Watch 64 Stunning and Terrifying Military Nuclear Test Films That Were Just Declassified

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From 1945 until 1962, the United States military conducted 210 nuclear bomb tests. I know many of you have probably seen footage of some of these tests in the past; they feature the big fiery mushroom cloud of death. The testing was banned in 1963, but before that, there was a ton of footage that was shot and stored away in vaults that have never been revealed... until now. 

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory weapon physicist Greg Spriggs has set out on a mission to preserve the 7,000 known films that exist. Over the past five years that LLNL has been working on this they've already scanned 4,200 films and 750 of those are now declassified. 

So far they've taken sixty-four of those declassified films and posted them YouTube, which you can watch below in the video playlist. These videos are both awesome and absolutely terrifying. 

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.

Via: Gizmodo