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

A still from a film recently digitized by a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The film shows a 1958 explosion at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

The U.S. conducted hundreds of atmospheric nuclear tests between 1945 and 1962 — and filmed them. A project to digitize those films has changed the analysis of the nuclear explosions themselves.

(Image credit: Screen grab by NPR/YouTube)