Between the 1940s and 1960s, the United States conducted hundreds of nuclear tests.. Although this information was no longer a secret to anyone for a long time, recordings of these experiments were kept in high-security vaults, given their degree of confidentiality. 174g2c
This week, some videos started to become public. And it wasn't because the American government decided it was time for people to know about his experiments.
It turned out that the more than 10 thousand film reels were decomposing in the vaults. More than the loss of the historical record, the destruction of this material would undermine current research on fission and nuclear fusion bombs..
After all, in the last 55 years, on the surface of the United States, no nuclear tests have been conducted. And since 1991, no nuclear tests have been carried out in the country.
“You can smell vinegar when you open the cans, because it is one of the by-products of the decomposition process of these films,” said the physicist. Greg Spriggs.
“We know these films are on the verge of decomposing to the point where they have become useless”
Therefore, five years ago the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, of which Spriggs is a part, works to try to recover as much of these records as possible. “The data we are collecting now needs to be preserved in digital form because no matter how well we treat the films, no matter how well you preserve and store them, they will decompose. They are made of organic material and therefore it decomposes. Then that's it. We got the project in time to save the data“, explained the physicist to the website New Atlas.
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However, Spriggs' team isn't simply retrieving footage. In addition to making modifications to the digital scanner to handle the film's density, they are hunting test reports to understand camera location, speed and device focus for analysis.
And, the most interesting thing about this process, is the discovery that the published information about the first tests was wrong, sometimes by up to 30%. According to the physicist who leads the project, the reason for the inaccuracies stem from the method used to make the calculations. At that time, the analyzes were done manually and with measurements taken by eye. Therefore, they could have as many analysts as they were, it would not be possible to be completely accurate.
Of the more than 10 coils, 6.500 have already been recovered. Of these, 4.200 were scanned and between 400 and 500 of them were analyzed. And 63 are already available on LLNL's Youtube for you to watch.
