What do you think?
Rate this book
100 Suns
Between July 1945 and November 1962 the United States is known to have conducted 216 atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests. After the Limited Test Ban Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1963, nuclear testing went underground. It became literally invisible—but more the United States conducted a further 723 underground tests, the last in 1992. 100 Suns documents the era of visible nuclear testing, the atmospheric era, with one hundred photographs drawn by Michael Light from the archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. National Archives in Maryland. It includes previously classified material from the clandestine Lookout Mountain Air Force Station based in Hollywood, whose film directors, cameramen and still photographers were sworn to secrecy.
The title, 100 Suns , refers to the response by J.Robert Oppenheimer to the world’s first nuclear explosion in New Mexico when he quoted a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, the classic Vedic “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One . . . I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This was Oppenheimer’s attempt to describe the otherwise indescribable. 100 Suns likewise confronts the indescribable by presenting without embellishment the stark evidence of the tests at the moment of detonation. Since the tests were conducted either in Nevada or the Pacific the book is simply divided between the desert and the ocean. Each photograph is presented with the name of the test, its explosive yield in kilotons or megatons, the date and the location. The enormity of the events recorded is contrasted with the understated neutrality of bare data. Interspersed within the sequence of explosions are pictures of the awestruck witnesses.
The evidence of these photographs is terrifying in its implication while at same time profoundly disconcerting as a spectacle. The visual grandeur of such imagery is balanced by the chilling facts provided at the end of the book in the detailed captions, a chronology of the development of nuclear weaponry and an extensive bibliography. A dramatic sequel to Michael Light’s Full Moon , 100 Suns forms an unprecedented historical document.
The title, 100 Suns , refers to the response by J.Robert Oppenheimer to the world’s first nuclear explosion in New Mexico when he quoted a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, the classic Vedic “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One . . . I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This was Oppenheimer’s attempt to describe the otherwise indescribable. 100 Suns likewise confronts the indescribable by presenting without embellishment the stark evidence of the tests at the moment of detonation. Since the tests were conducted either in Nevada or the Pacific the book is simply divided between the desert and the ocean. Each photograph is presented with the name of the test, its explosive yield in kilotons or megatons, the date and the location. The enormity of the events recorded is contrasted with the understated neutrality of bare data. Interspersed within the sequence of explosions are pictures of the awestruck witnesses.
The evidence of these photographs is terrifying in its implication while at same time profoundly disconcerting as a spectacle. The visual grandeur of such imagery is balanced by the chilling facts provided at the end of the book in the detailed captions, a chronology of the development of nuclear weaponry and an extensive bibliography. A dramatic sequel to Michael Light’s Full Moon , 100 Suns forms an unprecedented historical document.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published October 9, 2003
5 people are currently reading
1003 people want to read
About the author
Michael Light
13 books4 followersMichael Light is a San Francisco-based photographer and bookmaker focused on the environment and how contemporary American culture relates to it. His work is concerned both with the politics of that relationship and the seductions of landscape representation. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, and his work has been collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Research Library, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, among others.
For the last fifteen years, Light has aerially photographed over settled and unsettled areas of American space, pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact on the land, and various aspects of geologic time and the sublime. A private pilot, he is currently working on an extended aerial photographic survey of the inter-mountain Western states, and in 2007 won a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography to pursue this project. Radius Books published the first of a planned multi-volume series of this work, Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack, in Fall 2009. The second, LA Day/LA Night, will be released in Spring 2011.
Light is also known for reworking familiar historical photographic and cultural icons with a landscape-driven perspective by sifting through public archives. His first such project, FULL MOON (1999), used lunar geological survey imagery made by the Apollo astronauts to show the moon both as a sublime desert and an embattled point of first human contact. His most recent archival project, 100 SUNS (2003), focused on the politics and landscape meanings of military photographs of U.S. atmospheric nuclear detonations from 1945 to 1962.
20 editions of Light's books have been published globally since 1993.
For the last fifteen years, Light has aerially photographed over settled and unsettled areas of American space, pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact on the land, and various aspects of geologic time and the sublime. A private pilot, he is currently working on an extended aerial photographic survey of the inter-mountain Western states, and in 2007 won a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography to pursue this project. Radius Books published the first of a planned multi-volume series of this work, Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack, in Fall 2009. The second, LA Day/LA Night, will be released in Spring 2011.
