A team of specialists restored the film showing the M65 test, the only atomic cannon tested in historyalso known as Atomic Annie («Atomic Annie»).
He May 25, 1953the United States Army carried out a nuclear test in the Nevada desert that was the first and only test of the first atomic cannon in history. The video of that test was restored in 2020 with impressive quality.
The restoration was carried out by the channel’s specialists Neural Networks and Deep Learning. Technicians used machine learning algorithms to bring the film to 4K, eliminate noise and raise the frame rate from the original 24 to 48.
Exceptional Images
Surely, video scholars will find imperfections but the end result is extraordinary.
The W9 nuclear projectile was 1.3 meters long but very heavy: 364 kilos.
The cannon, of 280 mm caliber, fired at a distance of 11 kilometers the projectile he carried 50 kilograms of enriched uranium.
The power of the explosion was 15 kilotons, equivalent to that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
No other country has carried out similar operations, but the Soviet Union created two cannons similar in the 1950s.
After successful testing, the M65 was adopted by the US Armed Forces in 1956. However, in the mid-1960s it was withdrawn from service as newer missiles were developed.
In total, the United States manufactured 20 of those cannons at a cost (at that time) of U$S 800.000 each.
Currently only eight left, of which only one is complete and on display, at the Aberdeen Proving Ground museum in Maryland, the oldest military installation in the US.
GML
