Nightmare Fuel: US Declassifies Footage of Hundreds of Nuclear Tests (VIDEOS)

Nuclear explosions are one of the most impressive things one might see — horrifying and beautiful in their unstoppable force. They are also usually kept in secret, which fuels viewers' curiosity even more, as is clearly indicated by the many nuclear-themed videos on YouTube that have more than 10 million views each.

Most of the declassified videos are about one minute long and start at the exact moment of the explosion. Some are up to seven minutes long, and some are so short there are only a couple of frames in them.

"We hope that we would never have to use a nuclear weapon ever again," LLNL weapons physicist Greg Spriggs said in a press release for another batch of declassified nuclear test videos last year, Motherboard writes.

"I think that if we capture the history of this and show what the force of these weapons are and how much devastation they can wreak, then maybe people will be reluctant to use them," Spriggs said at the time.

Lawrence Livermore is a national defense lab in Livermore, California, that focuses on the US' nuclear stockpile, and part of its work is digitizing and analyzing footage from past tests. It is named after Ernest Lawrence, a US nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project to build an atom bomb during World War II and later founded the laboratory. Atomic element 103, Lawrencium, is named after him and atomic element 116, Livermorium, is named after the laboratory. Both are highly radioactive.

Between 1945 and 1962, the US conducted 210 bomb tests on its own territory. Thousands of films from these tests were left forgotten in secret vaults around the country for decades, until LLNL got their hands on them.