The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico | New Edition

By Joseph Masco

An important investigation of the sociocultural fallout of America's work on the atomic bomb

In The Nuclear Borderlands, Joseph Masco offers an in-depth look at the long-term consequences of the Manhattan Project. Masco examines how diverse groups in and around Los Alamos, New Mexico understood and responded to the U.S. nuclear weapons project in the post–Cold War period. He shows that the American focus on potential nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War obscured the broader effects of the nuclear complex on society, and that the atomic bomb produced a new cognitive orientation toward daily life, reconfiguring concepts of time, nature, race, and citizenship. This updated edition includes a brand-new preface by the author discussing current developments in nuclear politics and the scientific impact of the nuclear age on the present epoch of a human-altered climate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Mar 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691194288

Joseph Masco

Joseph Masco is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Book preview

The Nuclear Borderlands

The Nuclear Borderlands

The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico

New Edition

With a new preface by the author

Joseph Masco

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press

Preface to the new paperback edition copyright © 2020 by Princeton University Press

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First published by Princeton University Press in 2006

New paperback edition, with a new preface by the author, 2020

Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-20217-4

Ebook ISBN 978-0-691-19428-8

LCCN 2019952275

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE 2020 EDITION

What is the status of the nuclear future, as the atomic bomb reaches its seventieth-fifth year? More directly, how should one locate or delineate the nuclear borderlands after nearly a half century of Cold War and two decades of a U.S. war on terror, at a moment when international order is radically uncertain if not breaking down and climate disruption is violently changing environmental conditions literally everywhere? By nuclear borderlands I mean the competing ideas of insecurity, nature, and futurity that define any nuclear referent, and the contest over ways of living, fearing, and hoping that inform the strange phenomenon of national security itself. The atomic bomb is infrastructural to modern life—defining military state power, international relations, as well as scientific and industrial institutions. But its ultimate meaning, along with its affective circuits, and its place in emerging ideas about a planetary future remain the contested domain of the American social contract. Nuclear nationalism, as I hope to show, functions as a counterrevolutionary formation fundamentally at odds with both democratic life and the emerging demands for a collective future on planet Earth.

In the seventy-five years since the first nuclear explosion inaugurated the military nuclear age in New Mexico, the atomic bomb has anchored a notion of existential danger that has colonized U.S. statecraft and everyday life across the decades. The bomb exists as both a technological infrastructure (a set of institutions and experts and military-industrial relations) and as a charged signifier (a set of imaginations and national security affects built up over decades of citizen-state relations). The atomic bomb is also an industrial form (a global set of material relations linking mining and processing to design, testing, and deployment, to competing forms of contamination and nuclear waste storage). The atomic bomb is now deeply embedded into the earth system itself, leaving radioactive traces of twentieth-century nuclear nationalism in literally every ecosystem and living body on earth. The bomb is thus a form that operates in multiple registers and on many different temporal scales, connecting the shocking immediacy of nuclear danger in the form of ballistic missile attack (a danger measured in minutes) to that of radioactive contamination and waste (measured in decades, centuries, and millennia). In this way, the bomb both connects and disconnects, shattering notions of time-space and safety as well as alternative futures via an explicitly explosive technology.

The atomic bomb, as I argue in The Nuclear Borderlands, is literally world-making and world-breaking. But it is so in competing registers, across very different kinds of social orders, connecting people with radically different ideas about security, ecology, social relations, and politics via transformative military technoscience. This is also to say that the material, political, and affective force of nuclear technoscience is always in motion, continuing to shift understandings about danger and security, transforming bodies and ecologies, and colonizing deep futures in ways that were impossible to imagine in the year 1945, or fully account for in the year 2020. The multigenerational project of suffusing everyday life with nuclear threat is now a normalized condition, an artificial reality. The psychic familiarity of nuclear danger for many after seventy-five years is thus a danger in and of itself, producing profound modes of normalization, enabling linked forms of amnesia, belligerence, and unseriousness in American public life. The nuclear danger as constituted across the twentieth century in the United States, for example, was a political form designed for social control as well as deterrence—a way of keeping the world right on the edge of cataclysmic nuclear war as a mode of everyday American defense. As the first and primary form of existential danger in American life, nuclear weapons remain embedded today in a set of ideas about risk and threat that do not fit other existential dangers, such as climate disruption, which work on vastly different temporal and spatial scales, and cannot be deterred via military technoscience. Thus, the bomb both creates and colonizes ideas about security and danger, and does so in ways that distort both public attitudes and official policy responses to non-nuclear modes of collective endangerment, even as those modes of violence intensify year by year in the form of storms, fires, floods, droughts, illnesses, and accelerating species loss.¹

