Overview of Frenchman Flat, Looking West, Nevada Test Site, 1997
Sundance Craters and the Yucca Fault, Looking North on Yucca Flat, Nevada Test Site, 1996
Sedan Crater, Northern End of Yuca Flat Looking South, Area 10, Nevada Test Site, 1996
In 1962, the United States conducted ninety-eight nuclear tests and the Soviet Union seventy-eight. Thirty-five of America’s tests that year were atmospheric—launched by rocket or dropped from a plane—all but two of them in the Pacific Ocean. The rest were detonated underground in Nevada. Traces of the atmospheric tests were mostly scattered by the winds and absorbed by the seas. But the underground tests—and there were at least seven hundred more over the next thirty years—left a pox-like pattern of craters in the desert some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, a stark monument of deliberate ruin…
Yes, these could be nightmarish crop circles or dusty, haphazard versions of the center-pivot irrigation fields you come across throughout the semi-arid West. 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. The intimate clarity of Gowin’s lens makes it look as though every detail within its range is aspiring to be noticed. On the desert floor, cause and effect seem to have been reversed. The craters look as though they’re ancient geological formations, the roads added later by curious investigators exploring these strange formations. But, of course, it happened the other way around. The roads—some of them only dusty tracks—led to shafts drilled hundreds of feet into the earth. Down those bore-holes nuclear devices were detonated, causing a subterranean tremor (sometimes felt in Las Vegas) and raising a strange, flattened plume of dust, lifted by a wind with no direction and for which there is no name.
Nearly all of the circular scars in Gowin’s photographs were caused by explosions that the Department of Energy calls “weapons related.” In other words, they’re the test-bed of this country’s invisible nuclear arsenal. By the time Gowin photographed these sites, most of the infrastructure of observation—towers and trailers, temporary shelters and great girths of cable—was long gone. The exception is the serried ranks of troop placement trenches scratched into a hillside in Area 5. The landscape has an archaeological feel, especially where the irradiated desert soil has been scraped away, leaving behind dark etchings in the silvered surface of the earth. Looking at these photographs, you feel as though you’re witnessing the preliminary survey of an unknown planet—a close flyby revealing traces of abandoned alien activity. Except that the aliens are us and the planet, to use Oppen’s words, “is / Impenetrably ours.”
“The Uncrowded Country of the Bomb.”
Emmet Gowin
Photos from The Nevada Test Site