Emmet Gowin: The Nevada Test Site

Arthurwg · Dec 8, 2022

Just got a copy or Emmet Gowin's "Nevada Test Site," published by Princeton in 2019. IMHO, these are the best landscape pictures I've ever seen, perhaps rivaled only by the Hasselblad pictures from the moon. The photographs, shot with official sanction from a helicopter over several trips, reveal the atomic bomb craters and infrastructure of the vast nuclear test site, as well as the natural features of the area. The pictures are supremely elegant and beautifully printed. A forward by Robert Adams links them, in my mind, to the tradition of the New Topographics. Also included at the end of the book is Gowin's commentary on how he gained access to the top secret site. The only thing lacking is any technical commentary.

IMetodiev · Feb 23, 2023

Thanks for sharing, it's my type of subject matter, adding it to the list!

SodaAnt · Jul 27, 2023

Amazon link, for those interested:

ic-racer · Jul 28, 2023

ic-racer · Jul 28, 2023

Interesting illusion looking at these images from Google Map. The lighting makes the craters look like dirt mounds.

BMbikerider · Jul 28, 2023

Arthurwg said:
Just got a copy or Emmet Gowin's "Nevada Test Site," published by Princeton in 2019. IMHO, these are the best landscape pictures I've ever seen, perhaps rivaled only by the Hasselblad pictures from the moon. The photographs, shot with official sanction from a helicopter over several trips, reveal the atomic bomb craters and infrastructure of the vast nuclear test site, as well as the natural features of the area. The pictures are supremely elegant and beautifully printed. A forward by Robert Adams links them, in my mind, to the tradition of the New Topographics. Also included at the end of the book is Gowin's commentary on how he gained access to the top secret site. The only thing lacking is any technical commentary.

I have just looked at Google maps and the search 'Nevada test site' was identified but there were no details shown until you zoomed out so any info was tiny. What struck me was the location of the 'site' was only around 70/80 miles from Las Vegas, that struck me as a little too close for comfort to a major city

Rick A · Jul 28, 2023

ic-racer said:
Interesting illusion looking at these images from Google Map. The lighting makes the craters look like dirt mounds.

View attachment 345082

"Big Explosives Experimental Facility" Indeed!

TJones · Jul 28, 2023

BMbikerider said:
I have just looked at Google maps and the search 'Nevada test site' was identified but there were no details shown until you zoomed out so any info was tiny. What struck me was the location of the 'site' was only around 70/80 miles from Las Vegas, that struck me as a little too close for comfort to a major city

Nuclear Tourism: When atomic tests were a tourist attraction in Las Vegas, 1950s - Rare Historical Photos

Las Vegas is known as the city of lights and, at one time, that light was the glow of an atomic detonation in the Nevada desert.

rarehistoricalphotos.com

Donald Qualls · Aug 2, 2023

BMbikerider said:
that struck me as a little too close for comfort to a major city

When most of the above-ground testing was done there, Vegas wasn't yet what most would call a "major city" -- and the prevailing winds in the area would have blown the fallout away from the city, into the Nevada/Utah deserts and southern Rockies -- which at the time were very sparsely populated.

Sirius Glass · Aug 2, 2023

What is the technical term for a janitor at Chernobyl?

Mop & Glow

BMbikerider · Aug 2, 2023

Sirius Glass said:
What is the technical term for a janitor at Chernobyl?

Mop & Glow

The late janitor

ic-racer · Aug 4, 2023

As good or better than traveling in a carbon fiber tube to see the Titanic.

Alan Edward Klein · Aug 4, 2023

Are each of those craters another atomic bomb test? How far away are they from each other? Didn't one test irradiate the area nearby so how did the set up subsequent tests?

Donald Qualls · Aug 11, 2023

Alan Edward Klein said:
Didn't one test irradiate the area nearby so how did the set up subsequent tests?

Those craters are mostly camouflets from underground tests. The explosion produces a void in the ground (by melting and compacting the rock), and the overburden then slumps into the void. The longer term effects of radiation were either unknown or underappreciated back then, so if you didn't take enough dose to get sick immediately, you were thought to be (mostly) okay. Never mind your lifetime cancer risk going from a couple percent to around 1 in 2...

There were serious proposals as late as the 1960s to use this effect to dig a sea level canal from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific in a matter of weeks (a few weeks to drill and set the bombs, and a few seconds for the bang and slump). What finally stopped it was the lack of any immediate way to prevent rapid flow between the different sea levels from eroding away half of Guatemala.

