Physicist Declassifies Rescued Nuclear Test Films (llnl.gov) 62
Eloking quotes a report from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: The U.S. conducted 210 atmospheric nuclear tests between 1945 and 1962, with multiple cameras capturing each event at around 2,400 frames per second. But in the decades since, around 10,000 of these films sat idle, scattered across the country in high-security vaults. Not only were they gathering dust, the film material itself was slowly decomposing, bringing the data they contained to the brink of being lost forever. For the past five years, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) weapon physicist Greg Spriggs and a crack team of film experts, archivists and software developers have been on a mission to hunt down, scan, reanalyze and declassify these decomposing films. The goals are to preserve the films' content before it's lost forever, and provide better data to the post-testing-era scientists who use computer codes to help certify that the aging U.S. nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure and effective. To date, the team has located around 6,500 of the estimated 10,000 films created during atmospheric testing. Around 4,200 films have been scanned, 400 to 500 have been reanalyzed and around 750 have been declassified. An initial set of these declassified films -- tests conducted by LLNL -- were published today in an LLNL YouTube playlist.
Re:What this needs (Score:5, Insightful)
There's already one for previously-existing nuclear test footage [youtube.com].
Nuclear weapons explosions always have that strange mix of terrifying and stunningly beautiful.
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And Shatner narrating.... wait a minute....
Re: Nothing to be too excited about (Score:2, Offtopic)
Thanks for the alternative-history fiction. Do you have anything to say about the real world?
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Thanks for the alternative-history fiction. Do you have anything to say about the real world?
Point to the part you don't like and I'll provide a citation. But if you can't find it with google, perhaps Slashdot is not for you, because everything I said above is trivially supported with a search and absolutely none of it is far-out woo-woo conspiracy theorist schlock. You will find references in reputable publications with even the most trivial of invested effort.
Re: Nothing to be too excited about (Score:3)
Which "American interests" sold those things to Nazis during WW2? Which corporation operated by Prescott Bush were you referring to? If they're not far-out woo-woo theories, why doesn't Bush's Wikipedia page say more about those things than noting that similar claims were debunked long ago?
Re: Nothing to be too excited about (Score:2)
Thyssen was not the SS. He grew disillusioned with the Nazis after the Night Of The Long Knives. (He should have seen them for what they were earlier, of course.). The Guardian story is long on innuendo, and utterly lacking in details beyond what is presented in a much more objective way in Prescott Bush's Wikipedia page.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ahh, the ole Bush helped the Nazis kill jews bit.
Yes, that old bit, in which it is revealed that Prescott Bush could not possibly have not known what he was doing [theguardian.com]. In fact, a number of corporations [phactual.com] willingly cooperated [toptenz.net] with the Nazis [snopes.com]. Without their assistance, the axis could not have made war effectively [libcom.org]. Naturally, every one of these corporations has tried to disclaim responsibility for what their German divisions were up to, but the ongoing relationships between such entities during the war make that difficult [washingtonpost.com]. The service contract for the concentration
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You go on a rant about Bush and $1million, and ignore the probably $100 million Kennedy made.
If you want an agreement that the Kennedys were also assholes, you've got it. But if you want to imagine that the fact that I didn't mention your favorite bad guys invalidates what I've said, you're long on imagination but short on logic.
Re: Clarification (Score:1)
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No reason to point fingers at the US exclusively. (though it is fashionable to).
