And really soon, too… next week. No point in waiting, I suppose.

As previously mentioned, I’m putting together a book titled something like “A Guide to American Nuclear Explosive Devices.” It will include accurate diagrams of American nuclear bombs, RVs and warheads, along with pertinent information for each design. I’ve made a pretty good dent in the basic layout drawings, but there is more research to be done.

In order to get this done, there are a few places I need to visit. One of them is the National Museum of Nuclear Science & Industry in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s about an 11 hour drive from here, so  it’d be the better part of a work week to get down there, photograph *everything* (with scale references) and then get back. With gas, motels, cat boarding and the like, it’d be a fair chunk of change, but it also seems a pretty invaluable resource.

Sort of along the way is the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos. A smaller museum, but it looks pretty good as far as nukes. I am also interested in any suggestions for things to see – nuclear, military, aerospace, geological – between Thatcher, Utah, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

So,  in order to pull this off, I’m looking for funding. In the grand tradition of Kickstarter and the like, I’m using three funding levels:

$10 “Warm Glow”: You get a thank you email and a warm sense of accomplishment.

$50 “Going Ballistic”: I send you a DVD (or 2, or 3, or everything transferred via Dropbox or some such) with every single nuke-relevant photo I take on the trip.

$100 “BLAMMO”: You get the DVD & a prototype edition version of the book, which won’t be otherwise available (I’m looking at 11X17 with old-school pressboard covers, like the BoMi, Dyna Soar & BWB booklets I recently made briefly available). The final book, whether self-published by me or – who knows – by an actual publisher, will almost certainly be formatted much smaller.

So if you want a whole bunch of photos of nuclear weapons and a book of large-format detailed and accurate drawings of American nuclear weapons, or if you just want to help out… now’s your chance. This opportunity will be open for the next week or so.

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Here is a somewhat older image, showing a number of the nuclear weapons I’ve drawn up (more since then):

And here are some images showing roughly what you’ll see in the 11X17 prototype of the book: multiple views of each device in large scale, with a crude mockup of what the data page will look like for each device. It will have unique charts showing the physical effects – overpressure, thermal radiation, cratering, etc. – for each device.