BeigeJournal

100 Suns, by Michael Light. Knopf, 2003.

One hundred photos of US above-ground nuclear weapons tests. Arranged in no obvious order, with a few pages of captions, generally a paragraph each, collected in the back. I understand the desire to not clutter the photos with the text, but it is awkward to have to keep the book open in two places and flip back and forth. These are mostly very pretty pictures, if you don’t think too much about what they are pictures of. It really is amazing, to those of us who grew up in the modern era of radiation protection guidelines, that people used to set these things off right out in the open, and with soldiers nearby, no less.

There are several Castle Bravo photos, the test that, though expected to yield 4–8 megatons turned out, due to the unexpected boost from lithium-7, to yield 15 MT and a radiological disaster. One wonders why, when testing a fusion bomb, they felt that they just couldn’t wait for more favorable weather. It also seems that a lot of the airdrop tests missed the target, starting with the very first, Crossroads Able. One wonders, if so much trouble was had hitting the target in very carefully organized tests involving dropping live nuclear bombs, when one would imagine extra care would be taken, where the bombs would have fallen in the confusion of actual war. No wonder there was such interest in high-yield weapons.