As you pass through the chain link gate at the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert, the barren landscape sparkles in the morning sun. But there’s more to the twinkling desert than meets the eye. The glittering sand is the result of tiny green fragments of trinitite strewn across the desert floor, an artifact of the ominous events that took place there almost 80 years prior. At around 5:30am on the morning of July 16, 1945, in this remote part of southern New Mexico, the United States Army detonated the world’s first nuclear device. Part of the U.S. government’s Manhattan Project, the blast had an estimated yield of 25 kilotons of TNT and was felt over 100 miles away. It sent a mushroom cloud billowing 7.5 miles into the air and the resulting fireball melted the surrounding desert, thrusting the world into the nuclear age. The Manhattan Project – which culminated in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – was the first large-scale use of nuclear technology and ushered in profound changes to the course of technological development for humankind. Scientists quickly realized this new form of energy would allow development of long-lasting power sources which could subsequently be employed in a range of applications. Promoted as the epitome of progress and modernity, the United States Atomic Energy Commission predicted that, by the turn of the 21st century, there would be one thousand reactors producing electricity for homes and businesses across the U.S. This, combined with rapidly increasing Cold War-fuelled military demands saw the rapid rise of the nuclear industry. From uranium mining and processing through to nuclear research, testing and energy generation, atomic energy became an ever-increasing commercial interest. For the past decade American/Australian photographer Brett Leigh Dicks has been exploring the legacy of atomic energy, traversing the country’s far flung reaches in his pursuit of the stories behind America’s nuclear program. He has applied a new topographic photography approach to documenting sites associated with all facets of atomic energy and the nuclear revolution. GROUND ZERO is divided into five stanzas, each representing a different aspect of nuclear energy – Mining, Testing, Weapons, Energy, and Waste. The subject matter documents everything from plutonium processing facilities to atomic test sites, nuclear power stations, missile bases, and waste storage cells to tell the haunting stories of America’s coming of nuclear age.