
Weapon physicist declassifies rescued nuclear test films - mxfh
https://www.llnl.gov/news/physicist-declassifies-rescued-nuclear-test-films
======
soneca
Coincidentally, I am just 15 minutes away from finishing listening the 350
minutes podcast episode of Dan Carlin's Hard History: The Destroyer of
Worlds(1), which is all about how the advent of nuclear weapons changed
everything regarding international politics and the war itself.

The podcast covers the political and military landscape and events between
1945 and 1962, culminating at the Cuban Missile Crisis, focusing on the
American side of the Cold War.

If you know Dan Carlin's work, and take a hint from the episode's length, you
know that it is a profound analysis, thoroughly studied from a variety of
sources and with a real, intelligent effort to understand all sides, all
parties, all individuals, and all context of the events. A real historian
work.

Of particular interest is the glimpse on what was passing through all those
brilliant scientists minds throughout and after the development of the tech.
This is concentrated in the first half of the podcast if you are interested.

(1): [http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-
destroyer-o...](http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-of-
worlds/)

EDIT: just finished it, I think the final words of the episode are worth
sharing:

 _" As I said, human beings are 70+ years into an on-going experiment to see
if they can adapt or evolve to handle their weapon's technology. So far, so
good. But let's remember that we are a long way from the edge of this
tightrope. These might not even be the most powerful weapons we are creative
enough to invent. And the systems we have in place still have human beings
involved, which is one of those variables that makes it tough to think that we
can go another 100, 30 or so years, and have the human story end with the
words '...and we lived happily, ever after.'"_ Dan Carlin

~~~
andrew_wc_brown
I tried listening to your podcast episode, but the windiness of your intro
didn't get me hooked after 10 mins of listening and I had to stop listening.

~~~
soneca
It is not "mine" podcast, I just listened to it. I edited my original comment
to include "finishing listening" \- I am not sure it is correct English, but
at least I think clears this misunderstanding.

~~~
throwanem
"Finishing listening" is arguably grammatical and certainly clear as to
meaning, but a double verb like that is relatively rarely encountered in
modern colloquial English, and falls somewhat oddly on the ear as a result. In
a case like this, the lexical context generally supplies sufficient clue; one
might instead, for example, say "...15 minutes away from the end of the...",
or just "...from finishing the...", and have only a negligible fraction of
readers fail to derive "listening" from the context of talking about a
podcast. When that context might not be clear, it's worth expanding on the
nature of the action described, but such cases are unlikely to be common and
should be fairly obvious when they do occur.

Hope this helps!

~~~
soneca
It does, thanks!

------
M_Grey
_" You can smell vinegar when you open the cans, which is one of the
byproducts of the decomposition process of these films," Spriggs said. "We
know that these films are on the brink of decomposing to the point where
they'll become useless. The data that we're collecting now must be preserved
in a digital form because no matter how well you treat the films, no matter
how well you preserve or store them, they will decompose. They're made out of
organic material, and organic material decomposes. So this is it. We got to
this project just in time to save the data."_

That's... incredible. Then it sounds like they used a DNN or something similar
to analyze the rate of fireball expansion in the films to refine their earlier
estimates of yield.

What a beautifully subtle use of tech.

~~~
spookyuser
That quote makes it so clear how weak film is as an archival method.

Yet I still hear people talking about how digitally shot films have an
archival problem. I really can't see how any well thought out digital archive
wouldn't be significantly safer than film in a can.

~~~
paulmd
Well, like anything it totally depends on the specifics.

A modern B+W film, properly fixed and washed, is essentially forever. Metallic
silver doesn't really degrade by itself (50+ year lifespan) - and you can use
a toner like selenium to convert the metallic silver into silver selenide
which is _even more stable_ , easily 100-200 years+ (note that this is
generally done with _prints_ but it also works with film).

Color films are generally considerably less permanent because you can't
capture color using metallic silver unless you have one negative each for red,
green, and blue. You can do that though, the TechniColor "3-strip" process did
this and it's actually extremely stable for its time. It was also used for the
color series of Magic Lantern glass plates from the Prokudin-Gorsky survey of
1905 [0].

Modern negative films are decent if stored properly, but early color negative
films were pretty disastrous in terms of long-term stability.

