What a Nuclear Explosion Looks Like

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.

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.

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.”

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