Put more directly, with the U.S. atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, American visions of the future were fundamentally altered, which is a crucial but underexplored aspect of the nuclear revolution. An expectation of constant technological advancement (enabling visions of geopolitical hegemony, cheap energy, improved health, and expanding consumer power through endless Manhattan Projects across technical fields) was installed alongside a terrifying vision of nuclear end-times, an imminent danger that could destroy life within just a few minutes of conflict. For generations, the American future oscillated between these Cold War extremes, as the utopian and apocalyptic promises of nuclear science captured and coordinated American imaginations and ambitions and fears, rationalizing on a vast scale covert actions, dispossessions, and toxic practices. Indeed, the atomic bomb quickly became an organizing principle of American society, a way of linking statecraft to technoscience to imaginations and emotions in a powerful new configuration.

The promissory note of American power, the perverse logics of both the American Dream and American exceptionalism, after World War II relied on managing this unprecedented split future, framing the possibility of continual progress and prosperity (with all its raced, classed, and gendered complexity) against an ever-shortening time horizon to nuclear destruction. The public nuclear programs of the American Cold War state—epitomized by Atoms for Peace and the concurrent Federal Civil Defense Administration’s nuclear war exercises—created affectively charged but opposed futurities that could not be reconciled through policy or politics, only provisionally balanced against one another. A future without nuclear war was portrayed as endless technological and social progress, one in which science and technology would systematically solve the problems of health, welfare, and the environment. Or, as Americans learned though the atomic civil defense programs that theatrically enacted the destruction of the nation-state in regular drills, the Cold War project could fail in an all-consuming flash, leaving nothing behind in its wake.

Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first atomic explosion in 1970, Glenn Seaborg offered an iconic positive vision of nuclear technoscience in his contribution Our Nuclear Future—1995. As a key architect of the nuclear age, Seaborg was not only a Manhattan Project chemist and discoverer of plutonium; he also directed the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1960s and was a lifelong adviser to presidents (from Truman to Clinton) on nuclear matters.² Writing in 1970, he predicted a nearly perfect future for nuclear revolution by the end of the twentieth century. He begins his essay by imagining the inauguration of a new fusion reactor in 1995 and imagines looking back in bemusement at an earlier generation’s fear of the atom, describing life at the end of the first nuclear century this way:

We’ve come from fear to mistrust to understanding to confidence in our affairs with the atom. Managed wisely, with knowledge and skill gained over a period of decades, the atom’s energy used in infinite variety is the lifeblood of our society. It lights, heats, and cools our cities and homes. It powers our industry. It helps to control our waste and re-cycle our resources. On its tireless energy, space vehicles move to and from the planets with men and scientific packages, while satellites hover over the earth retrieving and relaying valuable information about the condition of this planet and man, and automated nuclear ships silently ply the seas carrying huge cargoes of essential goods between the continents and nations that are no longer armed camps. The atom is also quietly at work in our hospitals, on our farms, in our schools. (Seaborg 1970: 7)

For Seaborg, the promise of the atom is literally a new society, one that is self-sustaining, peaceful, ever more efficient, and in control of nature. In his science fiction, the widespread fears of nuclear accidents and war that animated the late twentieth century have simply not occurred: the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency have successfully governed the atom on a planetary scale, and constant advancements in nuclear reactors have led to a stable global population living a good life in harmony with nature, without plundering or defiling it. Indeed, Seaborg even sees in the future aesthetically beautiful nuclear reactors, designed to blend into the natural landscape, low in profile, with all distribution lines underground constituting park-like settings as close to an extension of nature as any human enterprise (1970: 10). There is no longer any nuclear weapon development to fear, as the bomb has been transformed into a civil engineering tool, used only to move mountains and create new harbors. People are in control of food production, outer space research, and increasingly able to alter the terms of matter itself, all because of the continuing transformational power of nuclear science.

This sublime image of the perfect nuclear revolution was a far cry from that of nuclear war strategists and antinuclear activists writing in the same era. Perhaps best epitomized in the work of Herman Kahn, defense intellectuals pondered not only the terms of an arms race but also created detailed descriptions of life during and after nuclear attack. In Kahn’s 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War, the nuclear future did not involve the successful conquest of nature but rather a negotiation of the gruesome terms by which the American project might end. He sought to differentiate nuclear war in terms of scales and casualties and processes, offering a variety of portraits of nuclear conflict involving from 2 million to 160 million Americans dead and vastly more around the world. Kahn asked seriously if the survivors would envy the dead (2007 [1960]: 20) after nuclear war and set about trying to imagine what governance could possibly look like in various postnuclear environments. His core question mirrored the formal terms of U.S. nuclear war fighting plans, which predicted hundreds of millions of global deaths in the first hours of nuclear warfare (Sagan 1987) and created whole new fields of study devoted to predicting the ecological, climatic, and multigenerational genetic effects of creating a radioactive planetary environment. The U.S. status as global nuclear superpower was thus linked to new visions of the imminent destruction of the nation-state and civilizational order, a paradoxical achievement that generated psychosocial contradictions of the first degree in American society.

