Islam and the Bomb: Religious Justification for and Against Nuclear Weapons, a report written by Rolf Mowatt-Larssen a former senior CIA officer and now a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. Mowatt-Larssen’s report examines the debate within Muslim societies on the use of weapons of mass destruction.
Following a style and a format I had set up in a previous Mowatt-Larssen report, I tried to form a comprehensive vision for a lot of disparate information. Every detail, from the layout of the chronological listings, to the consistent use of space for the various “voices”, was thoughtfully designed for maximum impact and readability.
Rolf was a big fan of my WMD cover and I wanted him to be just as enthusiastic about my design for this paper. Such a compelling title was bound to produce a strong reaction. Knowing Rolf’s previous title attracted quite a bit of media attention, I wanted to be sensitive in the imagery I created around it.
The first chapter of the book discusses the moral underpinning of the various states and sub-state actors as it relates to nuclear accountability. After doing some research using the Belfer Center’s Nuclear Terrorism Fact Sheet, I created a graphic illustrating the state of the current nuclear stockpile.
The information graphic in context.
The first half of the book is five chapters dealing with the arguments in the muslim world for and against nuclear weapons. The second half is an appendices with background information for those arguments. I designed it so each chapter could be easily identified at a glance.
Inside cover and a memoriam.