Special Reports

100 Suns by Michael Light, Jonathan Cape/Random House, £30, ISBN 0224064517 Reviewed by Maggie McDonald

MICHAEL LIGHT's 100 Suns has a deadly, fascinating beauty. He has collected 100 stunning photographs of nuclear tests conducted by the US between the late 1950s and early 1960s. At the end, brief notes tell you what you have seen: tests in Nevada, troops getting "familiar" with bomb effects, an underwater detonation at Johnston Island, near to Hawaii.

And the images are extraordinary. Yankee, this 13.5-megaton hydrogen bomb, exploded on 1 March 1954, and was the second biggest weapon the US ever detonated. The glowing debris surrounding it is dust from Bikini atoll. Yankee lingers on in the contaminated soil that keeps the Bikinians off their island. (You can dive nearby, but not grow food.) After years of argument, the people of Bikini reached agreement with the US government in 2001.

How can a picture of an exploding bomb be considered beautiful when it is the source of such misery and anger? It's not a dislocation of meaning and appearance: perhaps fascination with the deadly is a survival instinct. The strange beauty of that blast image makes us pay attention to the problems caused by nuclear weapons testing. Johnston Island, for example, will become a wildlife sanctuary in 2004. Can this really be possible on top of a plutonium landfill?