Titan II Nuclear Missile
© Alastair Philip Wiper
There is a compelling argument that the biggest danger from nuclear weapons is that we may accidentally blow ourselves up. History is full of de-classified examples of aeroplanes crashing with nuclear weapons on board, governments mistaking computer simulations of war for the real thing, weapons being accidentally dropped by people pulling the wrong handle, and explosions in missile silos like this one. Once, a bear climbing the fence of an Air Force base was mistaken for Russian special forces beginning an invasion. And then there are the drugs.
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"Of the roughly 114,000 people who’d been cleared to work with nuclear weapons in 1980, only 1.5 per cent lost that clearance because of drug abuse" explains Eric Schlosser in his book "Command and Control". That means at least 1,728 people - the ones that were caught - used drugs while they were around nuclear weapons. In 2016, more than a dozen Air Force members guarding nuclear missiles were convicted of using and/or distributing LSD, ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana.¹
Two "marijuana cigarettes" were found in the control centre of a Titan II missile silo in 1977.² It was about 40 miles south of Tucson, Arizona, and it might well have been this one. The Titan II nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile carried the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States. At 9 megatons, it was about 600 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Between 1963 and 1987, 54 missiles were on 24-hour alert, 365 days per year, spread through Arizona, Arkansas and Kansas.
The launch sequence took 58 seconds, and the time taken to hit its target in the Soviet Union was about 30 minutes, with the rocket travelling at 26,000 kph. The rocket was 32m long.
A 9-megaton blast would result in a fireball with an approximate 5km diameter. The radiated heat would be sufficient to cause lethal burns to any unprotected person within a 32 km radius. The Minuteman missile replaced the Titan II, and there are currently 400 Minuteman III missiles, each with a 170-kiloton warhead, "on alert" at air force bases in Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana. Keep your fingers crossed.
Part of a long-term project I am working on called "How We Learned to Stop Worrying".
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
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© Alastair Philip Wiper
There is a compelling argument that the biggest danger from nuclear weapons is that we may accidentally blow ourselves up. History is full of de-classified examples of aeroplanes crashing with nuclear weapons on board, governments mistaking computer simulations of war for the real thing, weapons being accidentally dropped by people pulling the wrong handle, and explosions in missile silos like this one. Once, a bear climbing the fence of an Air Force base was mistaken for Russian special forces beginning an invasion. And then there are the drugs.
"Of the roughly 114,000 people who’d been cleared to work with nuclear weapons in 1980, only 1.5 per cent lost that clearance because of drug abuse" explains Eric Schlosser in his book "Command and Control". That means at least 1,728 people - the ones that were caught - used drugs while they were around nuclear weapons. In 2016, more than a dozen Air Force members guarding nuclear missiles were convicted of using and/or distributing LSD, ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana.¹
Two "marijuana cigarettes" were found in the control centre of a Titan II missile silo in 1977.² It was about 40 miles south of Tucson, Arizona, and it might well have been this one. The Titan II nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile carried the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States. At 9 megatons, it was about 600 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Between 1963 and 1987, 54 missiles were on 24-hour alert, 365 days per year, spread through Arizona, Arkansas and Kansas.
The launch sequence took 58 seconds, and the time taken to hit its target in the Soviet Union was about 30 minutes, with the rocket travelling at 26,000 kph. The rocket was 32m long.
A 9-megaton blast would result in a fireball with an approximate 5km diameter. The radiated heat would be sufficient to cause lethal burns to any unprotected person within a 32 km radius. The Minuteman missile replaced the Titan II, and there are currently 400 Minuteman III missiles, each with a 170-kiloton warhead, "on alert" at air force bases in Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana. Keep your fingers crossed.
Part of a long-term project I am working on called "How We Learned to Stop Worrying".
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
Eternal Lifeline
© Alastair Philip WiperFor $200,000 you can have your body cryogenically preserved after death. The question is: To what end?
A tour of Alcor Life Extension Foundation’s headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona, includes some unique sights. The non-profit has more than 200 human bodies or heads—and a few beloved pets—in cryogenic preservation on-site.