Light is also known for reworking familiar historical photographic and cultural icons with a landscape-driven perspective by sifting through public archives. His first such project, FULL MOON (1999), used lunar geological survey imagery made by the Apollo astronauts to show the moon both as a sublime desert and an embattled point of first human contact. His most recent archival project, 100 SUNS (2003), focused on the politics and landscape meanings of military photographs of U.S. atmospheric nuclear detonations from 1945 to 1962.
20 editions of Light's books have been published globally since 1993.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
May 16, 2024
[Review cribbed from "The Alien Online" (not by me)]. It's a great book. On my "100 Best Ever" list.
The title refers to Robert Oppenheimer’s words after watching the first atomic weapons test in 1945. One of the fathers of the atom bomb, he said: ‘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.’ Michael Light has taken him at his word; his book contains 100 pictures of – you guessed it – ‘suns’, the US military’s open-air nuclear weapons tests conducted during the ‘40s, ‘50s and early ‘60s.
Light, a photographer himself, was also responsible for the stunning Full Moon, a genuinely enlightening collection of photographs from the Apollo moon landings, and one I thoroughly recommend for any space-flight enthusiast. You may think you’ve seen all the good Apollo pictures a thousand times, but trust me, you really haven’t.
So, speaking as someone over whom nuclear weapons – and their truly god-like destructive power that Oppenheimer so presciently noticed – have exerted a morbid and unreasonable fascination since the reality of the four-minute warning became apparent to me as a child during the ‘80s, I just had to see this book.
An initial flick through 100 Suns will reveal many abstractly beautiful images. Some, like those taken with ultra-high-speed cameras to catch the precise moment when a new sun is born, look like giant viruses or bacteria, and wouldn’t look out of place in the Turner Prize Exhibition, so weird and otherworldly are they. Others, particularly those in which US soldiers appear, are equally otherworldly, if less abstract, evoking a lost era of innocence (or foolish naiveté or criminal irresponsibility) about the effects of 32-kiloton atomic explosions.
You’d think that the really big tests, the 35-megaton bombs detonated in the Pacific, would be the real eye-openers here, but although they are beguilingly beautiful there’s no sense of reality, or place and effect about them. These stupendous releases of energy mostly seem too abstract to inspire the expected awe; even caught by the practical lenses of US military observers they’re strangely soft and fuzzy – more like perfect holiday sunsets than artificial sunrises of annihilation.
Light also excels with the (mostly) short paragraphs that accompany each of the 100 images. These contain just enough necessary information to put the awe, the horror and sometimes the sheer disbelief back into all of these pictures. There are things I certainly never knew about these tests, the people who conducted them and the people who suffered from them. Read each of the short pieces about all of these pictures and I guarantee you’ll be amazed, for lots of different reasons.
[No longer online, so I'm sharing my file copy here. Good review of a great book.]
Bonus: video compilation of cleaned-up nuclear test video, with a cool soundtrack. Don't miss!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=LL...
Plus: Organic Plutonium! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
The title refers to Robert Oppenheimer’s words after watching the first atomic weapons test in 1945. One of the fathers of the atom bomb, he said: ‘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.’ Michael Light has taken him at his word; his book contains 100 pictures of – you guessed it – ‘suns’, the US military’s open-air nuclear weapons tests conducted during the ‘40s, ‘50s and early ‘60s.
Light, a photographer himself, was also responsible for the stunning Full Moon, a genuinely enlightening collection of photographs from the Apollo moon landings, and one I thoroughly recommend for any space-flight enthusiast. You may think you’ve seen all the good Apollo pictures a thousand times, but trust me, you really haven’t.
So, speaking as someone over whom nuclear weapons – and their truly god-like destructive power that Oppenheimer so presciently noticed – have exerted a morbid and unreasonable fascination since the reality of the four-minute warning became apparent to me as a child during the ‘80s, I just had to see this book.
An initial flick through 100 Suns will reveal many abstractly beautiful images. Some, like those taken with ultra-high-speed cameras to catch the precise moment when a new sun is born, look like giant viruses or bacteria, and wouldn’t look out of place in the Turner Prize Exhibition, so weird and otherworldly are they. Others, particularly those in which US soldiers appear, are equally otherworldly, if less abstract, evoking a lost era of innocence (or foolish naiveté or criminal irresponsibility) about the effects of 32-kiloton atomic explosions.
You’d think that the really big tests, the 35-megaton bombs detonated in the Pacific, would be the real eye-openers here, but although they are beguilingly beautiful there’s no sense of reality, or place and effect about them. These stupendous releases of energy mostly seem too abstract to inspire the expected awe; even caught by the practical lenses of US military observers they’re strangely soft and fuzzy – more like perfect holiday sunsets than artificial sunrises of annihilation.