Color slide films in particular are actually quite decent as long as you store
them properly (cold, and out of light). Kodachrome (K-14 process), in
particular, was remarkably stable because there is actually no dye in the film
itself - it's created by reaction during the (incredibly complex) processing,
so (again, if properly washed) there is nothing left to continue reacting and
"fade" the image out. Properly processed, Kodachrome does actually approach
the stability of B+W film. The only thing that really degrades it is exposure
to light (i.e. projecting it or leaving it in a window).

Many early film bases were problematic though, because it was essentially a
parallel effort with basic materials-science research in plastics.
Nitrocellulose is super flammable and many early theaters burned down as a
result, it was replaced with acetate "safety film" which tends to go vinegary,
finally everyone settled on polyester. Nowadays you can have a pretty good
expectation of the storage properties of our plastics.

Anyway, to make a short story long - you are assuming the question by adding
"a well-thought-out digital archive". You can't pick a random instance of film
storage and pretend that's representative of a modern, well-thought-out effort
at archival. People did all kinds of dumb things in the past - South
Carolina's constitution is falling apart because they laminated them back in
the 60s and now they're turning to vinegar too [1]. The equivalent in digital
terms is a random paper tape from the 60s pulled from someone's attic, or a
DVD that was scribbled on with an alcohol-based marker and left on a spindle
somewhere. Or someone's VCR bootleg of the first rough-cuts and rotoscope
layers of Star Wars (see "Deleted Magic" [2], it's amazing but wow is the
quality terrible in some of them).

It's always going to be possible to store some relatively stable physical
media, that's the easy part. The problem with digital is you then add
additional tasks of loading and interpretation on top. Even if it's stable,
how do you get that Quadruplex video tape into your computer? Is there a
driver that interprets the filesystem? A codec (ideally open-source)? Is there
a sync signal in the medium that might degrade (like VHS)? etc etc. Yes, these
are not insoluble problems, but they do add a huge threshold to get over. It
might be worth doing to save Star Wars but it's not going to happen for Uncle
John's photo collection.

Consider something like the task of encoding a message to an alien race. You
have to provide something like a Rosetta Stone to help make sense of your
format. Or you could just send a phonograph which can be read by many
different methods (laser measurement is the coolest). It's a pretty solid
assumption that there will always be basic instruments for physical
measurement like lasers and reflectometers, and that's all you need to
interpret a basic medium like B+W film or a phonograph. Although I suppose
_how dare I assume the visual wavelength of an alien species!_ /s

On the other hand - if you are going at it thoughtfully, i.e. periodically
rotating your digital storage medium to whatever the standard is at the time,
and you retain sufficient backups - the chances of there ever being a total
discontinuity in migration path, or a total loss of knowledge on how to
interpret the format is relatively low. The going at it thoughtfully part is
the key though. Again, nobody apart from a handful of archival specialists or
enthusiasts can really read a random minicomputer tape from the 80s, and
that's only 30 years.

I personally started noticing bit-rot on a significant fraction of DVDs that I
burned within 5 years (at least 20% of discs). Now I use DVDisaster to encode
extra parity/recovery data on a rolling basis - disc X contains a 20% parity
file for disc X-1, with the most recent kept on my HDDs, so that I can "chain"
backwards through them.

Still though - imagine the kind of digital files that were made in 1995 with
MOV files or whatever. Now compare them to the high-resolution 4K scans that
are made from the same films. That's really another problem with digital, not
just archival - the bits are what they are, you can't go back and try again
when technology is better.

[0.0] [https://www.flickr.com/photos/prokudin-
gorsky/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/prokudin-gorsky/)

[0.1]
[https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html](https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html)

[0.2]
[http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/prok/](http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/prok/)

