America’s underground tests of nuclear devices in Nevada—many hundred of them over more than three decades—left a pox-like pattern of craters in the desert some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas. The landscape looks almost lunar. Some of the circles do indeed look like the top of a fallen cake or the entrance to a subterranean ant colony. But each one is a subsidence crater, the slumping cone that results when hundreds of thousands of tons of earth and rock are vaporized far below ground. In 1996 and 1997, the Department of Energy and the US Air Force allowed the photographer Emmet Gowin to take photographs of Nevada’s nuclear landscape from a helicopter. Now gathered in a new book, The Nevada Test Site, his images are a stark monument of deliberate ruin.
Source : The Uncrowded Country of the Bomb
