JoltBlog

Gregory Green is an artist who constructs nuclear bombs. Not sculptures, actual bombs. He has done seven to date, based on the design of the earliest atomic weapons including Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. "Two were looked at by nuclear physicists," says Green, "and they've said they would work. My experience is that it is certainly possible for someone with a little talent and time to do something that would work. Even if you didn't get a nuclear explosion, you'd certainly get a monstrously big 'dirty' bomb."

Green lives and works in New York City. Six weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Centre he was woken by a seismic tremor - New York was hit by a mild earthquake: "My first reaction was that someone had set off a home-made nuclear bomb, but then I realised there were no fires. Do I think it will happen? I see no reason why a non-state group should not put together a nuclear bomb. In the 1960s some students built an almost functional one. The only problem is accessing the plutonium."

Sceptics should be warned that Green told a newspaper several years ago he believed terrorists would eventually destroy the Twin Towers. His own intentions are more conceptual; he shows his bombs in galleries as part of a larger project to explore "the real potential for chaos that is out there - the more we ignore the disenfranchised, the more the possibility of horror exists". Of course, to make anything takes care and attention, and in a sense Green's art loves the bomb. But then, for more than a half a century, artists have been half in love with nuclear megadeath.

Even before Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, the atom bomb was celebrated as visual spectacle. The language of the US war department's press release on the first successful nuclear test explosion in the New Mexico desert, July 16 1945, is of revelation and awe at the sight.

Observers of the test, including Robert Oppenheimer and General Groves, lay down with their feet facing the blast and then rolled over to watch through dark glasses. "At the appointed time there was a blinding flash lighting up the whole area brighter than the brightest daylight. A mountain range three miles from the observation point stood out in high relief... a huge multi-coloured surging cloud boiled to an altitude of over 40,000 feet." The light was so powerful that a blind girl in a nearby New Mexico village reportedly asked, before the blast was felt: "What was that?"

This is the beginning of the curious art-history of the mushroom cloud. When Enola Gay's tail-gunner George Caron photographed the Hiroshima bomb, he too spoke of what he saw from his gun turret in ecstatic visual terms: "The mushroom cloud itself was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke - and you could see it had a red core in it and everything was burning inside."

The atom bomb is a staggering visual phenomenon. When Caron looked back from Enola Gay, he could not see the dead and dying, any more than we can in his black-and-white photograph. But where once the end of the world was represented by Satan swallowing up the damned armies of skeletons massacring the sinful, demons whipping them, herding them into burning pits after Hiroshima we have a new image of apocalypse: a blinding light followed by a vast mushroom cloud.

Salvador Dali thought he had seen it all. But this exceeded surrealism. "The atomic explosion of August 6 1945 shook me seismically," he says in The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali. "Thenceforth, the atom was my favourite food for thought. Many of the landscapes painted in this period express the great fear inspired in me by the announcement of that explosion." Dali may be the first artist to have exhibited a nuclear artwork. In December 1945 he displayed the painting Atomic and Uranian Melancholic Idyll, a response to Hiroshima featuring molten, decaying objects, a mournful floating face, and an uncomfortable juxtaposition of two American images - a baseball player and a bomber. The bomb, intuits Dali, burns the mind and scars the imagination.

Visual spectacle is underestimated as a weapon in the cold war. Between 1945 and 1963 - when overground nuclear tests were banned - the US and the Soviet Union released picture after picture of nuclear test explosions; every year, more mushroom cloud pictures were circulated round the world. The third world war had not yet happened, but it was seen, in photographs and films of explosions in deserts, in the south Pacific - images that still define our experience of a nuclear war that has not yet happened.

They are landscape photographs, with the mushroom cloud each time set off against various terrains and surroundings. Test-explosion Mike took place in the Pacific, making palm trees bow in the blast; the Baker explosion consumed Bikini Atoll. The first hydrogen bomb is seen from the sky, in clouds that it illuminates with eerie beauty in a disturbingly well-organised and pleasing colour photograph - the last sunset.