For Seaborg, the future was a problem of design and research and of maintaining public confidence in science; for Kahn, the nuclear future was a problem of calculation and aggression and determining how much nuclear injury the American population would be willing to endure to defeat communism. For one, the future was a pure utopian vision of human control over nature; for the other, the future held the promise of a destroyed natural environment, one that only offered varying intensities of injury and mass death. This was the utopian-apocalyptic circuit of Cold War nuclear politics in full, coordinating desires for an improved world on specifically American terms with fears of the imminent end to national existence and a destroyed global environment. This duality structured American domestic and international politics for generations and became a context for social engineering across political domains, provoking wide ranging protest and political activism.³

The temporal coordinates of always-on-alert nuclear weapons systems, capable of completing a global nuclear war in a few hours of conflict, was formally offset by the project of building domestic security via new knowledge infrastructures, welfare-state programs, and environmental policy. Thus, the future was not only divided along a utopian/dystopian circuit; its temporal form was highly constrained by nuclear logics and temporalities. Indeed, the utopian/dystopian potential was always an alibi, a mechanism for the deferral of a full federal commitment to social justice or actual democracy while maintaining the nuclear emergency. The emerging future for U.S. citizens could nonetheless be judged not only in terms of the minute-to-minute determent of nuclear war but also in terms of degrees of social progress across the domains of health, wealth, racial and gender equality, and the environment. The Cold War arms race was thus a paradoxical means of preventing nuclear war by constantly improving the destructive capacities of nuclear systems, creating a geopolitics founded in nuclear fears but hyperfocused on specific materials, technologies, experts, and capacities. As a conceptual framework for policy (spanning the areas of security, science, and welfare) this circuit created a maximal affective charge to American politics, one that made regular claims on the life or death of citizens, international order, and ultimately, the biosphere.

But this focus on a utopian/apocalyptic circuit rides on top of, and often works to erase, the material effects of the bomb itself: in addition to being the only state that has engaged in nuclear warfare via the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the United States is the most nuclear bombed country on earth—with 1,054 nuclear detonations conducted within its territorial borders in the name of national security. The first 219 of these tests were atmospheric nuclear events that distributed radionuclides on a planetary scale, while linking indigenous populations across the U.S. Southwest, Alaska, and the Marshall Islands in a new form of radioactive colonization. Nuclear nationalism has created ongoing health problems for a vast range of communities, nuclear workers, and military personal, processes which continue to infuse and expand the foundational violences of indigenous dispossession and anti-blackness in the United States. Thus, one tension that remains in U.S. nuclear nationalism is between the formal futurities debated in nuclear policy and the material effects of nuclear production itself, which has contributed to a planetary-scale set of nuclear signatures that operate on a wide range of half-lives—from hours to hundreds of thousands of years. These signatures of nuclear nationalism concentrate in some bodies more than others but are also a collective earthly condition—underscoring the strange new politics of an exposed world that is also unequal in the degrees of exposure. U.S. nuclear nationalism has met these concerns by forwarding a logic of nuclear defense, by offering an existential protection from rival states and violent nonstate entities in an uncertain and violent world. But this multigenerational commitment to nuclear terror has produced a range of health and environmental problems that have been systematically minimized to protect nuclear nationalism itself. This is why the nuclear referent is always both material and psychosocial, a technoscientific problem that is also a problem of the social contract, a machinic form that is also a mode of damaged life.

It is important to remember that the end of the Cold War arms race was largely coterminous with the end of the welfare state project in the United States. The demise of the Soviet Union concluded that competitive state- and nation-building project in the United States and encouraged the embrace of a neoliberal economics that rejected state-based social engineering in favor of the marketplace. Thus, the utopian/apocalyptic registers of American politics and the specific futurities they implied were also profoundly altered in the 1990s. The war on terror recommitted the United States to existential danger in 2001 as an organizing principle of domestic and international politics, but it did not re-energize the utopian program of social engineering through state programs—quite the opposite. The U.S. world of counterterror considers the future an endless source of threat infused with the potential for new existential dangers to emerge (Masco 2014). Existing violences that are not yet existential, including the amplifying force of climate disruption, are not part of the field of counterterror concerns. This makes national security in 2020 a highly perverse project, one that carefully orchestrates which potential dangers might matter over and against the mounting everyday violences that play out materially across bodies and environments inside the United States and globally.

