The title recalls the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer at the first nuclear explosion, in New Mexico. Quoting the Bhagavad Gita, the scientist said: "If the light of a hundred suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one." The book tells the indescribable, presenting without sweetening them the raw records of those experiments, caught at the very moment of the explosion. Each photograph gives the name of the test, its yield in kilotons or megatons, and the date and place. The testimony of these images and their implications is tremendous and at the same time a deeply disturbing spectacle. The visual grandeur is matched by the chilling, detailed list of data in the plate notes, a chronology of the development of atomic weapons, the list of declared tests and a broad bibliography.