Light also excels with the (mostly) short paragraphs that accompany each of the 100 images. These contain just enough necessary information to put the awe, the horror and sometimes the sheer disbelief back into all of these pictures. There are things I certainly never knew about these tests, the people who conducted them and the people who suffered from them. Read each of the short pieces about all of these pictures and I guarantee you’ll be amazed, for lots of different reasons.
[No longer online, so I'm sharing my file copy here. Good review of a great book.]
Bonus: video compilation of cleaned-up nuclear test video, with a cool soundtrack. Don't miss!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=LL...
Plus: Organic Plutonium! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
September 3, 2008
This book is DISTURBING! And, I like it very much -- in fact it might be why I like it so much. The endnotes at the back of the book are the real payoff. The images are just presented with the bomb test code name, kiloton estimated yield, location, & date.
You have to get through the book to get to the supporting info. Very effective. These are beautiful images BUT they are terrible at the same time.
Nice primer on the basics of thermonuclear particle physics & radiation physical effects forensics.
You have to get through the book to get to the supporting info. Very effective. These are beautiful images BUT they are terrible at the same time.
Nice primer on the basics of thermonuclear particle physics & radiation physical effects forensics.
June 30, 2011
This book is a great read for anyone who wishes to know the power and terrible beauty that is the history of US atmospheric and underwater nuclear testing.
The set of 100 photographs are equally seperated into two groups: desert (Nevada) and ocean (the Pacific). The photos are labelled accroding to the codename designated by the US military. The names themselves do not have any relation to the nuclear wepon involved for that particular testing. Some of the names are chosen in a seemingly random fashion, ranging from a word or sometimes a type of vegetable. This only accentuate the chilling factor of the horrifying event being named after something that seemed innocent and entirely unrelated to nuclear testing.
After the photographs there is a section that explain to readers (in an almost layman's term) the basic nuclear phyics (how the explosion occurs) and the damage to human and environment during and after the nuclear testing.
The author also points out the fact that all those pictures are from a small fraction of photos that are taken during the atmosphere and underwater testing between 1945 to 1962. Many more during from those period are either still in strict classified archives, deliberately destoryed or lost. Moreover, since the Limited Test Band Treaty signed by US and Russia in 1963 until 1992 (in US), there are still many more underground testing that were conducted. The photographs of those testing are never released. The absence of those photos only further strengten on how much more of such testing are unknown to the general public.
I have the pleasure of visiting The Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas in last Decemeber. While seeing the actual exhibit and photos provides a more unsettled feeling after viewing than the book itself, the book provides a fair substitute for those who cannot see the museum exhibit themselves.
The set of 100 photographs are equally seperated into two groups: desert (Nevada) and ocean (the Pacific). The photos are labelled accroding to the codename designated by the US military. The names themselves do not have any relation to the nuclear wepon involved for that particular testing. Some of the names are chosen in a seemingly random fashion, ranging from a word or sometimes a type of vegetable. This only accentuate the chilling factor of the horrifying event being named after something that seemed innocent and entirely unrelated to nuclear testing.
After the photographs there is a section that explain to readers (in an almost layman's term) the basic nuclear phyics (how the explosion occurs) and the damage to human and environment during and after the nuclear testing.
The author also points out the fact that all those pictures are from a small fraction of photos that are taken during the atmosphere and underwater testing between 1945 to 1962. Many more during from those period are either still in strict classified archives, deliberately destoryed or lost. Moreover, since the Limited Test Band Treaty signed by US and Russia in 1963 until 1992 (in US), there are still many more underground testing that were conducted. The photographs of those testing are never released. The absence of those photos only further strengten on how much more of such testing are unknown to the general public.
I have the pleasure of visiting The Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas in last Decemeber. While seeing the actual exhibit and photos provides a more unsettled feeling after viewing than the book itself, the book provides a fair substitute for those who cannot see the museum exhibit themselves.
January 2, 2016
Unexpected layout and it made no sense. Page after page of photos with the basics. Only at the end can you read about each test/photo, and only after that do you get to the timeline that makes sense of all of it. The timeline was the best part of the book and it was crammed into a few pages. Interspersing photos with details and chronology would have made a fascinating read.
June 4, 2020
Did you know that fission nuclear bombs have a physical limit of about one megaton? The critical mass gets blown apart before you can exceed this limit.
September 7, 2020
Truly exceptional collection of US nuclear weapons test photography. Second to none.
September 24, 2010
As terrible as a nuclear detonation can be, this book manages to capture the spectacle and beauty from the above-ground nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site and other detonation sites in the 50s and 60s.