Kodachromeguy · Aug 11, 2023

Donald Qualls said:
There were serious proposals as late as the 1960s to use this effect to dig a sea level canal from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific in a matter of weeks (a few weeks to drill and set the bombs, and a few seconds for the bang and slump). What finally stopped it was the lack of any immediate way to prevent rapid flow between the different sea levels from eroding away half of Guatemala.

Another plan (or maybe the same) was the sea level canal passing through Lake Nicaragua. There, a big issue was mixing of species from the Pacific to the Atlantic and salinity in the lake. Oh, and a minor amount of radiation....

https://porteconomicsmanagement.org/pemp/contents/part1/interoceanic-passages/interoceanic-central-american-canal-routes-considered/

https://www.kqed.org/science/710956...hought-h-bombs-would-make-awesome-earthmovers

Donald Qualls · Aug 11, 2023

Kodachromeguy said:
Another plan (or maybe the same)

Likely was the same. The plan evolved for a while.

Arthurwg · Aug 11, 2023

Donald Qualls said:
The longer term effects of radiation were either unknown or underappreciated back then, so if you didn't take enough dose to get sick immediately, you were thought to be (mostly) okay. Never mind your lifetime cancer risk going from a couple percent to around 1 in 2...

I live about 40 miles from Los Alamos here in New Mexico, where among other thing they manufacture the plutonium detonators, known as PITS, that trigger the explosion of nuclear warheads. Under law these must be renewed and replaced regularly. In other words, it's an ongoing process with no end in sight. Radioactive contamination at Los Alamos is acknowledged but its extent is impossible to discover. BTW, the town Los Alamos has one of the highest per-capita incomes in the USA.

Sirius Glass · Aug 11, 2023

Arthurwg said:
I live about 40 miles from Los Alamos here in New Mexico, where among other thing they manufacture the plutonium detonators, known as PITS, that trigger the explosion of nuclear warheads. Under law these must be renewed and replaced regularly. In other words, it's an ongoing process with no end in sight. Radioactive contamination at Los Alamos is acknowledged but its extent is impossible to discover. BTW, the town Los Alamos has one of the highest per-capita incomes in the USA.

Do the Los Alamos people glow in the dark?

Alan Edward Klein · Aug 11, 2023

Sirius Glass said:
Do the Los Alamos people glow in the dark?

Only their money.

DREW WILEY · Aug 11, 2023

There was an epidemic of thyroid cancer among those who lived in Vegas during the above ground test era. Lots of premature deaths. And Donald - there were plenty of times the wind didn't cooperate as planned. But in its predicted path, the effect on livestock and those small towns which were out there was infamous, and also denied by the Govt for a long time.

I once worked with a former pilot who was transferred to a jeep driver position once he started having inner ear problems,
driving the big brass out to the test site and back for events. He smuggled out a lot of then classified color pictures - a lot sharper than the ones the public saw - and showed them to me. One of the more interesting projects was a fellow who took a lot of available photos of mushroom clouds and published a book of the prints he made from them using uranium toner. Ominous enough looking.

Emmet Gowin's own prints were small and highly toned. I've seen some of those, but not the book itself. He did quite a bit of aerial shooting of the apocalyptic sort, including the aftermath of the Mt St Helens eruption as well.

That test range is enormous, and they wanted to repurpose it, with all its old tunnels, into the main nuke reactor waste disposal operation in the country. That's logical. But nobody wants rail cars carrying that kind of thing across their own State, so it just tends to accumulate, often where it's really bad to have around, getting into soil and aquifers.

Arthurwg · Aug 11, 2023

Lots of thyroid cancers on the east coast due to atypical winds that brought fallout from western tests in the 1950s. A slow-growing cancer, they usually take 20 years to develop.

DREW WILEY · Aug 11, 2023

Last year I had several long lunch conversations with an elderly Hiroshima survivor. He was a 7th grade school student at the time, and just happened to behind an especially thick concrete wall, less than 3/4 mile from the blast. His father worked nearby, reached him, and carried him out. A major river bridge had collapsed, so they actually walked across the charred bodies of people filling the river. His father got quite a radiation dose and died two days later. But the son ended up being transported to an American military hospital right after the surrender of Japan, where he was subjected to all kinds of painful tests and experimental radiation cures for several years without his consent, until a compassionate nurse adopted him. But other than eventually going blind, he's one of the lucky ones, and went on to have a successful grocery business and raise a family here.

DREW WILEY · Aug 11, 2023

If you put Google Earth in the 3D mode, it's obvious which Nevada site features are craters versus elevated mounds, likely used for the towers the devices were place atop during above ground explosion days. One of the spare towers has been left intact as an outdoor museum piece. There's a two lane paved highway all the way into there.

Emmet Gowin: The Nevada Test Site

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