The cameras shudder as blinding light flashes across the earth. Deformed white clouds balloon and mutate from the force of the nuclear test explosions.

These are some of the images captured in raw footage of bomb tests carried out by the United States between 1945 and 1962 in Nevada and the Marshall Islands. For the first time, the footage is available in an online archive after some of about 10,000 nuclear testing films were restored, scrutinized and declassified in a project by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The bulk of the videos, some only seconds long and others just over seven minutes, had been stored at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. But the experts in Livermore, about 40 miles southeast of San Francisco, have been working for years to retrieve and preserve the films, which over time had begun to turn brittle or curl, and then to create digital imprints.