New Data From Cold War-Era Nuclear Test Films

[Boris13c]

Digitization Unearths New Data From Cold War-Era Nuclear Test Films

These are films of the nuclear age, and there are thousands of them. They document the 210 atmospheric nuclear tests the United States conducted between 1945 and 1962.

Until recently, these government-commissioned films had been scattered around different archives, though the bulk of them sat in boxes at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Fortunately, a team of physicists and film archivists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California decided to digitize the films before it was too late.

Greg Spriggs, a weapon physicist and the project lead, notes that the film canisters were already starting to smell of vinegar — one of the byproducts of film decomposition.

Spriggs and his team started digitizing the films using special scanners that move the film without gripping it by the holes in the edges. But as they watched the old films, they noticed something: The nuclear yield data based on the images was wrong.

These aren't just any old government movies: They are scientific documents that are key to understanding nuclear power. And even though the films are very old, scientists don't get access to these sorts of nuclear tests anymore. Atmospheric nuclear tests have been banned since 1963.

Today, nuclear physicists run virtual nuclear tests on supercomputers. But those tests are based in part in research in the old films. And, unsurprisingly, there are better methods of measurement today.

So Spriggs and his team set about reanalyzing all of the old films, using new techniques. The indicators remain the same, in some ways: The double flash of light, the fireball and the shock wave captured on film all provide significant information for researchers on the energy generated by the nuclear blast. But today's new tools offer greater precision.

For instance, the size, speed and duration of the fireball created can be used to estimate the weapon's yield. The old methods involved analysts studying the film, advancing it frame by frame to see where the edge of the fireball seemed to be, and measuring its radius. This created plenty of room for human error, and, indeed, the yield numbers generated by this method produced inconsistent results.

But the newly digitized films allow researchers to more clearly see the fireball's edge, allowing for much more accurate yield estimates. "We were finding that some of these answers were off by 20, maybe 30, percent," says Spriggs. "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."

[video][/video]

[UOK]

Pretty incredible. Saw some stuff on reddit about this yesterday.

[G08]

I really don't like that we as humans have this kind of power.

[Boris13c]

I really don't like that we as humans have this kind of power.

that is made more frightening by the fact those with the access to use this power are rarely qualified to have that authority

used to be the worry was a random nut from a 3rd world country having access ... now the random nuts seem to be running everything in places other than 3rd world

and no, I am not making this a political thread ... that is a general reference to world wide nuclear arsenals and how we should probably be more worried now than the folks were during the Cold War

[mmmc_35]

Monkey brains with God like power. We are to stupid for the physics.

https://youtu.be/ZWSMoE3A5DI