Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Film records of nuclear experiments released
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory publishes declassified films from tests in ’50s and ’60s.
From the deserts of southern New Mexico and Nevada to islands in the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. government conducted dozens of nuclear weapons tests from the 1940s until the early 1960s.
Vintage rolls of film collected from high-security vaults show some of the blasts sending incredible mushroom clouds into the sky and massive fireballs across the landscape.
Others start with blinding flashes of light followed by rising columns of smoke in the distance.
A team from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory last week published more than five dozen films salvaged from government installations where they had sat idle for years.
Lab physicist Greg Spriggs said the decadesold films were in danger of decomposing and being lost to history. He called them a big part of the nation’s history and an important tool for providing better data to modern scientists who now use computer codes to help certify that the U.S. nuclear stockpile remains safe and effective.
“We don’t have any experimental data for modern weapons in the atmosphere. The only data that we have are the old tests,” he said, noting that the manual methods used in the 1950s to analyze the blasts weren’t that accurate.
By scanning the film and reviewing it with data sheets from the tests, the team discovered much of the data published were wrong. Some of the answers were off by 20 percent.
“One of the payoffs of this project is that we’re now getting very consistent answers,” he said. “We’ve also discovered new things about these detonations that have never been seen before.”