LLNL is digitizing & analyzing (decomposing) nuke test films

[jeffbert]

Who'd a thought they would wait until now to perform certain analyses on the 10,000 or so films they have of nuclear weapons tests?

In an article by David Szondy dated March 15th, 2017, it states that,

Because of their top secret status, about 10,000 reels of film recording the 210 above-ground nuclear tests conducted by the United States between 1945 and 1962 were allowed to rot in high-security vaults across the country. Now partly declassified, they are the focus of a project at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) that has spent the past five years transferring the decomposing images to digital format so as to preserve their content.

In later paragraphs, it states that early measures were off by as much as 30%, as they were done by hand, whereas modern technology is automated.
http://newatlas.com/classified-nuclear-test-film/48429/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=c3ab0d619d-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-c3ab0d619d-76704577

[Kitty Lue]

Wow, I wonder how those films, being classified, were allowed to just sit and rot for all those years. It'd be one thing if they weren't recorded on perishable material and they just hadn't been analyzed, but I can't understand how something important enough to be considered "classified" can be simply ignored this long when doing so can allow all of that information to be lost. Interesting article.

[DrFrag]

People retire, change departments, get replaced.

I worked in government and I went through our store room. I found some old backup tapes. I have no idea what was on them because they weren't labelled properly. The format was so old we didn't have the hardware to read them. I didn't even know what type of tapes they were, probably some obsolete proprietry standard from a defunct company requiring unavailable software for systems incompatible with our own. I asked my boss and she said she had no idea, they were before her time and she'd never dug through the store room. In the end I chucked them back in the box. My job wasn't data archaeology and I had other things to do.

So I can see how the films sat there for so long. No one working there was going to say "Hey, let's spend 5 years cataloging those 10,000 ancient-looking film cannisters in the store room instead of doing the actual jobs we were hired for." Being classified data makes it that much harder to get an outside lab to do it.

[Kitty Lue]

Ah, makes sense. Guess it's just a shame nobody was assigned to analyze those films at around the time they were filmed, despite having it all filmed. But then again, given the pace described for doing so back when those were filmed, it's entirely possible someone waaaay overestimated how much data they could analyze with how many people they had working on it. "Hey, go film 10,000 shots of test explosions at 2400 frames per second and then analyze all of it."
Well, I guess it's just a good thing that someone's finally salvaging the test footage before it's completely gone.