Founded in 1972 by Fred and Linda Chamberlain, Alcor is dedicated to cryonics research and education and has about 1,500 members planning on some form of cryogenic preservation. While they’re still living, members wear medical alert bracelets that instruct hospitals and doctors to contact the organization in the event of a life-threatening emergency. A team is on standby to rush the body of any member who dies to Alcor’s facility. There, bodily fluids are replaced with special solutions that won’t turn to ice during the next step in the preservation process—cooling the cadaver to -196C (-321F).
The operation required to process and protect a body upon arrival is extensive, and the chemicals used for vitrification are unique, accounting for the hefty price tag: $200,000 for the whole body or $80,000 for just the head, plus monthly membership fees of up to $100. (Most members pay by designating Alcor as the beneficiary of their life insurance policies.) User fees cover about 40% of the cost, with the rest coming from donations.
James Arrowood, co-chief executive officer of Alcor, describes cryogenics as a serious scientific undertaking, deemphasizing the more outré associations it has in the public imagination as just a way to cheat death. He sees scientific research as the heart of Alcor’s mission. “I know what happens if I choose cremation,” Arrowood says. “I know what happens if I choose burial. I also know what the loss is to the science.” He gives the example of Albert Einstein’s brain, which was removed for study but was cut into pieces because there was no way to preserve and examine it in a non-destructive way. If there had been, Arrowood says, we could have learned more about the unique nature of the scientist’s genius. “Einstein’s brain is all over the world in little chunks,” he says. “And you can never get that data back.”
Alcor has accumulated a repository of data on organ preservation and decay that spans more than five decades. It has in storage the brain of someone born in the 1880s and someone born in the 2000s. Much of what it was doing in its early years was aspirational and felt like science fiction, Arrowood acknowledges, but he adds that cryogenics isn’t as weird as it’s made out to be. With in vitro fertilization, “embryos are frozen indefinitely,” he says, “and they ultimately result in a living being.”
As technology has progressed, advances such as improved preservation of individual organs have become viable goals. Arrowood cites kidney donation as an area in which Alcor might be able to make a difference—notably by preserving kidneys long enough after a donor’s death to line up a match and arrange for surgery. “That is a solvable problem,” he says. “It’s not fiction.”
Arrowood also sees potential for Alcor to contribute to scientific knowledge about what happens to bodies after death and to serve as a kind of seed bank, helping preserve species that are near extinction.
Naturally, he’s planning to be cryopreserved himself. “Have you seen a cremation? They’re awful! Or burial? You get eaten by worms! I’ve never liked worms,” he says. “I am choosing to be a part of a supercool science experiment.”
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
The Anthropocene Illusion
© Zed Nelson“While we destroy the natural world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial ‘experience’ of nature - a reassuring spectacle, an illusion.”
In a tiny fraction of our Earth’s history, we humans have altered our world beyond anything it has experienced in tens of millions of years. Scientists are calling it a new epoch, ‘The Anthropocene’ - the age of human.
Future geologists will find evidence in the rock strata of an unprecedented human impact on our planet - huge concentrations of plastics, fallout from the burning of fossil fuels, and vast deposits of concrete used to build our cities. The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years. We are forcing animals and plants to extinction by removing their habitats.
We have broken our ancient bonds with nature, divorcing ourselves from the land we once roamed and from other animals. Yet we cannot face the true scale of our loss. Somewhere deep within us the desire for contact with nature remains. So, while we destroy the natural world around us, we have also become masters of a stage-managed, artificial ‘experience’ of nature, a reassuring spectacle, an illusion.
Over six years, across four continents, Zed Nelson has examined how we humans immerse ourselves in increasingly simulated environments to mask our destructive divorce from the natural world. From theme parks, zoos and natural history museums, to national parks, African safaris and alpine resorts, his work reveals not only a global phenomenon of denial and collective self-delusion, but also a desperate craving for a connection to a world we have turned our back on.
‘Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.’
John Berger (1926 - 2017). ‘Why Look at Animals’.