[1] [http://www.npr.org/2017/02/21/515410087/an-attempt-to-
save-s...](http://www.npr.org/2017/02/21/515410087/an-attempt-to-save-south-
carolinas-historical-documents-is-destroying-them)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2r4Nffrc6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2r4Nffrc6Y)
(there is also a Deleted Magic Revisited DVD with better quality and some more
footage - finding it is left as an exercise to the reader)

~~~
erikpukinskis
> A modern B+W film, properly fixed and washed, is essentially forever

> easily 100-200 years+

I don't understand, is it forever or 200 years?

The videos I uploaded to YouTube 10 years ago of me singing crappy songs into
a webcam are plausibly going to exist until the heat death of the universe,
whereas it sounds like the best case scenario for B&W film is 200 years.

> I personally started noticing bit-rot on a significant fraction of DVDs

DVDs aren't digital, they are an analog format that we use to store digital
data. They are made of plastic and foil. The fact that they degrade is a shot
against _analog_ storage. Digital storage is electrical. Like S3. A good
digital storage device is a living, self-repairing organism.

> The problem with digital is you then add additional tasks of loading and
> interpretation on top.

That's where your thinking is being constrained. You're thinking of digital
archiving as something you do on top of analog media. That's backwards.

With digital, the _only_ task is loading and interpretation. And dozens of
file formats have totally stabilized. A CD packaged with an .ISO image for a
Linux computer that can read it is pretty much self-hosted. You could've
encoded those images 20 years ago, and they'd still be runnable on EC2 today.
And they'll still be runnable on EC2 100 years from now. The fact that some
very old formats are difficult to read does not mean we're going to forget how
to decode ISO images, or boot Pentium-class virtual machines.

I get it that archivists are obsessed with DVDs and film, and I have a massive
amount of respect for people who want to try to protect those physical
objects. But the idea that preservation of digital files is somehow
equivalent—or even more difficult!— is laughable.

~~~
credit_guy
>heat death of the universe

Off topic here, but there is no such thing as the heat death of the Universe.
The second princile of thermodynamics (entropy cannot decrease in a closed
system) does not hold at cosmic scales. That's because that principle assumes
the gravity is negligible compared to the other forces that move the molecules
around, which is a perfectly valid approximation for all human-scale systems
(such as engines). At cosmic scales gravity becomes dominant and the entropy
of closed systems can and does spontaneously decrease. For example a giant gas
cloud evolves to become a spinning disc and then a planetary system.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Doesn't that break down if the cloud of gas is expanding at such a rate that
the particles have enough momentum to escape the gravity well?

~~~
credit_guy
For sure there are cases (plenty of them) where the second principle continues
to hold (entropy goes up). I was just pointing out that there are very natural
example where that principle breaks down at cosmic scales. Such an example is
exactly how our planetary system was born.

People know vaguely that in a few billion years our Sun will collapse and it
will either become a supernova or become a star where the fusion reaction is a
higher one (instead of hydrogen+hydrogen->hellium, something like
hellium+hellium->carbon). At some point possibly after trillions of years, all
the nuclear reaction converge to produce only iron, and from that point on
there's no more fusion and fission, and later on the heat death of the
universe occurs. Well, even if there are no more nuclear reactions, the
universe will not die from reaching a maximum state of entropy (heat death),
but may continue to evolve forever, going periodically through states of
higher and lower entropy.

------
rangibaby
I'm not surprised these were kept classified for so long. No one could watch
these and not be moved. That beautiful beach with a mushroom cloud on the
horizon. The birds fleeing. What a juxtaposition! Nuclear weapons are
humanity's shame. That we used our best minds and science to build these
things.

"I should have become a watchmaker" \- Einstein

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _No one could watch these and not be moved._

I am very much moved by pictures of nuclear tests. Though for me, the
description would go like this: "that typical boring beach like every other
beach out there, with that _beautiful_ nuclear fireball and mushroom cloud on
the horizon".

Call me weird, but I'm absolutely mesmerized by videos of nuclear detonations.
I appreciate that dropping nukes on people is evil and wrong, but it doesn't
change that so much _raw power_ extracted out of what's basically cleverly
mixed soil, unleashed on human command, feels like a big achievement.

That we learned to control it and put into productive use in nuclear reactors
is even better, but nowhere near as beautiful to watch.

~~~
btown
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation)
is equally beautiful/awe-inspiring to my eyes. It's like we made those glowing
starship engine cores out of science fiction, except they exist in real life.
Nuclear detonations feel a bit more like power we _can 't_ control - and
arguably, that's true.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Indeed. Nuclear detonations are more about just how much power we can deliver
to a place on demand, but we don't really control much of it. Nuclear reactors
are about us controlling smaller, though still huge amounts of that power.

Related, while I'm at all into cars, I love the ingenuity behind internal
combustion engines - we took a substance that just burns very well and figured
that if we can explode very small amounts of it in a container very quickly,
we can produce lots of reliable, portable power. We built a whole civilization
on top of it.

Cherenkov radiation is just beautiful.

------
matthewmcg
This is important work. I would also recommend any of the Peter Kuran
documentaries ( _Trinity and Beyond_ , _Nukes in Space_ , _Hollywood 's Top
Secret Film Studio_).

What's really interesting about these is that there is a visible frame count
on some of the videos and that you get to see a few frames before the
detonation. E.g. the Androscoggin test opens on frame "-8" with the first
flash visible at frame 0. You can see this by pausing the youtube videos and
advancing frame by frame with the "." key.

There are a whole bunch of really interesting but rarely-seen effects that
occur in those first one or two frames.

Here's an example from a different source of the "Teller Light" that
immediately follows the initial release of gamma radiation from the initial
nuclear fission in the bomb core:
[http://www.americancrisis.us/images/2013_08_30_013709_1_tell...](http://www.americancrisis.us/images/2013_08_30_013709_1_teller_light_2.jpg)

There's a neat description of this in a paper from 1958 here:

"The glow is known begin immediately (well within a shake) after gamma
irradiation of the air, and has an apparent brightness of the order of that of
the sun."

[https://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/4814701](https://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/4814701)

It would be _really_ interesting to see the first few high speed frames of a
detonating multi-stage weapon. Presumably this would reveal details about the
sequence of energy flow from the exploding fission stage to the compressed
fusion stages. Indeed, there were diagnostic pipes like this fitted to some of
the early H-bomb test devices, e.g.
[http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/IvyMikeDevB1600c20...](http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/IvyMikeDevB1600c20.jpg)

Sadly, all of the multi-stage tests I have seen in public sources begin a few
frames after detonation, or, like these, they are shot from far enough away
that you just see a single diffuse glow.

~~~
JoeDaDude
I second the recommendation. Peter Kuran, a film maker, was responsible for
restoring a lot of atom bomb test footage that was rotting away and making the
restored versions publically available.

[1] [http://www.atomcentral.com/about-Peter-
Kuran.aspx](http://www.atomcentral.com/about-Peter-Kuran.aspx)

------
cr0sh
Is it me, or does it piss anybody else off when stuff like this happens,
especially with something of this magnitude?

I mean - as terrible and stupid as it still is - it is one thing to lose the
original video footage of the first moon landing (GAH!).

But here we have data, about the most destructive weapons ever created, that
just sits gathering dust, decomposing, becoming useless. Meanwhile, the
computer models, being developed and designed by people who likely weren't
even alive at the time of these tests, are relying on data and assumptions
that don't match up with the data in those tests!

What does that mean? I don't know - but it doesn't sound good on the surface -
not good at all. Would these weapons work if needed (let's hope that is never
the case!)? Would they fail? Are they failing now?

And why wasn't this stuff digitized a long time ago? Why do we not seem to
care about this crap?

Lastly - we are in an era that are so far away from that time period of
testing. It bothers me and frightens me that so many people - most who either
weren't alive at the time, or were children with no access - these people have
no idea about the destructive power of these weapons, having not experienced
first-hand the nuclear tests that did occur. These men and women who were
"there" are dying or dead already. And those replacing them seem to be getting
bolder about wanting to use these weapons, without having the gut affirmation
of what they would unleash. I have an opinion - which may be unfounded and
false - that one of things that have kept us (humanity) from nuclear
annihilation thru war has been the fact that there are still people who
remember those tests. Those who remember - at a gut level - that the power of
these weapons, from witnessing (or having other close-knowledge of other
witnesses) these tests - have stuck with them in a way that can only be akin
to that of say, seeing the earth from the moon, or from space.

It's a primal thing - the knowledge from seeing these weapons and their
capabilities - a single one which can destroy an entire city - and knowing we
and "them" target many to many to cities and other places...

Yet - here we are, people wanting to use them. And the data that could help
make these weapons "safer" rotting away. I'm not sure if that is a good or bad
thing overall...

Fuck these weapons.

------
jacquesm
"It's just unbelievable how much energy's released," Spriggs said. "We hope
that we would never have to use a nuclear weapon ever again. I think that if
we capture the history of this and show what the force of these weapons are
and how much devastation they can wreak, then maybe people will be reluctant
to use them."

That's exactly why they likely _will_ be used. So it serves as a deterrent
right up to the point where it serves as an advertisement.

Interesting bit of un-intended poetry in there: The nitrate film used to store
the images is itself rather explosive, so here is one explosive used to record
the effects of another:

[http://www.atomsandnumbers.com/2013/why-the-golden-age-of-
ci...](http://www.atomsandnumbers.com/2013/why-the-golden-age-of-cinema-was-
also-its-most-dangerous/)

~~~
mirimir
They smelled acetic acid in the cans, so that means cellulose acetate film,
right? Degraded cellulose nitrate film will smell of NO2.

~~~
jacquesm
Some of the cans were labeled clearly 'nitrate' in the video.

