Media reports say US authorities have declassified hundreds of videos chronicling the country’s 20th century nuclear weapon tests.
The US government has reportedly declassified about 750 of the estimated 10,000 films created during the atmospheric nuclear weapon tests conducted by the country between 1945 and 1962.
Between the end of World War II and the early 1960s, the United States conducted over 200 nuclear weapon tests high in the atmosphere in remote parts of Nevada, New Mexico and in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Thousands of videos recording the massive explosions from dozens of angles were stored in government vaults and now roughly 750 films have been declassified by the US government.
According to Fox19 Now, news researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have been working to track down, declassify and publish the films.
Gregg Spriggs, a weapon physicist at the LLNL who works on the project, explained that the team’s work has a certain sense of urgency as the original films are made of nitrate cellulose and slowly decompose over time.
To date, the team has located around 6,500 of the estimated 10,000 films created during atmospheric above-ground testing, New York Post reported.
Around 4,200 films have reportedly so far been scanned and 400 to 500 have been reanalyzed.
