Fan of mushroom clouds? Dozens of nuclear test videos declassified, uploaded to YouTube

On Tuesday, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a federally funded facility outside San Francisco that focuses on nuclear research, released 63 rare, restored and declassified films of nuclear testing that was done between 1945 and 1962. 

The films were uploaded to the lab’s YouTube account, and are part of a trove of some 10,000 that have been in storage since they were originally shot.

The initial release is just a fraction of about 750 that Greg Spriggs, a physicist at the lab who has worked on the project for five years, declassified on Tuesday. And even that number is small compared to some 6,500 films that have been found of the 10,000 that were estimated to have been shot at the height of the Cold War.

Here's Greg Spriggs discussing the films:



This explosion was named Harlem, and occurred off Kiribati in 1962 in a series of tests known as Operation Dominic:



This one is part of a series of tests at the Nevada Test Site that took place in 1955 that was known as Operation Teapot. This particular explosion was called Tesla:



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