How to watch a declassified nuclear test film like a weapons physicist
Greg Spriggs likes to joke that if he were a better golfer, he would never have become a nuclear weapons physicist. But it’s a good thing he’s not professionally smacking golf balls right now, because Spriggs has an important mission. He’s working with film preservation expert Jim Moye to save decades-old films of nuclear blasts that are among the last, best sources of real-world information about nuclear explosions.
The best way to test what happens when a nuclear weapon explodes is to just blow it up. So from 1945 to 1963, the US exploded 210 nuclear devices in the air. Scientists captured the massive fireballs and mushroom clouds on camera — preserving the data in at least 10,000 films. The films were then analyzed to determine key…
