100 Suns
by Michael Light
Jonathan Cape
On seeing the successful test of the first atomic bomb, Trinity, in June 1945, Robert Oppenheimer said to himself, quoting the "Bhagavad Gita": "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One ... I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Adapting his title from Oppenheimer's citation, San Francisco photographer Michael Light has assembled 100 photographs of United States' atmospheric nuclear tests in the Nevada desert and various Pacific atolls between 1945 and1962, when such tests were relocated underground. Many of these images have been recently declassified; most were taken by the Air Force 1,352nd Photographic Group based at Lookout Mountain Station, a secret Hollywood facility that used the latest photographic technology. Such was the scale of Lookout Mountain's activity that the filming of 1946's Baker test at Bikini Atoll led to a worldwide shortage of film stock for several months.
The beauty of the photographs that comprise "100 Suns" is a relentless one, one of image after image of gigantic explosions, of fierce red sunsets promising apocalypse. The mushroom cloud was naturally co-opted by Andy Warhol for one of his silkscreen reproductions of mass-produced images of disaster, 1965's "Atomic Bomb." The images in "100 Suns" resensitize; this is a glimpse into the inferno, the blood-red sunrises and sunsets of the Pacific tests teaser trailers for the last day of human life. The reader realizes again what nuclear weapons mean.
In some shocking pictures, human beings share the frame with the fireworks. The military wanted to assess the ability of combat troops to carry out operations in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear strike. Thus, an initially banal image of helicopters flying towards the horizon takes on new significance once one realizes that they are flying towards the debris cloud of a nuclear explosion. We see troops huddling in trenches, showered by sparks from the detonation of Simon before "ground and air shockwaves will toss them like dolls, then fill their mouths with radioactive dust." We see strange, almost bleached images of military brass watching the tests, clad in eerie protective goggles. Another image simply shows five GIs staring open-mouthed at the Dog test — the only named individuals to appear in the photos. Light's selection manages to humanize the moment of nuclear detonation.
The tests were given names like Stokes, Hood, Sequoia, Little Feller — names almost comically at variance in their down-home blandness with the sheer scale of the forces unleashed.
Light was previously best known for "Full Moon," an extraordinary compilation of photos from the Apollo missions. These images, taken by the practical men who walked on the moon, far exceeded the TV images for power and strangeness. This was the technocratic tendency in American culture at its best; "100 Suns" shows a darker side. Both books are exquisitely beautiful, both stun most when you realize that this is man on the moon, this is the moment of nuclear detonation — in other words, this is it.
Light's closing essay and the captions for each photo feature phrases like "an explosion greater than all those of World Wars I and II combined" with numbing frequency. In their dry way, with their litany of desert towns ravaged by tumors, islanders relocated and official deceit and denial at every turn, the captions illuminate the lunacy that surrounded the whole nuclear enterprise. The victims of nuclear testing — the town of St. George, Utah; the still uninhabitable Bikini Atoll; the Japanese trawler Daigo Fukuryu Maru; John Wayne, Susan Hayward and other members of the cast and crew of The Conqueror — their fate is one that once seemed to threaten us all.
Of course, there would be a place for a Soviet and Chinese "100 Suns," with their own catalogs of casualties and cover-ups. Its publicity material claims "one of the virtues of the book is its emphasis on data not on argument," implying that this in a way a sober, "value-free" presentation of images. This is true up to a point; there are no rending images of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, Light's essay is sober and powerful, and concludes with the invocation "May no further nuclear detonation photographs be made, ever."
But merely presenting these images, even without any comment (especially without any comment, one could argue), is a far from value-free act. This is the reality of nuclear testing, these images with their "terrible beauty" (Yeats' lines "all is changed, changed utterly/a terrible beauty is born" from Easter 1916 would have been equally appropriate from Oppenheimer's lips in June 1945) sear themselves into one's consciousness. Light observes that the transfer of testing underground brought cultural invisibility and secrecy. "Photographs only tell us about the surface of things, about how things look. When it's all we have, however, it's enough to help understanding. It exists. It happened. It is happening." In "100 Suns," we see one of the most extreme phenomena of human existence happening, again and again.
— Seamus Sweeney (seamus.sweeney@campus.ie)
