DARKNESS VISIBLE.(book of photographs of nuclear weapons testing)(Book Review)

The atomic bomb set off in the Nevada desert on June 4, 1953, a little over sixty miles from Las Vegas, was code-named Climax. It was dropped from an airplane and detonated 1,334 feet above the desert floor. Rockets fired from the ground just before detonation, to help measure the shock wave, left smoke trails beside the mushroom cloud. The United States conducted a hundred and six nuclear tests in the atmosphere over Nevada in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties, most of them observed by American soldiers or, in the case of the Zucchini test in 1955, by Canadian and British military observers, for whom bench seating was provided thirteen miles from the blast (above). The spectacular nuclear explosions in the desert and in the Pacific Ocean were photographed by a unit working out of the Lookout Mountain Air Force Station, in Hollywood. Most of the unit's pictures have been destroyed, lost, or are still classified, but some of them are available in government archives. For the elegant and emotionally charged "100 Suns" (Knopf; $45), ...