Treffer: PRESERVING the PAST to PROTECT THE FUTURE: Advanced technology revives Cold War-era film reels, providing new data to validate modern nuclear weapons science.

Atmospheric nuclear weapons testing has an important place in history for its scientific, political, and cultural legacies. Between 1945 and 1963, the United States conducted 210 such tests and captured the events on dozens of cameras. Testing goals included experimenting with new weapons designs, evaluating weapons reliability and performance, and measuring explosive effects. Now, in the post-nuclear-testing era, preserving these decades-old films is a matter of national security. The Film Scanning and Reanalysis Project, a joint effort between Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories, focuses on digitizing and analyzing the aging, deteriorating films. The team has combed through secure government vaults to inventory and salvage thousands of film rolls. The researchers use modern scanning technology to digitize the films while developing image-processing techniques to extract key data with unprecedented accuracy. Livermore scientists rely on three-dimensional computer models to predict blast effects and energy yield, and the newly digitized films have produced millions of valuable data points. In 2017, for the first time, the public was given access to a batch of these films via YouTube. INSET: Necessity and Invention in Mid-20th Century Film T. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]