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The Light of a Man-Made Star

July 10, 2025
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The Light of a Man-Made Star
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In 2003, the photographer Michael Light published 100 Suns, a collection of government photographs of nuclear-weapons tests conducted from 1945 to 1962. Each bomb test was given an innocuous name—Sugar, Easy, Zucchini, Orange—and then detonated in the desert or ocean. The Army Signal Corps and a detachment of Air Force photographers, working out of a secret base in Hollywood, photographed the tests. Light collected their work from the archives of laboratories such as Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore.

black-and-white nighttime photo of 5 uniformed soldiers standing and looking skyward, brightly lit by the explosion
NARA / Michael LightSoldiers observe the Apple-1 test, March 29, 1955, in Nevada.

The photos, he says, are part scientific study and part propaganda, a measure of America’s technological progress and the power of its arsenal. They are also, in a way the Pentagon likely never intended, a disconcerting form of art: surreal balls of fire and ash set against barren landscapes; man-made stars, as Light described them, rising over the horizon.

black-and-white photo of daytime desert landscape with hazy sun near dark mushroom cloud in distance, with a man standing in foreground watching with hand shielding eyes
NARA / Michael LightThe Priscilla test, June 24, 1957, Nevada

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting nuclear detonations in the atmosphere, the ocean, and outer space. Bomb testing disappeared underground—but it didn’t end. “In all of these underground tests, there has been little to see and little to photograph,” Light wrote in 100 Suns. “There is no record that helps keep an informed citizenry viscerally aware of what its government is doing.”

black-and-white photo of silhouetted group of soldiers standing on shore with enormous swirling mushroom cloud in distance
NARA / Michael Light / 100 SunsThe Oak test, June 29, 1958, Enewetak Atoll, Marshall Islands


This article appears in the August 2025 print edition with the headline “The Light of a Man-Made Star.”

The post The Light of a Man-Made Star appeared first on The Atlantic.

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