The Missiles on Our Land, is a story of risk, mixing new scientific research, in-depth interviews and striking data visualizations — a collaboration by groups from Princeton University, Columbia Journalism School, Scientific American and the Brown Institute. We are proud to announce that the project has been shortlisted for a 2024 Sigma Award! In all, 52 of the 591 Sigma submissions this year made it to this stage of the competition, with the winners being announced later in March.
The US government has plans to replace every nuclear weapon in its arsenal — decades of work costing $2 trillion. The Missiles on Our Land is a sobering look at the consequences of this project, laying out the risks to people and the natural surroundings. It is potentially a disaster at a global scale. To tell such a sweeping story, Sébastien Philippe from Princeton’s Science and Global Security Program collaborated with a team from Scientific American and from Columbia Journalism School. The Brown Institute’s Katie Watson contributed a powerful interactive map, Under the Nuclear Cloud, that presents, at a continental scale, the fallout from nuclear strikes on US missile silos.
Congratulations to Sébastien Philippe, Nina Berman, Duy Linh Tu, Jeffery DelViscio, Ella Weber, Tulika Bose and Katie Watson on an incredible project. (And fingers crossed for the finals!)