In 1950 Jackson Pollock told an interviewer that "the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture". Pollock felt obliged to compete with the bomb, to create art that had an equally mind-blowing effect. In his paintings massive potential energy is released in an instant, a nuclear explosion; he characterised his art as "energy and motion made visible". Other abstract expressionist painters - Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning - spoke out against Hiroshima. Their paintings can easily be read, in their apocalyptic intensity, as evocations of the terror of the nuclear age. So - most of all - can Mark Rothko's floating clouds of colour, vertical layerings of sickly hues that make you think of a photograph of a nuclear explosion. Rothko's paintings are beautiful, but lure the eye into ultimate darkness, a void of eternal night.

It was the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 that made artists focus on nuclear weapons in a more immediate way. This was the moment of pop art, and the atom bomb became one of the classic pop images, as instantly iconic as Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe. The kitsch immediacy of images of the bomb was what the pop artists tried to evoke - the fact that you opened your morning paper and saw a mushroom cloud next to an advert for shoes or gossip about Elizabeth Taylor. In James Rosenquist's 1965 anti-war painting The F-111, a mushroom cloud is superimposed upon a colourful umbrella next to a little girl having her hair blow-dried. Robert Rauschenberg made a peace poster inviting the viewer to include their own choice of newspaper cutting, British pop artists such as Richard Hamilton were active in CND, and London-based artist and activist Gustav Metzger invented a new movement for the nuclear age, "auto-destructive art", which he claimed mimicked the destructiveness of an age committed to potential mass destruction.

But in the end the most powerful art of the nuclear age was made by artists who were not quite so clear where they stood. Andy Warhol's 1965 painting Atomic Bomb is not a protest so much as a description - it is the constant repetition of the same terrible sight that Warhol comments on. Atomic Bomb has the blasted pathology of a mind bombarded by images of apocalypse, pictures so widely diffused they have become routine. He has silkscreened a photograph of a mushroom cloud in black, surrounded by a deep dull red. Red and black are the only colours left. The only sight is the cloud - repeated, multiplied, as if hundreds of missiles are striking. At the bottom of the painting everything turns black. It is a vision of the moment when all the bombs fall, a recognition of what is promised in every photograph of a mushroom cloud. And who will watch the final display of mushroom clouds? Who will be left to see it? The nuclear apocalypse is banal, repetitive, mass-produced. We already know its details. We have already seen it.

A similarly chilling spectacle of massed explosions is orchestrated at the end of Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, set to Vera Lynn singing We'll Meet Again. Kubrick's montage of mushroom clouds assembles many of the test explosions photographed and filmed in the 1950s and early 1960s. Like Warhol, he implies that we already have seen the end, that that we walk around with film of the world's destruction running in our heads.

Strangely, the end of the cold war brought a certain nostalgia for its technologies, its material remains, the silos and warheads that for so long dominated our imaginations. Jane and Louise Wilson's 1999 film installation Gamma preserves images of the abandoned silos and control centre at Greenham Common Airbase. Stranger still is the career of American artist James L Acord, who spent much of the 1980s and 1990s trying to secure nuclear material with which to make sculptures. At one point he was attached to an American nuclear facility, and even obtained a licence to transport nuclear materials across international borders. Acord, however, found it harder than expected to make nuclear art commercially viable or even legal, and his activities seem to be in abeyance.

"I don't take any clear moral stance," says Gregory Green of his homemade nuclear weapons. "If you look at terrorism in a cold way, it is a media spectacle that is strong enough to give the terrorist a platform. My work has been a kind of conceptual terrorism giving me a platform." Green is in a tradition of art that has been deeply impressed by the power of the bomb, which recognised that the world was remade by the nuclear bomb. The world the bomb created is one where a certain image of catastrophe is universally shared, diffused, reproduced - a constant of our visual world, where, in 1995, the US Post Office planned to issue a commemorative stamp with an image of a mushroom cloud, where an image of mass death is recycled without cease.

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