Nuke routes

The Radioactive Waste Campaign, a branch of the Sierra Club active in the 1980s, published this map with the goal of sounding the alarm about the danger of nuclear weapons. This poster was issued as part of the campaign's book Deadly Defense: Military Radioactive Landfills. The goal of the map was to show that nuclear weapons were threatening Americans’ domestic safety even when they weren't being actively launched into the air. By visualizing the corridors and routes over which nuclear material was transported between different manufacturing and processing facilities, the map seeks to portray the presence of nuclear materials into a nationwide threat.

The extra spacing between the colored route lines borrows the visual technique of a flow map, but gives the impression that vast swathes of the country are in the path of nuclear weaponry components. For example, look closely at the route between the Oak Ridge plant, just outside of Nashville, and the Savannah River Plant: the single route is outlined by nine different lines and covers more than half of South Carolina. In reality, of course, the nuclear materials weren't cutting a path hundreds of miles wide on their trip through Tennessee and the Carolinas.