So, in the seventy-fifth year of the military nuclear age, what remains of the once powerful nuclear future? Neither Seaborg’s utopia, nor Kahn’s nuclear dystopia have fully materialized. While a nuclear war has thus far been avoided in the twenty-first century, the global infrastructures for nuclear war remain firmly in place and on constant alert. And while some nuclear arsenals have been reduced in numbers of weapons from their all-time highs in the Cold War, the United States and Russia both still maintain the capacity of eliminating life as we know it on planet Earth. Similarly, while there has not been a new U.S. nuclear reactor started in decades, the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi in 2011 demonstrated the costs of technological failure in the nuclear age. Moreover, the existential fear once formally attached to nuclear weapons has become newly politicized under the logics of counterterror, folded into the much broader category of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—a term that now carries so many different technologies and scales of danger as to become a nonspecific evocation of maximal threat (Masco 2014: 37). American political culture is currently filled with images of collective crises across the spectrum of terrorism, disease, food, energy, and the environment but with little promise from federal agencies to reduce those dangers. Indeed, the negative future and increasing modes of social abandonment have become the core of American politics despite the still unprecedented economic, military, and scientific power of the United States.

The Barack Obama administration sought to reverse these trends, working to expand nonproliferation governance via a new nuclear disarmament agreement with Iran. In 2010, the United States and Russia also entered into a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the first in many years, which reduced the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons. In exchange for Republican support for this treaty, the Obama administration agreed to a modernization program of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, what has become at least a trillion dollar commitment to rebuild warheads, bombers, missiles, and submarines in hope of reducing the overall number of nuclear weapons in the world.⁴ These planned nuclear weapons will be less complex mechanically and more robust than the Cold War designs in the current arsenal (which have been painstakingly maintained part by part for close to three decades and improved in terms of their accuracy and lethality). They will also employ a new generation of nuclear weapons scientists through mid-century. These new warhead designs will not have to be detonated, as did all prior systems, before being deployed into U.S. military arsenals, thanks to the past twenty-five years of nuclear weapons research involving component testing, supercomputing, and simulations (see chapter 2). The promise of the virtual weapons laboratory now points to a permanent nuclear production capacity in the United States, one that can maintain an underground nuclear test moratorium, while also introducing new and improved nuclear weapons in perpetuity. In the best light, this makes U.S. policy formally a paradoxical program of calling for global nuclear disarmament while rebuilding the already state-of-the-art U.S. nuclear production complex. It also formally recommits to nuclear fear as the coordinating logic of American power and geopolitics through the twenty-first century.

The Donald J. Trump administration has embraced nuclear power even more aggressively, literally calling for a new arms race and working to eliminate the last set of treaties restricting U.S. nuclear production. This includes calling for the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty to lapse in 2021 as well as rejecting the nuclear agreement with Iran and pulling the United States out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The Trump agenda also includes expanding on the Obama administration’s modernization program by calling for the development of more usable nuclear weapons—involving lower yield warheads to be placed on both cruise missiles and submarine launched missiles (DOE 2018). These technologies are not aimed at achieving deterrence through the threat of mass destruction but rather are designed for field use—for nuclear war fighting. Not coincidentally, Russian and U.S. fighter jets have returned to the Cold War pattern of aggressive maneuvers and overflights. Russia and North Korea have also publicized planned new nuclear weapons systems via digital animations of how those weapons would be used to destroy the United States. A major effort to restore and extend nuclear-state sovereignty is under way in the bomb’s eighth decade, one that offers the potential of a renewed arms race, but one with more nuclear state players, new technological capacities, and without the long-standing constraints of an international arms treaty system.

While 20th century nuclear powers recommit to nuclear nationalism, non-nuclear states have also mobilized to defend nonproliferation efforts and international law. In 2017, 122 non-nuclear nations adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at the United Nations, which bans the development, testing, possession, or threat to use nuclear weapons. The culmination of decades of international activism, when in force it will render existing nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, United Kingdom, France, Pakistan, India, North Korea, and Israel) in violation of international law. The treaty also fundamentally rejects a global hierarchy of states founded on the possession of weapons of mass destruction.