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
The Anthropocene Illusion reflects on how—at a time of environmental crisis—a consoling version of nature has been packaged as a commodified, curated experience, designed to mask our divorce from the natural world.
The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years.
Today, more tigers exist in captivity than in the wild.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
Charles Darwin reduced humans to just another species – a twig on the grand tree of life. But now, the paradigm has shifted: humankind is no longer just another species. We are the first to knowingly reshape the living earth’s biology and chemistry. We have become the masters of our planet and integral to the destiny of life on Earth.
Surrounding ourselves with simulated recreations of nature paradoxically constitutes an unwitting monument to the very thing that we have lost.
Just 3% of the world’s land remains ecologically intact with healthy populations of all its original animals and undisturbed habitat.
In 1989, the writer Bill McKibben (in his book The End of Nature), foresaw a moment when our environment would exceed the capabilities of our environmental language. The remade Earth, McKibben further argued, would set record after record—hottest, coldest, deadliest—before people realized the need for new ways of keeping score. But inertia is an intellectual proposition as well as a physical one; for a long time, he suggested, confronted with evidence of a changing world, humans would refuse to change their mind.
Medea, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, said, “I can see - and I approve the better course, and yet I choose the worse.”
Today, social media and the internet’s ceaseless flow of information and visual stimulation have birthed a state of unreality, where we are no longer looking for truth, but only a kind of amazement.
Our future as a species depends on urgent new assessments of humanity’s relationship to the natural world - requiring intentional acts of culture, with paradigm shifts in priorities and empathies.
Zed Nelson
The Anthropocene Illusion, by Zed Nelson, will be published as a book by Guest Editions - release date 15 May, 2025.
254 x 300mm | 196 pages including 75 colour images, made over six years and across four continents | 12pp index section with extended image descriptions and an essay by Zed Nelson | Casebound in a printed green Colorado cloth | Printed in the UK on Fedrigoni papers.
Order book - £40 -Pre sale with 10% discount
Order book with fine art print - £135 -Pre sale with 10% discount
254 x 300mm | 196 pages including 75 colour images, made over six years and across four continents | 12pp index section with extended image descriptions and an essay by Zed Nelson | Casebound in a printed green Colorado cloth | Printed in the UK on Fedrigoni papers.
Order book - £40 -Pre sale with 10% discount
Order book with fine art print - £135 -Pre sale with 10% discount
Spiraling
© David MaiselClimate scientists from Brigham Young University recently warned that if emergency measures are not enacted immediately, Utah’s Great Salt Lake could disappear by 2028. The entropic conditions of human-induced climate change and drought are tipping the region into a desiccated dead zone. In Spiraling, I chart the environmental crisis point that the imperiled Lake is rapidly approaching.
Few lakes rival the Great Salt Lake in size and significance — it is the largest saline lake in the United States and the eighth largest in the world. However, drought conditions caused by regional climate change and industrial development have caused the Lake to decrease in scale by more than two-thirds in the past forty years. The surface area of the Lake has declined from 3,330 square miles in 1980 to a record-low 950 square miles in 2021.
In addition, because the Great Salt Lake is a terminal lake (meaning it has no natural outlets), over the past century it has become a repository of arsenic, dioxins, mercury, PCBs, and other toxins from the mining industry as well as from agricultural runoff. As more of the lakebed becomes exposed due to the Lake’s depletion, the surrounding atmosphere will become increasingly poisoned by toxic airborne dust emanating from the playa.
As Terry Tempest Williams has written: “On any given day, dust devils are whipping up a storm in these hot spots, blowing mercury- and arsenic-laced winds through the Wasatch Front, where 2.6 million people dwell, with Salt Lake City at its center. Arsenic levels in the lakebed are already far higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommendation for safety. And with the state’s population projected to increase to 5.5 million people by 2060, the urgency to reverse the lake’s retreat will only grow.”
Maisel has been working in the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake for nearly forty years. “Spiraling is my latest chapter responding to this environmental disaster, which is unfolding with increasing urgency. I was drawn to the region by the Kennecott Copper Mine and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty; I made aerial photographs of the massive open pit copper mine as part of my Black Maps series in 1988 and photographed the Spiral Jetty as part of my Terminal Mirage series in 2003.”
