He doesn't want nuclear weapons to be used and passionately believes the key to ensuring they aren't is to making sure the U.S. stockpile continues to be an effective deterrent. > "We need to be able to validate our codes and trust that the answers that are being calculated are correct," Spriggs said. "The legacy that I'd like to leave behind is a set of benchmark data that can be used by future weapon physicists to make sure that our codes are correct so that the U.S. remains prepared."

overcast 10y ago

This footage is always so scary, and beautiful at the same time. Amazing stuff. I can't imagine what it was like seeing the first test go off. The feeling those people must have had about the future.

coldcode 10y ago
It amazing to think how something so small can produce so much energy. Yet I look around where I live and try to imagine every last bit being vaporized and it's very sobering.

random3 10y ago

Wow! Watch starting from 1:07 in slow motion (0.25) and as it goes you can see (I believe) the shockwave expanding starting at ~1:11 the ground gets gradually lighter colored and when it reaches the camera it shakes it.

hamburglar1 10y ago

I wanted more explosions. SAD

soneca 10y ago

Coincidentally, I am just 15 minutes away from finishing listening the 350 minutes podcast episode of Dan Carlin's Hard History: The Destroyer of Worlds(1), which is all about how the advent of nuclear weapons changed everything regarding international politics and the war itself. The podcast covers the political and military landscape and events between 1945 and 1962, culminating at the Cuban Missile Crisis, focusing on the American side of the Cold War. If you know Dan Carlin's work, and take a hint from the episode's length, you know that it is a profound analysis, thoroughly studied from a variety of sources and with a real, intelligent effort to understand all sides, all parties, all individuals, and all context of the events. A real historian work. Of particular interest is the glimpse on what was passing through all those brilliant scientists minds throughout and after the development of the tech. This is concentrated in the first half of the podcast if you are interested. (1): http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-of-worlds/ http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-o... EDIT: just finished it, I think the final words of the episode are worth sharing: "As I said, human beings are 70+ years into an on-going experiment to see if they can adapt or evolve to handle their weapon's technology. So far, so good. But let's remember that we are a long way from the edge of this tightrope. These might not even be the most powerful weapons we are creative enough to invent. And the systems we have in place still have human beings involved, which is one of those variables that makes it tough to think that we can go another 100, 30 or so years, and have the human story end with the words '...and we lived happily, ever after.'" Dan Carlin

koreyb 10y ago
Hope you used Overcast on 2x :)
- 33W 10y ago
  I normally listen to all podcasts on 2x speed, but I usually slow Dan Carlin down to 1.5x. He has such a great storytelling style that gets degraded at higher speeds, IMO.
- soneca 10y ago
  Lol no! I always use 1x on podcasts. In this case specially because i am no native english speaker and the content is very dense (on the more interesting parts I would even rewind to listen twice). On top, I agree with the other comment that his storytelling skills are great and worth savoring. But even on brazilian, humorous podcasts i dont speed up. I listen while doing chores and the ocasional commute. No hurry. I took about a month to finish this one.

chrisper 10y ago

How did they keep these tests secret? Surely you could see these clouds from far away?

Malic 10y ago
Sometimes they DID fail to keep it a secret for that very reason! http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/atomic-tests-were-a-tourist-draw-in-1950s-las-vegas/375802/ http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/atomic-tests-were-a-...

epalmer 10y ago

My dad was 10 miles away from the explosion at Bikini Atoll. He was on a ship. I wish I had spoken to him more about it. He just did not want to talk about his work on the Manhattan Project or as a civilian at Bikini Atoll. I did find out he measured radiation levels on the Atol 24 hours after the explosion. He did not get cancer and lived a healthy life to 82 years old. Many of the people he was with did get cancer at a relatively young age.

taude 10y ago

I highly recommend everyone watch the two part series on PBS on Uranium - Twisting the Dragons Tail [1]. I found it really interesting the amount of money we spent to develop the Atomic bomb, and I think about today, if we invested the same percentage of GDP budget and went all in with alternative energies... [1] http://www.pbs.org/program/uranium-twisting-dragons-tail/ http://www.pbs.org/program/uranium-twisting-dragons-tail/

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

So, he is able to himself declassify them or he is able to get them declassified?

cr0sh 10y ago

Is it me, or does it piss anybody else off when stuff like this happens, especially with something of this magnitude? I mean - as terrible and stupid as it still is - it is one thing to lose the original video footage of the first moon landing (GAH!). But here we have data, about the most destructive weapons ever created, that just sits gathering dust, decomposing, becoming useless. Meanwhile, the computer models, being developed and designed by people who likely weren't even alive at the time of these tests, are relying on data and assumptions that don't match up with the data in those tests! What does that mean? I don't know - but it doesn't sound good on the surface - not good at all. Would these weapons work if needed (let's hope that is never the case!)? Would they fail? Are they failing now? And why wasn't this stuff digitized a long time ago? Why do we not seem to care about this crap? Lastly - we are in an era that are so far away from that time period of testing. It bothers me and frightens me that so many people - most who either weren't alive at the time, or were children with no access - these people have no idea about the destructive power of these weapons, having not experienced first-hand the nuclear tests that did occur. These men and women who were "there" are dying or dead already. And those replacing them seem to be getting bolder about wanting to use these weapons, without having the gut affirmation of what they would unleash. I have an opinion - which may be unfounded and false - that one of things that have kept us (humanity) from nuclear annihilation thru war has been the fact that there are still people who remember those tests. Those who remember - at a gut level - that the power of these weapons, from witnessing (or having other close-knowledge of other witnesses) these tests - have stuck with them in a way that can only be akin to that of say, seeing the earth from the moon, or from space. It's a primal thing - the knowledge from seeing these weapons and their capabilities - a single one which can destroy an entire city - and knowing we and "them" target many to many to cities and other places... Yet - here we are, people wanting to use them. And the data that could help make these weapons "safer" rotting away. I'm not sure if that is a good or bad thing overall... Fuck these weapons.

vernie 10y ago

Why do the YouTube videos have such low resolution?

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

I realize that the article indicates that these old films were just lying around untouched for decades, but what you are missing is that this data is "declassified." That doesn't mean it wasn't analyzed between the 50's and today, or that it doesn't exist in other media forms in classified channels - which it does. The US government does a lot of replication of effort because most agencies don't know what the other agencies are doing. The DOE/CIA/DOD/DOS NBC program is massive, and the simulations and modeling teams have all of the extracted RAW data that exists on past tests, including the ones shown here. I think this is a great effort, but all the teeth gnashing about how all of this data would be otherwise lost if not for this effort is - at least in this case - misguided.

matthewmcg 10y ago

This is important work. I would also recommend any of the Peter Kuran documentaries (Trinity and Beyond, Nukes in Space, Hollywood's Top Secret Film Studio). What's really interesting about these is that there is a visible frame count on some of the videos and that you get to see a few frames before the detonation. E.g. the Androscoggin test opens on frame "-8" with the first flash visible at frame 0. You can see this by pausing the youtube videos and advancing frame by frame with the "." key. There are a whole bunch of really interesting but rarely-seen effects that occur in those first one or two frames. Here's an example from a different source of the "Teller Light" that immediately follows the initial release of gamma radiation from the initial nuclear fission in the bomb core: http://www.americancrisis.us/images/2013_08_30_013709_1_teller_light_2.jpg http://www.americancrisis.us/images/2013_08_30_013709_1_tell... There's a neat description of this in a paper from 1958 here: "The glow is known begin immediately (well within a shake) after gamma irradiation of the air, and has an apparent brightness of the order of that of the sun." https://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/4814701 https://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/4814701 It would be really interesting to see the first few high speed frames of a detonating multi-stage weapon. Presumably this would reveal details about the sequence of energy flow from the exploding fission stage to the compressed fusion stages. Indeed, there were diagnostic pipes like this fitted to some of the early H-bomb test devices, e.g. http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/IvyMikeDevB1600c20.jpg http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/IvyMikeDevB1600c20... Sadly, all of the multi-stage tests I have seen in public sources begin a few frames after detonation, or, like these, they are shot from far enough away that you just see a single diffuse glow.

JoeDaDude 10y ago
I second the recommendation. Peter Kuran, a film maker, was responsible for restoring a lot of atom bomb test footage that was rotting away and making the restored versions publically available. [1] http://www.atomcentral.com/about-Peter-Kuran.aspx http://www.atomcentral.com/about-Peter-Kuran.aspx

DonHopkins 10y ago

Tom Jennings is going to love this. He collected these device test images from wxvax7.esa.lanl.gov: http://worldpowersystems.com/J/wxvax7.esa.lanl.gov/index.html http://worldpowersystems.com/J/wxvax7.esa.lanl.gov/index.htm... "In the late 1990's LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratory) had a public web server running on what later turned out to be a classified machine. I don't think any security breach occurred, but one day the machine simply disappeared. I wrote to the webmaster (back when you could do such a thing) who told me an audit discovered this alarming state and it was shut down. Luckily I'm a packrat and occasionally use 'wget' to snarf down the contents of a website. This is one of those times. The images aren't anything exclusive, just a good set directly from the horse's mouth..." Tom has a thing for cold war nuclear and computing machinery. He also created FidoNet and Homocore. http://worldpowersystems.com/Projects/index.html http://worldpowersystems.com/Projects/index.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings

j2kun 10y ago

I interned at LLNL and went to a few talks where they discussed small-scale physics first-principles about how the interior of a star works, and I was shocked to discover that these videos were basically all that they had to go off. (And NIF, though each firing of the laser is extremely expensive and contained to a tiny chamber)

saycheese 10y ago

Animated GIF of video: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/hsknc3dfszboff6pqirm.gif https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/hsknc3dfsz... YouTube of it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XnrLY-phipw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XnrLY-phipw

mathgenius 10y ago

Does anyone else think we need a remake of the 1983 movie "The Day After" ?

amai 10y ago

They used cameras that could do 15 million frames per second: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQp1ox-SdRI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQp1ox-SdRI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera