I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before (which sort of amazes me) but for the past three years I’ve been working on a major photo project on nuclear weapons. Road-tripping across the United States, covering a total of 25,000 miles by car and visiting thirty-five states, I’ve visited all manner of places with nuclear weapons on public display. Sure, I was at a US Air Force missile base, but I also found them at museums, at high schools, at highway rest stops, at city parks, and at Army-Navy surplus stores.
Nuclear weapons are on display all over yet are somehow largely invisible to the American public. People worry about the economy, about the environment, about social justice, about politics and democracy, and about foreign wars but (with the exception of the war in Ukraine, and that only happened in the last two years or so) there’s not much discussion about the nukes. In the public imagination, there is a “bomb” and there is a “missile” or “ICBM” and that seems to be the extent of the conversation.
That is no foundation for any sort of public debate about these weapons, collectively the first danger to humanity, above pandemics, above social upheaval, above environmental disasters.
With my project, American Nukes, I hope to contribute to illuminating the nature of these weapons, to show what they look like, to share what they do, and to chart how they have evolved over time. I want to help provide a better foundation for debate, a starting point for the non-specialist.
Each weapon (or group of weapons) will have it own page and gallery of images (the heart and soul of the project). Each page will also have a detailed caption for each of the images, a short essay, a few specs on the weapon(s), an image from NukeMap with the weapon’s destructive capabilities shown (with a link back to the NukeMap page), a selection of relevant online videos, and a list of links for further reading.
There is also, elsewhere on the site, a section on locations where you might see the weapons for yourselves. So far I have listed the (almost all) of the sites I visited and soon I will add the rest of the potential sites from my database.
I have four pages up now, out of a projected fifty pages, and I’m adding new ones every week. You can sign up there if you want monthly updates but I will also occasionally post something here about the project.
I hope you find the project compelling.
