One of the first photographs in Robert Del Tredici’s book At Work in the Fields of the Bomb shows a mustached young man standing on the steps of a federal building in Washington, D.C., holding a model of a hydrogen bomb. The man is Howard Morland, who achieved notoriety in 1979 when the federal government sued the Progressive to stop publication of his article on how to build a hydrogen bomb. In the ensuing trial, Morland showed that all the information he wanted to publish was already in the public record. After six months, the magazine published his article, “The H-Bomb Secret (To Know How Is to Ask Why).”
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For all the space nuclear weapons take up in the headlines and in unquiet dreams, few people know what they look like, where they are built, or who builds them. It was that imbalance that Howard Morland tried to correct a decade ago; two years ago Del Tredici attempted the same thing with the publication of At Work, a collection of photographs and text that documents the theory, production, and effects of the Bomb.
Del Tredici knew the effects of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, because he’d just finished a book about it entitled The People of Three Mile Island, which focused on the people who worked at or lived near the reactor. “My experiences there showed me that some people’s lives had really been affected,” he says, “but there were also people who said with a wave of the hand, ‘This is a beautiful country. There’s no problem.’”
Del Tredici’s straightforward documentary photographs don’t let style get in the way of substance. John Smitherman, a Navy veteran who was exposed to fallout in the first postwar atomic-bomb tests, seems racked with pain in his photo; he died of a blockage of the lymph system associated with radiation exposure soon after Del Tredici photographed him. An official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency blandly describes civil-defense strategies that sound futile; with his deadpan explanatory expression, he is the quintessential bureaucrat. A photo taken in Lapland of a huge freezer filled with reindeer carcasses contaminated with radiation from the Chernobyl disaster appears with its unidentifiable piles of frozen meat like somebody’s grim dream of a nuclear winter. The bomb factories–many of them photographed from the air–look like factories anywhere, underlining the fact that they are, as Morland wrote, “in ordinary towns.”