It is hard not to read the resurgent U.S. nuclear nationalism in relation to the Trump administration’s near total rejection of environmental science, including a refusal to participate in international efforts to mitigate global warming (much like the George W. Bush administration before it). In 2020, the United States is both the premier nuclear power in the world and the largest historical carbon emitter, having built much of its core wealth and geopolitical strategy through petrochemical extraction. Nuclear weapons and petrochemical capitalism have materially remade the earth system, distributing industrial effects that have both shifted the global climate and dosed all life with radionuclides, synthetic chemicals, and plastics. This entry of the Industrial Age human into the earth system is a subject of multidisciplinary consideration in the twenty-first century, led most powerfully by geologists searching for the clearest artificial signal in the earth system that could be used to designate a new geological epoch. In this seventy-fifth anniversary year of the bomb, geologists have concluded that the plutonium from atmospheric nuclear detonations is so pervasive and eternal that it could be the basis for the designation of a new geological periodization—the Anthropocene.⁵ This makes the nuclear age not only a distinctive period in technoscience, militarism, and geopolitics but also a part of the geological composition of the earth itself. It also means there is no outside to the ongoing force of twentieth-century nuclear nationalism: the atomic bomb is a material infrastructure that radiates across politics, economies, environments, and time, ignoring territorial limits and crossing all species boundaries.

At seventy-five, the atomic bomb is thus both ever present and still emerging, informing a new concept of the earth system while also fomenting both resurgent nuclear nationalisms and antinuclear opposition movements based in international law. As Los Alamos scientists work to build the first entirely new nuclear weapons since the 1980s using their latest Trinity supercomputer (named to recognize the seventy-fifth anniversary of the laboratory’s first achievement in the deserts of New Mexico), the Russian state has claimed possession of a new class of nuclear weapons, a hypersonic missile capable of evasive maneuvers and such high speed that it would overwhelm any missile defense system. If achieved, the hypersonic weapon would also reduce the time frame on possible nuclear war from minutes to mere seconds, yet another escalation of the ongoing nuclear danger. This new antagonism between Cold War rivals is a kind of collaboration, an effort to reassert the power of the nation-state form in a highly globalized era experiencing the destabilizing effects of both global capital and climate change. The U.S. military has lately designated climate change a threat multiplier, which means that a destabilizing environment increases the instability of existing global order, amplifying disease, migration, scarcity, and conflict across all domains (DOD 2014). The insurgent nuclear nationalisms of the United States and Russia combined with the formal U.S. rejection of international responses to climate change and nonproliferation regimes offers, therefore, a startling view of the future. It ensures that the twenty-first century will be an increasingly violent period in terms of both militarism and the environment, begging the question again about the loss of positive futurities and the possibilities of imagining global peace after generations of nuclear danger and decades of counterterror.

Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientists are not focusing today on how to end the Manhattan Project peacefully but rather on building the next-generation U.S. nuclear complex, meaning that the nuclear revolution that started in New Mexico in 1945 continues apace and has a claim on an ever-deeper future. Thus, the nuclear borderlands is only expanding in its seventy-fifth year, redefined by the threat amplifications of a state political order that denies climate change while embracing both counterterror and nuclear weapons. With this in mind, consider the remarkable conceptual shifts in the American social contract from the Cold War to today: it is difficult to remember that the era of the most intense Cold War nuclear fear was also the era that built domestic infrastructures, created the terms of international regulations over dangerous technologies, invested in higher education as well as science and engineering, and created the first round of serious environmental laws. Today, however, Americans are presented with official portraits of existential crisis with some regularity (involving WMDs, climate change, pandemics, cyberattacks, and nuclear conflict) but do not have a social contract that enables deep investments in a positive collective future. This represents a significant retraction of federal involvement in everyday life and raises urgent questions about the collective future.

In key respects, the promise of security has been replaced with intensifying precarity in the twenty-first century. This is a cultural shift in the very terms of statecraft, one that distorts public life and limits the scope of policy, creating impasses that are more ideological constructs than actual material restrictions. This is easiest to see in the lack of a U.S. security state response to climate change, an ongoing transformation of the total environment that puts every organism, built structure, and ecosystem at risk. Even though the same supercomputers that maintain U.S. nuclear weapons in Los Alamos are also involved in modeling global warming (see Masco 2014), these existential dangers are not equal subjects of emergency concern for the U.S. security state, which picks and choses which dangers matter and which are simply to be endured.

