144 pp., 83 4-color photographs

Photographs and text by Paul Shambroom, with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Richard Rhodes,

Published April 2003 by Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore

$34.95 | hardcover | 0-8018-7202-2

(more info and orders): http://www.press.jhu.edu/press/books/titles/s03/s03shfa.htm)

In Face to Face with the Bomb, photographer Paul Shambroom documents the components of America's nuclear arsenal, and through his series of striking images which depict the devices and their day-to-day maintenance, he the makes clear the magnitude of the nuclear reality we have created. Taken between 1992 and 2001 at military bases in the United States and the South Pacific, these photographs offer an unprecedented inside look at the missiles, warheads, bombers, submarines, and command centers that make up the far-flung nuclear infrastructure of the United States. Shambroom's full-color prints depict both historic, Cold War--era weaponry shortly before it was mothballed and new warhead designs and missile defense prototypes that may be deployed well into the twenty-first century.

Face to the Face with the Bomb also features an introductory essay by Pulitzer Prize--winning historian Richard Rhodes, who places Shambroom's photographs within the context of the arms race with the Soviet Union, and a prologue by Shambroom, in which he discusses his experiences visiting the country's top-secret nuclear installations. Visually arresting and chillingly matter-of-fact, this volume provides a lasting document of one of the most uncertain, dangerous periods in human history.

Advance praise and reviews:

"With detached neutrality rarely found in documentary photography, Shambroom remains aloof while unleashing the lethal cerebral logic of the architecture and technology of mass destruction. Straddling distinctions between documentary and fine art, Shambroom pictures the internal spaces of the absolute power of the military, industrial, corporate complex with an equally deadly visual objectivity." -- Kristine Stiles, Duke University

"No one who looks into this book can fail to be struck by the potency of America's military might. These chilling, wonderful photographs show us how casually we take the potential for terror, and how, unexamined, it has become a power in itself. Mere human beings can hardly hope to control it." -- -Sandra Phillips, Senior Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

"Paul Shambroom's Face to Face with the Bomb richly deserves the much abused adjective 'unique.' With tenacity and chutzpah, Shambroom got okays from the Defense Department to visit nuclear-weapons sites and to photograph what he saw. No one else has done that; and in today's hyper-tense climate, it is unlikely to happen again. Shambroom neither praises nor condemns America's nuclear deterrent. His purpose was to demystify, to reveal the unseen. Openness, he reasoned, is the American way. The result is a one-of-a-kind artifact of the Cold War." -- Mike Moore, Senior Editor, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

"Shambroom's Nuclear Weapons series stands as an important document of America in the nuclear age. Dominated by their striking formal qualities, these photographs reflect an aesthetic sensibility deeply responsive to the advent and infusion of new technologies in our daily surroundings. His images are powerful reminders of this reality with which we continue to live." -- Elizabeth Armstrong, Chief Curator, Orange County Museum of Art

"More than any study I have come across, Shambroom gives us a visceral sense of the most powerful and cruel weapons ever devised. The relevance of his extraordinarily important work is heightened in the aftermath of Sptember 11." -- Robert Jay Lifton, author of Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima

"My favorite photographer in the [1997 Whitney Biennial] is Paul Shambroom, whose large color pictures of truly forbidden places, namely those nuclear weapons sites which he somehow obtains permission to photograph, are not only truly beautiful but also highly informative." -- Brooks Adams, Art in America

"Paul Shambroom's 'Nuclear Weapons' photographs images of soldiers climbing on and around nuclear warheads introduced the Minneapolis artist to a national audience at the 1997 Whitney Biennial. The series, which was impressive for Shambroomfls ingenuity in gaining access to these classified spaces as for its formal rigor, toed the line between reportage and art, engaging in a kind of watchdog politicism that characterizes much contemporary photography." -- Jordan Kantor, ArtForum

"Here in Paul Shambroom's remarkable photographs are the machines we have built at great expense to destroy millions of human lives... and the men and women whose professional duty it is to maintain them until we learn the deep lesson that the discovery of how to release nuclear energy revealed a natural limit to the scale of human conflict." -- from the Introduction by Richard Rhodes