That's not what that statement was doing. That statement only took issue with giving a technology credit for something it hadn't accomplished. I point fingers at the US because I live here, and thus I have ready access to information about what we've done. If I knew more than a couple of words of German,* maybe I'd be reading their websites and figuring out e.g. who owned the newspapers in Germany when Hitler rose to power, how they covered him and why, etc etc. What's interesting in the USA is questions li
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2. Nuclear weapons kept those proxy wars and "police actions" from becoming full blown conflicts that engulf entire continents again,
That, sir, is a matter of opinion, and not a fact. International wars do not happen without the approval of the power elite — the robber barons of the military-industrial complex, the top echelons of international bankers, and the other usual culprits, because it's not possible to engage in such wars without their complicity. It is equally plausible that nuclear war is simply not in the best interests of these individuals any more than wars on their own soil, which is why we have proxy wars in third-w
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The 50 years of post WWII peace and stability in the world that these tests have blessed us with is well worth the 'poison' it generated, which has had minimal measurable impact on the world. In exchange, millions of lives have been saved that would have otherwise been lost in wars.
Relying on nuclear weapons to suppress human conflict is like when the National Park Service meticulously suppressed every forest fire.
Things went great for a while, until unburned fuel built up and got out of hand in a catastrophic conflagration that was far worse than what the sum of all the smaller fires would have been.
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Relying on nuclear weapons to suppress human conflict is like when the National Park Service meticulously suppressed every forest fire.
Things went great for a while, until unburned fuel built up and got out of hand in a catastrophic conflagration that was far worse than what the sum of all the smaller fires would have been.
Wait... did you just put forward the case for having lots more world wars using conventional weapons? Because that's kind of the direction it looks like you're going there.
It's ok. Just like regular forest fires, regular world wars with conventional weapons will just clear out all the dead wood! How could we have missed this? Here we've had relative peace and prosperity for 70 years, but now that we know it's propped up with the human equivalent of dead leaves and brush, can we really continue?
GPP's analogy was bad and he should feel bad.
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but now that we know it's propped up with the human equivalent of dead leaves and brush, can we really continue?
We may not continue that long if people like Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un stay true to their nature and start acting like kids playing with Zippo lighters.
My analogy is spot on. 70 years of fortunate luck (despite multiple very close calls) proves nothing.
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My analogy is spot on.
Either it was a bad analogy, or you are seriously saying we need to kill off tens to hundreds of millions of people every couple of decades.
My bad for assuming you weren't a monster.
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That's not an option. Unlike the park service, we can't put the genie back in the bottle and go back to the old ways, because nukes are already spread all over the world and they're not going away.
However, if there were no nukes, killing tens of millions every few decades would be preferable to introducing nukes and then eventually killing off most of the human race in a big holocaust every century or two., which is what's almost certainly going to eventually happen now.
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No, I'm just pointing out what's probably going to end up happening to those who think that nuclear weapons are some kind of fix for human behavior.
Nuke 'em (Score:2)
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nuk... [nuclearsecrecy.com]
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(OP) Almost all of the nuclear tests that involved delivery of a "payload" (i.e. not underground) were conducted by the Defense Nuclear Agency (under the Department of Defense). The Atomic Energy Commission technically owned the bomb cores but not the bombs proper which were still under the control of the military, along with the planes that delivered them (that got a little fuzzy after the "pits" could not longer be removed... I think that started with the Mk 6). Granted, several of prototype bombs were n
These pictures... (Score:5, Funny)
are da bomb!
Literally!
Yay (Score:2)
Why (Score:1)
When some own them they are called deterrents when others seek then they are called weapons.
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Let's punch a hole in the ozone layer! (Score:1)
'Answers were off by 30 percent' (Score:2)
Once Spriggs did complete the first scans and roll his sleeves up for the analysis, he discovered that much of the data published were wrong. All the films would need to be reanalyzed.
"When you go to validate your computer codes, you want to use the best data possible," Spriggs said. "We were finding that some of these answers were off by 20, maybe 30, percent. That's a big number for doing code validation. One of the payoffs of this project is that we're now getting very consistent answers. We've also discovered new things about these detonations that have never been seen before. New correlations are now being used by the nuclear forensics community, for example."
I'm pretty sure that's because the FBI pressured them to publish modified information. In recent years they wanted to cut about a third of one man's book on nuclear physics.
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[[Citation Needed]]
I've watched a lot of nuke films... (Score:2)