At the center of this strange impasse is an American commitment to the bomb, an assumption that possession of a state-of-the-art weapon of mass destruction can suture together a violent world instead of generating an ever more violent world. This is the core conceit of U.S. nuclear nationalism, a construct that has changed the nature of American politics across the spheres of presidential power, congressional authority, and militarism; has redefined the social contract to generate mounting insecurities, modes of dispossession, and sacrifice; and that at its center remains committed to an idea of permanent conflict. One of the chief legacies of eight decades of nuclear nationalism has been the inability of many people to think outside this logic, to imagine a world not founded on totalizing threat, to see past radioactive nation-building in favor of a different kind of planetary order. In 2020, the bomb may become an illegal technology as well as the basis for a new geological epoch; however, it also remains at the center of U.S. strategy, and its continued development is increasingly unrestrained by nuclear treaties, non-proliferation efforts, or even official lip service to the ideal of a nuclear-free world. This means that experiences of the nuclear uncanny will proliferate in both forms and intensities in the coming decades, continuing to structure the conditions of possibility not only for politics but for life itself.

REFERENCES

Brown, Kate

2019    Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. New York: W. W. Norton.

Cram, Shannon

2015    Becoming Jane: The Making and Unmaking of Hanford’s Nuclear Body. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(5): 796–812.

Hamblin, Jacob Darwin

2013    Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kahn, Herman

2007    [1960] On Thermonuclear War. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Masco, Joseph

2015    Nuclear Past, Nuclear Futures; or, Disarming through Rebuilding. Critical Studies on Security 3(3): 308–12.

2014    The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Sagan, Scott D.

1987    SIOP-62: The Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy. International Security 12(1): 22–51.

Seaborg, Glenn T.

1970    Our Nuclear Future—1995. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 26(6): 7–14.

United Nations

2017    Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. New York: United Nations.

U.S. Department of Defense

2014    Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense.

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2018    Fiscal Year 2019: Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan—Biennial Plan Summary. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Waters, Colin N., et al.

2016    The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene. Science 351(6269): 137–47.

Wolfsthal, Jon B., Jeffrey Lewis, and Marc Quint

2014    The Trillion Dollar Nuclear Triad. Monterey, CA: James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Zaretsky, Natasha

2018    Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s. New York: Columbia University Press.

NOTES

1. For recent work on the global health and environmental effects of nuclear production, see Brown (2019), Cram (2015), and Hamblin (2013).

2. See Masco (2015) for earlier analysis of Seaborg’s portrait of the nuclear future.

3. For example, see Zaretsky (2018) for the ways that nuclear fear activated a range of activist movements spanning race, gender, and the environment in the United States during the Cold War period.

4. See Wolfsthal, Lewis, and Quint (2014) for a detailed assessment. Because of the expanding nature of the modernization program during the Obama and Trump administrations, estimates are approaching $2 trillion by midcentury for a new nuclear triad and warheads.

5. For an evaluation of atmospheric plutonium fallout as the basis for the Anthropocene designation, see Waters et al. (2016).

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I arrived in New Mexico to study post–Cold War security culture in November 1993, landing the very week the Albuquerque Tribune began publishing its Pulitzer Prize–winning series on covert U.S. human plutonium experiments during the Cold War. Breaking nearly fifty years of local silence about the legacies of the Manhattan Project, the articles helped foment an unprecedented regional and national conversation about the material legacies of America’s nuclear project. Indeed, as scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory sought to redefine the institution in a post–Cold War world, residents of northern New Mexico began actively debating the terms of life within the U.S. nuclear economy. Over the next decade, I conducted three years of fieldwork in northern New Mexico, finishing this book during the Bush administration’s war on terror in a dramatically changed U.S. national security climate. If this research began with a proliferation of nuclear discourse in New Mexico about the regional effects of the Cold War and the future mission of Los Alamos National Laboratory, it ended with the reestablishment of a U.S. nuclear security state founded in secrecy and international threat. Thus, this book documents both the development and curtailing of the first nuclear public sphere in New Mexico. It analyzes a unique moment in the history of the nuclear age and the region, a time of political uncertainty, of historical reassessment, and dramatic mobilization by diverse community interests. The post–Cold War period (1991–2001), which began with the break up of the Soviet Union and a moritorium on U.S. nuclear testing, ended with the formal regeneration of the nuclear security state as a counterterrorist formation after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