~~~
mirimir
Oops. I tend not to watch much video. There's no sound on this VM host.
Because there's too much risk of compartment leakage, with so many family
smartphones lying about :(

~~~
i336_
I am _very_ curious what you mean by "compartment leakage", and I don't know
how to unambiguously interpret "so many family smartphones lying about". Are
these smartphones you refer to compromised?

Clarification would be highly appreciated :)

------
ceejayoz
This one's pretty remarkable:
[https://gfycat.com/WeirdPoisedFairybluebird](https://gfycat.com/WeirdPoisedFairybluebird)

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Many of these are remarkable and downright creepy. Some look like gaping
skulls. IIRC the spikes you see coming out of the fireball are the guy wires
securing the mast that the bomb was mounted on, which initially ignite faster
than the fireball expands.

------
mixermf
The closing quote: "The legacy I'd like to leave behind is basically a set of
benchmark data that can be used by future weapon physicists."

~~~
kevando
hahah I know, right! I have such mixed feelings about this. There's no
changing our actions during the cold war, and we should certainly better
understand what happened, but doing so to help future makers of nukes? Very
unsettling to say the least.

~~~
positr0n
I went to the museum at LANL a few months ago and in a lot of the videos the
scientists and engineers expressed similar sentiments. They feel that the work
they are doing is instrumental in the relative peace humanity has had since
the end of WWII. I don't know a ton about that subject but it is hard for me
to to disagree that without nukes and MAD the world would have a net increase
in bloodshed.

Relevant SMBC: [http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-04-15](http://www.smbc-
comics.com/comic/2010-04-15)

------
patorjk
Should these films be marked as public domain? I noticed the license was
"Standard YouTube License" for all of the ones I checked on the playlist.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I asked, and they responded with this:

>Copyright and Reuse

    
    
        Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory grants certain permissions to reuse content created by Lawrence Livermore. These permissions are governed by Creative Commons copyright license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (link is external), more commonly referred to as "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike." Under this license, Lawrence Livermore permits others to remix, tweak and build upon original works created by Lawrence Livermore, as long as appropriate credit is given to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, any reuse is not for commercial purposes, and any remixed works are shared under identical copyright terms.
    
        Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
        NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
        ShareAlike —  If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
    
    

Source: [https://www.llnl.gov/copyright-and-
reuse](https://www.llnl.gov/copyright-and-reuse)

~~~
patorjk
It seems strange to me that a government organization would grant a CC license
for their content, especially restricting it's use to non-commercial stuff
(not that I have any intention to use there stuff commercially). Glad that
it's at least available under a CC license though, thank you for asking!

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Maybe they ticked the best option with the least friction (not sure what
license terms are even available at YT).

------
ghaff
I don't know about these ones specifically but a lot of the nuclear test
photography was done by Doc Edgerton and EG&G.

[http://edgerton-digital-collections.org/](http://edgerton-digital-
collections.org/)

~~~
Zigurd
I had the great good fortune of being able to take the Strobe Lab course when
I was an undergrad. Edgerton explained some of the engineering that went into
high speed filming and how the cameras were protected from the blast and
radiation. It was a great look into a multidisciplinary engineering project.
Everything was purpose built for a unique task.

~~~
ghaff
I did as well. Great guy. Also the sort of hands-on tinkerer and practitioner
that I suspect there are a whole lot fewer of at top research universities
today.

