Posted on 03/17/2017 1:35:15 PM PDT by NYer
Weapon physicist declassifies rescued nuclear test films - Video
On Tuesday, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a federally funded facility outside San Francisco that focuses on nuclear research, released 63 rare, restored and declassified nuclear-test films.
The films, uploaded to the lab’s YouTube account, are part of a trove of some 10,000 that have been in storage since they were originally shot between 1945 and 1962, and had been held in secure vaults since then.
The initial release is just a fraction of about 750 that Greg Spriggs, a physicist at the lab who has worked on the project for five years, declassified on Tuesday. And even that number is small compared to some 6,500 films that have been found of the 10,000 that were estimated to have been shot at the height of the Cold War.
The goal in preserving and digitizing them, Spriggs said in a news release, was to keep the films for future study, lest they decompose and disappear forever.
“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.”
What that means for viewers of the lab’s YouTube account is a lot of mushroom clouds. Like this explosion named Harlem, which occurred off Kiribati in 1962 in a series of tests known as Operation Dominic.
Or this explosion, part of a series of tests at the Nevada Test Site that took place in 1955 that was known as Operation Teapot. This particular explosion was called Tesla.
The United States is the only country to have ever used nuclear bombs during war. In 1945, at least 100,000 men, women, and children were instantly killed when bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in addition to tens of thousands more who later died because of the bombs’ after effects.
The government would never lie to us
I always wanted to see an exploded view of an exploding explosion.
Always in the Dr. Strangelove mood.
Bkmrk for later.
* * *
You saw similar effects on tower mounted devices with guy wires. The soft x-ray pulse traveled ahead of the fireball, vaporizing the wires. Dr. John Malik called it the “rope trick”.
These things are the only defense we have against a threatening comet or meteor impact. The Cold War nuclear arsenals may one day be praised as having saved the entire planet’s bacon.
These things are the only defense we have against a threatening comet or meteor impact. The Cold War nuclear arsenals may one day be praised as having saved the entire planet’s bacon.
I’ll second #37.
Some were detonated on towers or balloons for elevation studies. The blast was able to progress down the guy wires faster than thru air, leading to the “spike” effect.
bkmk
I’m not so sure that those men were riding into the nuke blast area. Maybe, but it wasn’t obvious, and easily could have been done just for propoganda purposes. The one shot that does have a blast cloud in the background is much smaller than the one from the nuke.
I got a kick out of the wooden chairs in front of the computer, and the guys with sabers on horseback as they enter the Nuclear Age.
Start blinking your eyes at 55 if you don't see it :)
“The United States is the only country to have ever used nuclear bombs during war. In 1945, at least 100,000 men, women, and children were instantly killed when bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in addition to tens of thousands more who later died because of the bombs after effects.”
....and thereby saved the lives of a least 1,900,000 Japanese and 1,000,000 Allies who were expected to die in Operations Olympic - Coronet, the Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands.
I once asked a former WWII Japanese Field Artillery officer about the universally accepted estimate of a total of 2,000,000 Japanese dead in the invasions. He said, “No. That number is wrong. It would have been much higher, perhaps as many as 8 t0 14 million. Every Japanese man and boy, and I mean every one, would have been honored to die for the emperor.”
The part of the physics I always was the most amazing is that all the nuclear fission reactions are complete in a few millionth of a second. All the rest is aftermath.
It wasn’t in anger, it was out of necessity. Kinda like George Zimmerman having to shoot Trayvon Martin. It’s too bad that it had to happen but it did.
***at least 100,000 men, women, and children were instantly killed when bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki***
So? it was WAR. Almost the same number were killed when Tokyo was bombed with conventional bombs. Don’t see Leftists and Liberals weeping and wailing about them!
Amazing. I imagined Mecca at the epicenter.
Google the words "rope trick" and you'll get complete explanation.
This is some fascinating stuff.I always thought that a nuke going off was instant destruction of the entire immediate area.
They ought to make a movie about that.
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