Perhaps what makes these illustrations work is that they trust their young audience with difficult questions: Are our brains simply computers? Are our bodies mere machines? What is work, without agency? What is pleasure, without feeling? These are not things I was thinking about in 1989.

Or, you know, it could be the fact that they’re utterly stunning, and look like something you’d find in an art gallery, not a rotting children’s book.

More at [AJourneyAroundMySkull via BoingBoing]

A few years after the United States unleashed the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union tested their first nuclear warhead ever. They appropriately called it “First Lightning”, the opening of a series of 456 atomic tests that brought hell to Earth 60 years ago. For all of us, that summons terrifying but beautiful images like this into our brains:

Sadly, to more than one million innocent people living near the Semipalatinsk Polygon — the Soviet nuclear testing site in the northeast of Kazakhstan — it means this:

For three generations, and more to come, those tests mean deformed babies. They mean premature aging and countless diseases caused by radiation poisoning. The bombs’ ghosts still live in the dead steppe, their invisible fangs ready to suck seven years off the life of every person living around that place. That’s the difference in life-expectancy with the rest of Kazakhstan.

Of course, it’s not the only horror inflicted by weapons in the Soviet Union — or in the rest of the world. I recently read all about them in a fascinating book by Ryszard Kapuściński, one of the best journalists and writers of our time. The book, called Imperium, talks about the Soviet Union through a series of adventures and trips that reach all the corners of the Red Empire. The mosaic is a frightening view of the deadliest, most insensitive killing machine that has ever existed, all through the eyes of the people who suffered it. Not even Hitler matched the horrors of Stalin and his cohorts.

But while Kapuściński’s raw prose have moved me to tears many times, these images by Ed Ou are a perfect summary of the horrors inflicted upon hundreds of millions that Kapuściński describes in his book.

However, as I watch through glassy eyes how Mayra Zhumageldina massages her daughter Zhannoor, or how 29-year-old Berik Syzdykov sings and plays piano despite being deformed and blind after being exposed to a nuclear blast while he was inside his mum’s womb, I try to smile a bit. I try to be a bit optimistic because, no matter how monstrous some men and women can be, the human spirit always seems to find a way to survive. [Adventures With Light and Getty Images via Big Picture]

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defence ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret.

The scary thing is that Perimeter still works today. At least according to Valery Yarynich, a former Soviet colonel now 72 years old. Yarynich should know, though: He worked 30 years at the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff helping to build it.

US Officials won’t even like to mention it, but with the Cold War over and Russia being more or less a friend, why risk having such a system in place? I really don’t like the idea of something going wrong in a rusty 25-year-old piece of Soviet-era technology.

Not when it can automatically launch a nuclear attack capable of taking out Humanity out of the map. [Wired]