A nuclear weapon physicist has saved film footage from some of the 210 atmospheric nuclear weapons tests the United States conducted from 1945 to 1962, and the footage is now available on YouTube. 

“We know that these films are on the brink of deteriorating to the point they will become useless,” said Greg Spriggs, a nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “We don’t have any experimental data for modern weapons and the only data we have is from the old tests and so it gets a little bit more complicated.” 

In a YouTube video, Spriggs said he’s leading a project to scan and re-analyze all of the films from the atmospheric tests. Spriggs and his team have scanned more than 4,200 films of the estimated 10,000 shot during the period. The best films have been shared on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s YouTube channel.