How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

There was a fun little news story from Fox News last week:

The US government has about 10,000 films of the 221 atmospheric nuclear tests conducted between 1945 and 1962, covering the destructive power from all sorts of angles and distances, Business Insider reports.

But until recently those films were literally rotting away in top-secret storage. Gregg Spriggs, a weapons physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, tells Paleofuture the films were "on the brink" of being "useless." Not anymore.

Spriggs has scanned 4,200 of the films to digital and gotten 750 of them declassified. And this week he posted 65 of the films—an "initial set"—to YouTube.

Some of the films are rather dull, like this one:



On the other hand, there are some excellent examples too, which make for great viewing, if you like watching large explosions (and I do!). Following are the better examples, for your viewing pleasure:





Here is a fascinating close-up of Operation Teapot: