Unleashed

Thoughts on the beauty and terror of atomic images

William L. Fox

You can't see these events because they happen in millionths of seconds, when the human eye can only register something that takes at least three-thousandths of a second to occur. You can't see them because they are far, far too bright for our neuro-optics. You can't see them because the military hides the explosions on remote desert playas and Pacific islands where anyone living nearby has been relocated, if necessary by force. And you can't see them because they went underground in 1963, and then were stopped entirely in 1992—at least the ones triggered by the Americans or Soviets.

So it is nothing short of a miracle that Michael Light presents the photographs of 100 Suns, and a damned good thing he does. The fact that we have built nuclear bombs damns us to living in perpetual fear that they will be used. The Cold War may be over, but Pandora's Box remains open. Our government continues to develop nukes for surgical strikes on bunkers in the Middle East, and the Russians recently announced that they may pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that's been in place for the last 19 years. The United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel all have The Bomb—and those last four aren't even signatories to the treaty. It seems only logical, if tragic, to assume someone somewhere will set off another nuclear device someday. That's true damnation.

We wouldn't know what that means without seeing evidence of the explosions and their effects. And that's why Light's exhibition (and book of the same title) is good. The hundred-plus photographs of nuclear tests made in the atmosphere and underwater that constitute 100 Suns range in time from the first millionth of a second to several minutes after detonation. The explosions burst on the ground, in midair, under the ocean; their columns of debris open like malignant brains lit from within, then rise to make unnatural and ghastly figures in the air. The photographs, pulled from the nation's nuclear archives, are beautiful and awful, compelling and repulsive. The nuclear explosions stem from a technological triumph achieved under the pressures of a world war, a feat of engineering and science unmatched in history, and their portraits are awe-invoking. But to view their portraits is also to stare into the depths to which human beings will descend to destroy each other.

Nuclear weapons remain out of sight and mind for most of us most of the time. Light restores the images and meaning to our memory. Praise be.

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