I am indebted to individuals throughout northern New Mexico who were willing to share their experiences and thoughts about the long-term legacies of the Manhattan Project with me. These conversations were necessarily conducted on the basis of anonymity, and identities have consequently been protected throughout this text. Nevertheless, I would like formally to thank here all those individuals who took time from busy lives to meet with me and discuss often difficult and politically charged issues. I hope this book serves to document, at the very least, the powerful, cross-cultural investments in northern New Mexico and the complexity of regional politics around Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Through the many years of work on this book, I have become indebted to individuals and institutions across the United States. The project would never have started without the intellectual support and personal commitment of Michael Meeker. I am deeply grateful to him as well as to Ramon Gutierrez for creating a space for me to conduct the first stages of this research at the University of California, San Diego. John Borneman sparked my interest in (post–)Cold War national culture early in graduate school, and has been a generous critic of this work. Susan Harding invited me to participate in the History of the Future seminar at the Humanities Research Institute at UC, Irvine, where I wrote the first piece of this book. I am forever grateful to her, as well as to F. G. Bailey, James Holston, George Lipsitz, Liisa Malkki, Anna Tsing, Kathleen Stewart, Vince Raphael, Dan Rosenberg, Andrew Wilford, Stefan Senders, Adriana Petryna, Kim Fortun, and Hugh Gusterson for conversations, criticism, and intellectual engagement. At the University of Chicago, I have been extremely fortunate to be part of a vibrant intellectual community. I would like to thank all my colleagues in the Department of Anthropology, and owe special thanks to Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Susan Gal, Adrian Johns, John Kelly, Michael Silverstein, Beth Povinelli, and Danilyn Rutherford for critical commentary on various drafts and parts of this book.

In New Mexico, my sincere thanks to the following individuals for their help in accessing archival and institutional resources: Juan Estevan Arellano at the Oñate Cultural Center, Hilario Romero at the New Mexico Educational Opportunity Center, Theresa Strottman at the Los Alamos Historical Society Archives, Roger Meade at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives, John Rhoades at the Bradbury Science Museum, Christina Armijo at the University of California Office in Los Alamos, Susan Hirshberg and Jay Couglin of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, Mary Risely and most especially Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group. Many thanks also to Tom Ribe, Ken Silver, and Steven Shankland for sharing their professional insights and good humor during my fieldwork.

This project was supported by a grant for research and writing from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as well as by a Richard Carley Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I would also like to thank the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego and the University of California, Humanities Research Institute for Graduate Fellowships.

Shorter versions of the following chapters have appeared previously: chapter 6, Lie Detectors, appeared in Public Culture 14(3) (2002); chapter 2, Nuclear Technoaesthetics, appeared in American Ethnologist 31(3) (2004); and chapter 7, Mutant Ecologies, appeared in Cultural Anthropology 19(4) (2004).

Over the many years of work on this project, my mother, Mary Anne Parmeter, has provided essential support and encouragement. I would also like to thank my brother, Thomas Masco, and sister, Maire Masco. Mena and David Boulanger have been a constant source of encouragement, as have Jay and Sandy Smith, and my lifelong friend, Ben Guterson, who first helped me explore New Mexico.

Finally, I am indebted to Shawn Smith, whose intellectual commitment, generosity, and critical insight have never failed to astonish. She has improved this book in simply incalculable ways.

The Nuclear Borderlands

1 The Enlightened Earth

The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.

—Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment

The nuclear age began in earnest in New Mexico.¹ Los Alamos scientists created much more than simply a new technology with the invention of a military atomic device in 1945; they engendered new forms of consciousness, new means of being in the world distinct from those that came before. For over a half century now, the psychosocial spaces of American modernity have been shaped by the most prominent legacies of Los Alamos: a utopian belief in the possibility of an unending technological progress, and an everyday life structured around the technological infrastructures of human extinction. The Manhattan Project not only marks the beginning of American big science and a new kind of international order; the invention of the atomic bomb transformed everyday life, catching individuals within a new articulation of the global and the local, and producing social imaginaries drawn taut by the contradictory impulses of the technologically celebratory and the nationally insurgent, as well as the communally marginalized and the individually abject.

Looking back across the temporal surface of the Cold War, the purple fireball and glassified green earth created in the deserts of New Mexico at exactly 5:29:45 a.m. on July 16, 1945, can only be narrated as a moment of historical rupture and transformation (see Figure 1.1).² For the detonation of the first atomic bomb marked the end of one kind of time, and the apotheosis of another, an uncanny modernity that continually exceeds the language of national security, mutual assured destruction, the Cold War, or even terror. For this reason alone, we might profitably return to the northern Rio Grande to assess the legacy and implications of one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic, yet lasting, achievements. For with the flash of the explosion known as Trinity, certain contradictions in modern life—involving the linkages between secrecy, security, technoscience, and national identity—become increasingly extreme in the United States, and much of this book is an exploration of the anxieties and ambivalences in American power made visible by the end of the Cold War in New Mexico.

1.1. The Trinity Test, July 16, 1945, 5:29:45 a.m. (U.S. Department of Energy photograph)

Attention to the local effects of the nuclear age, however, also promises a different vantage point on the phantasmagoria of nuclear conflict promulgated during the Cold War, both disturbing its familiarity and challenging its social purpose. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear war has repeatedly been marked in American culture as the unthinkable, an official declaration that no government would willingly engage in actions that could potentially end life on earth.³ But today, in the absence of the Soviet-U.S. global polarism and during an expanding war on terror, we might interrogate the unthinkability of the nuclear age anew, and ask: What kind of cultural work is performed in the act of making something unthinkable? How has the social regulation of the imagination—in this case, of nuclear war—been instrumental in American life since World War II? What are the legacies of this social project after the Cold War, in a world once again negotiating nuclear terror? For to make something unthinkable is to place it outside of language, to deny its comprehensibility and elevate it into the realm of the sublime. The incomprehensibility of the bomb is therefore an enormous national-cultural project, one whose effects constantly exceed the modernist logics required to build the nuclear complex in the first place. But what then encompasses the cultural spaces left behind when a national project of the size and scope of the nuclear complex is excised from political discourse? What happens when the submerged cultural legacies of nuclear nationalism come flooding back into the public sphere, as they did for communities in and around Los Alamos upon the end of the Cold War in 1991 or for a broader American public after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001?

In a post–Cold War world, then, we might usefully interrogate the cultural work performed by a nation-state in managing so explicit an image of its own end, of controlling the terms whereby citizens are confronted with their own, impossibly sudden, nonexistence. For if it is reasonable, as Benedict Anderson has argued, to begin a consideration of the cultural roots of nationalism with death (1991: 10), then the nuclear complex remains a particularly potent national project, informing one way in which citizens imagine both their collective lives and deaths. The unthinkability of the nuclear age has from this vantage point been perhaps the American nation-building project since World War II. The cultural logic of ensuring the immortality of the nation, which Anderson has shown is characteristic of the modern nation-state, is also, however, immediately compromised by the reality of nuclear weapons. The contradiction nuclear arsenals evoke is that as more national-cultural energy is put into generating security through improved weapons systems, the vulnerability of the nation to new military technology is ever further revealed; indeed, as the U.S.-Soviet arms race demonstrated, it is worked out in ever-exacting detail. The pursuit of security through ever-greater technological means of destruction thus troubles the nation’s internal coherence by constantly forwarding the everyday possibility of the ultimate national absence. Indeed, what Paul Edwards (1996) has called the closed world system of American Cold War technology—the ideological commitment to encompassing the globe with perfect technologies of command, control, surveillance, and military nuclear power—ultimately offered nuclear superpowers a perverse new form of immortality, one drawn from the recognition that a nuclear war might well be the last significant national act on earth.

The unthinkability of the nuclear age has right from the beginning, then, produced its rhetorical opposite; namely, a proliferation of discourses about vulnerability and insecurity.⁴ This is easiest to see in the periods of heightened international tensions of the early 1950s, 1960s, 1980s, and 2000s, when the unthinkability of nuclear war, in fact, made it impossible for many in the United States to think about anything else. But even in periods of relative international calm, Cold War nuclear discourse retained a specific trajectory in the United States, one that inevitably focused attention on the imagined end of the nation, and thus of life itself. Given that a nuclear war has not yet occurred, this apocalypticism remains at the level of a national imaginary. Nevertheless, an imagined end to the nation, or the human species, energized the argumentative core of (post) Cold War nuclear discourse and continues to this day to enable social movements both for and against the construction of the U.S. nuclear complex.⁵ In other words, the nuclear politics of the Cold War, the steady discourse and counterdiscourse of nuclear/antinuclear commitments, has promoted a specific apocalyptic vision in the United States, one that has made it difficult to see how the nuclear age has already impacted everyday lives.

With the end of that multigenerational project known as the Cold War, we might now interrogate the repressed spaces within nuclear modernism; that is, the social logics, technoscientific practices, and institutional effects that were rendered invisible by this national fixation on extinction. We can now examine how more than a half century of international work to construct a global nuclear economy has affected everyday lives on a local level, paying attention to the regional and cultural complexities and specificities of life in the nuclear age. For while we all still live in a world quite capable of nuclear war, the cumulative effects of the nuclear complex are already both more subtle and more ever-present than (post) Cold War culture has allowed, affecting some lives more than others, and impacting local ecologies and cultural cosmologies in ways that we have yet to recognize fully. To approach nuclear technologies from the quotidian perspectives of tactile experience, focusing on how people experience an orientation in time and space, and an individual relationship with a national-cultural infrastructure, is to fundamentally rewrite the history of the nuclear age. Indeed, attention to the local effects of the nuclear complex makes strange the invisibility of the U.S. arsenal in everyday American life, and allows us to interrogate the national-cultural work performed in the act of making so enormous a national project reside in the unthinkable. Consequently, it may be more useful to approach nuclear war as a phantasmagoria, a spectral fascination