------
overcast
This footage is always so scary, and beautiful at the same time. Amazing
stuff. I can't imagine what it was like seeing the first test go off. The
feeling those people must have had about the future.

~~~
coldcode
It amazing to think how something so small can produce so much energy. Yet I
look around where I live and try to imagine every last bit being vaporized and
it's very sobering.

------
DonHopkins
Tom Jennings is going to love this. He collected these device test images from
wxvax7.esa.lanl.gov:

[http://worldpowersystems.com/J/wxvax7.esa.lanl.gov/index.htm...](http://worldpowersystems.com/J/wxvax7.esa.lanl.gov/index.html)

"In the late 1990's LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratory) had a public web
server running on what later turned out to be a classified machine. I don't
think any security breach occurred, but one day the machine simply
disappeared. I wrote to the webmaster (back when you could do such a thing)
who told me an audit discovered this alarming state and it was shut down.

Luckily I'm a packrat and occasionally use 'wget' to snarf down the contents
of a website. This is one of those times. The images aren't anything
exclusive, just a good set directly from the horse's mouth..."

Tom has a thing for cold war nuclear and computing machinery. He also created
FidoNet and Homocore.

[http://worldpowersystems.com/Projects/index.html](http://worldpowersystems.com/Projects/index.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings)

------
epalmer
My dad was 10 miles away from the explosion at Bikini Atoll. He was on a ship.
I wish I had spoken to him more about it. He just did not want to talk about
his work on the Manhattan Project or as a civilian at Bikini Atoll. I did find
out he measured radiation levels on the Atol 24 hours after the explosion. He
did not get cancer and lived a healthy life to 82 years old. Many of the
people he was with did get cancer at a relatively young age.

------
amai
They used cameras that could do 15 million frames per second:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQp1ox-
SdRI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQp1ox-SdRI)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera)

------
linkmotif
This is amazing work. Thanks for posting. Reminds me of the people who rescued
the lunar orbiter tapes from a McDonalds.

I just don't understand why every little 3 minute video needs car commercial
music in the background. (re:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWpqGKUG5yY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWpqGKUG5yY))

------
AndrewKemendo
I realize that the article indicates that these old films were just lying
around untouched for decades, but what you are missing is that this data is
"declassified." That doesn't mean it wasn't analyzed between the 50's and
today, or that it doesn't exist in other media forms in classified channels -
which it does.

The US government does a lot of replication of effort because most agencies
don't know what the other agencies are doing. The DOE/CIA/DOD/DOS NBC program
is massive, and the simulations and modeling teams have all of the extracted
RAW data that exists on past tests, including the ones shown here.

I think this is a great effort, but all the teeth gnashing about how all of
this data would be otherwise lost if not for this effort is - at least in this
case - misguided.

------
gumby
By the way, the spring Trinity test site open house is coming up on the first
of April. You can only visit two days a year (1 April and 1 October). It's a
really good trip.

Here's the web site all about the site (note: this site may be inaccessible
from outside the USA):
[http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/Trinity/Pages/Home.aspx](http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/Trinity/Pages/Home.aspx)
. The national parks service has a page too -- I guess it's a national park
encapsulated within a classified military base?

------
taude
I highly recommend everyone watch the two part series on PBS on Uranium -
Twisting the Dragons Tail [1].

I found it really interesting the amount of money we spent to develop the
Atomic bomb, and I think about today, if we invested the same percentage of
GDP budget and went all in with alternative energies...

[1] [http://www.pbs.org/program/uranium-twisting-dragons-
tail/](http://www.pbs.org/program/uranium-twisting-dragons-tail/)

------
saycheese
Animated GIF of video: [https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-
media/image/upload/hsknc3dfsz...](https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-
media/image/upload/hsknc3dfszboff6pqirm.gif)

YouTube of it: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XnrLY-
phipw](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XnrLY-phipw)

------
j2kun
I interned at LLNL and went to a few talks where they discussed small-scale
physics first-principles about how the interior of a star works, and I was
shocked to discover that these videos were basically all that they had to go
off. (And NIF, though each firing of the laser is extremely expensive and
contained to a tiny chamber)

------
vernie
Why do the YouTube videos have such low resolution?

------
mathgenius
Does anyone else think we need a remake of the 1983 movie "The Day After" ?

------
chrisper
How did they keep these tests secret? Surely you could see these clouds from
far away?

~~~
Malic
Sometimes they DID fail to keep it a secret for that very reason!

[http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/atomic-tests-
were-a-...](http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/atomic-tests-were-a-
tourist-draw-in-1950s-las-vegas/375802/)

------
JustSomeNobody
So, he is able to himself declassify them or he is able to get them
declassified?

------
random3
Wow! Watch starting from 1:07 in slow motion (0.25) and as it goes you can see
(I believe) the shockwave expanding starting at ~1:11 the ground gets
gradually lighter colored and when it reaches the camera it shakes it.

------
hamburglar1
I wanted more explosions. SAD