The book is a collection of 100 colour and B&W photos from the US National Archives and LANL of various detonations. Some are taken mere milliseconds after detonation and show fascinating detail. Others show the detonations with soldiers looking on. Aerial shots show the impressive scale of the detonations.
Captions for the photos giving details on the test are listed in the back so as not to distract from the photo itself. It's an interesting book to look through and to see the scale of the above-ground nuclear weapon testing that was done in the middle of the 20th century.
The book is a collection of 100 colour and B&W photos from the US National Archives and LANL of various detonations. Some are taken mere milliseconds after detonation and show fascinating detail. Others show the detonations with soldiers looking on. Aerial shots show the impressive scale of the detonations.
Captions for the photos giving details on the test are listed in the back so as not to distract from the photo itself. It's an interesting book to look through and to see the scale of the above-ground nuclear weapon testing that was done in the middle of the 20th century.
June 7, 2009
A collection of stunning photographs from the United States nuclear testing program, unretouched and unembellished. Includes an index with information on the test series, date and estimated yield of each detonation. The 100 photos are divided equally between the Nevada Test Site and the Pacific Ocean tests, and many feature the US soldiers who witnessed the explosions, some from dangerous proximity.
These photographs provide beautiful, yet chilling testimony to the awesome destructive power of nuclear weapons. My only complaint with this compilation is that the minor, kiloton-level tests at the Nevada Test site are overrepresented, at the expense of the far more spectacular Pacific tests.
These photographs provide beautiful, yet chilling testimony to the awesome destructive power of nuclear weapons. My only complaint with this compilation is that the minor, kiloton-level tests at the Nevada Test site are overrepresented, at the expense of the far more spectacular Pacific tests.
August 7, 2009
I saw the pictures in this book as an exhibit at my local art museum over a year ago. The images and the descriptions are so haunting I had to return to them. These photos were like the sore that would heal because I couldn't stop picking it. Mushroom clouds causing lightning storms and flipping over ships or the images of soldiers watching tests with expressions that run from wonder to horror are coupled with descriptions that tell you things like the light of the explosions were so bright that men could see their own bones. This is a chronicle of what may be the worst thing that humanity ever did to itself. What does it mean that they are so beautiful?
July 17, 2013
This is a very unusual book, even by picture book standards. It consists of 100 photographs of nuclear bursts. Some have the appearance of artwork, so it's good to keep in mind what you're looking it. A few show people in the foreground. In the early days of nuclear testing, the military made soldiers witness these events. The after effects must have been pretty nasty, even with protective clothing. I would call many of the photo spectacular. Hopefully, the last photographs of nuclear bursts have been taken. I gave the book four stars for "interesting," not necessarily for "good."
March 16, 2015
The bizarre and threatening beauty of total devastation. The fact that some of these official army photographs make for beautiful art owes totally to the awe that only such a weapon of pure and complete death as thermonuclear bombs can provide. Worth a look, if only for the picture of the bomb that gave John Wayne and the rest of the cast & crew of The Conqueror terminal cancer.
May 23, 2015
A photo book of many atomic bomb tests. It's completely entrancing and disturbing and frightening. What we could have (and may yet) do to our pale blue dot of a home was an immediate version of the slow-motion ruination that climate change portends.
April 19, 2016
An amazing collection of declassified photographs of nuclear tests from the 1950's into the 1960's. Detailed information on the outcome of each test. A most unique compilation of awesomely powerful detonations, with some even having an eerie beauty in the colors of their images.
February 11, 2008
A pictorial history of US nuclear testing in the 1950s and 60s. Stunning and horrific at the same time, a really beautiful book.
April 1, 2008
A collection of images showcasing the "mushroom-like" cloud left after a bomb is dropped. The destruction it brings leaves an almost calm beauty..an eerie paradox.
March 6, 2009
If you enjoy nuclear weapons (and who doesn't), every photograph in this book is hypnotizing.
May 11, 2010
My blog Apples with Many Seeds includes a review of 100 Suns:
http://applewithmanyseedsdoucette.blo...
http://applewithmanyseedsdoucette.blo...
August 17, 2011
100 photos of nuclear detonations. These pictures are absolutely devastating. And I think that makes them all the more beautiful.
August 5, 2014
Compelling viewing.
August 8, 2012
Beautiful amazing book!
August 8, 2012
Loved this!
September 11, 2014
Terrifying and beautiful.
September 7, 2014
Brilliant photos and surprisingly beautiful! No description of the science or anything, just the photos - very powerful!
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews