After collecting dust in high-security vaults for more than 65 years, hundreds of reels of film showing Cold War nuclear bomb tests have been declassified by the United States.
From 1945 to 1962, the United States detonated more than 210 nuclear bombs, with multiple cameras capturing each explosion at around 2,400 frames per second.
For decades, about 10,000 of these films have been locked away, sitting idle, scattered across the US in high-security vaults. Until now.
A team from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has worked for the last five years on finding, declassifying and preserving the films’ content before it was lost forever.
Greg Spriggs, a weapon physicist at LLNL and head of the project said when they got their hands on the film they could smell it wasting away.
It is made of nitrate cellulose, an organic material that, when decomposes, smells like vinegar.
“You can smell vinegar when you open the cans,” Mr Spriggs said in a YouTube video.
Source: US releases secret footage of atom bomb tests – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
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