Declassified Videos of Nuclear Tests in the US Posted Online

US government declassified about 750 videos that capture nuclear tests, and about 60 of them were posted online, The Verge writes. In the period between 1945 and 1962, the US performed over 200 nuclear tests: all of them were recorded from numerous angles, and the total number of videos in the archive is about 10,000.

For many years, the footage was kept in storage, and started deteriorating over time — so it was decided to digitize them. “We got to this project just in time,” the physicist Greg Spriggs, one of the experts who initiated the digitalization, says. “We know that these films are on the brink of decomposing, to the point where they will become useless.”

He says that the digitized material will help experts study the aftermath of nuclear strikes better: “We don’t have any experimental data for modern weapons in the atmosphere. The only data we have are the old tests.”