A measure of the Lake’s disappearance can be gauged by Spiral Jetty, which was constructed on the shoreline of the Lake in 1970. In the era of Terminal Mirage, the Jetty appears as a ghostly white form – as the waters of the Lake began to shift into a drought condition, the Jetty reemerged covered with salt crystals from decades of submersion beneath the briny water. In its critical drought condition shown in Spiraling, the water levels in the Lake have receded hundreds of feet from the artwork, leaving it completely exposed, stranded from the shoreline hundreds of feet away. It stands as a symbol of the Lake’s impending demise.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
Few lakes rival the Great Salt Lake in size and significance — it is the largest saline lake in the United States and the eighth largest in the world. However, drought conditions caused by regional climate change and industrial development have caused the Lake to decrease in scale by more than two-thirds in the past forty years. The surface area of the Lake has declined from 3,330 square miles in 1980 to a record-low 950 square miles in 2021.
In addition, because the Great Salt Lake is a terminal lake (meaning it has no natural outlets), over the past century it has become a repository of arsenic, dioxins, mercury, PCBs, and other toxins from the mining industry as well as from agricultural runoff. As more of the lakebed becomes exposed due to the Lake’s depletion, the surrounding atmosphere will become increasingly poisoned by toxic airborne dust emanating from the playa.
As Terry Tempest Williams has written: “On any given day, dust devils are whipping up a storm in these hot spots, blowing mercury- and arsenic-laced winds through the Wasatch Front, where 2.6 million people dwell, with Salt Lake City at its center. Arsenic levels in the lakebed are already far higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommendation for safety. And with the state’s population projected to increase to 5.5 million people by 2060, the urgency to reverse the lake’s retreat will only grow.”
Maisel has been working in the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake for nearly forty years. “Spiraling is my latest chapter responding to this environmental disaster, which is unfolding with increasing urgency. I was drawn to the region by the Kennecott Copper Mine and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty; I made aerial photographs of the massive open pit copper mine as part of my Black Maps series in 1988 and photographed the Spiral Jetty as part of my Terminal Mirage series in 2003.”
A measure of the Lake’s disappearance can be gauged by Spiral Jetty, which was constructed on the shoreline of the Lake in 1970. In the era of Terminal Mirage, the Jetty appears as a ghostly white form – as the waters of the Lake began to shift into a drought condition, the Jetty reemerged covered with salt crystals from decades of submersion beneath the briny water. In its critical drought condition shown in Spiraling, the water levels in the Lake have receded hundreds of feet from the artwork, leaving it completely exposed, stranded from the shoreline hundreds of feet away. It stands as a symbol of the Lake’s impending demise.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty photographed for Terminal Mirage series in 2003
They
© Myriam AbdelazizThe pronoun they is used by individuals who identify as non-binary or genderqueer, meaning they do not exclusively identify as male or female. These individuals may experience a gender identity that is fluid, outside the traditional gender binary, or a combination of genders. The use of they as a singular pronoun has gained increased recognition and acceptance in society to respect and affirm the identities of non-binary individuals. By using they as a gender-neutral pronoun, people can avoid assumptions and not assign a binary gender to someone who does not identify as strictly male or female.
The impact of recognizing and using gender-neutral pronouns like they is multifaceted. It helps promote inclusivity and acceptance of diverse gender identities, fostering a more inclusive and respectful society. It acknowledges and validates the experiences and identities of non-binary individuals, reducing the erasure and marginalization they may face. It also encourages others to be mindful of the language they use and consider the gender diversity that exists beyond the traditional binary.
Since the recent Presidential election, non-binary people are starting to face a mix of challenges regarding both their rights and societal acceptance. Trump’s administration has already rolled back on several protection for LGBT+ individuals including guidance on gender identity in schools and healthcare creating a more hostile environment for those identifying as non-binary or gender non-conforming.
This new political environment could lead to increased mental health challenges for non-binary individuals due to discrimination and stigma,
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
