The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico

by Joseph Masco

The Nuclear Borderlands explores the sociocultural fallout of twentieth-century America's premier technoscientific project--the atomic bomb. Joseph Masco offers the first anthropological study of the long-term consequences of the Manhattan Project for the people that live in and around Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb, and the majority of weapons in the current U.S. nuclear arsenal, were designed. Masco examines how diverse groups--weapons scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, neighboring Pueblo Indian Nations and Nuevomexicano communities, and antinuclear activists--have engaged the U.S. nuclear weapons project in the post-Cold War period, mobilizing to debate and redefine what constitutes "national security."


In a pathbreaking ethnographic analysis, Masco argues that the U.S. focus on potential nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War obscured the broader effects of the nuclear complex on American society. The atomic bomb, he demonstrates, is not just the engine of American technoscientific modernity; it has produced a new cognitive orientation toward everyday life, provoking cross-cultural experiences of what Masco calls a "nuclear uncanny." Revealing how the bomb has reconfigured concepts of time, nature, race, and citizenship, the book provides new theoretical perspectives on the origin and logic of U.S. national security culture. The Nuclear Borderlands ultimately assesses the efforts of the nuclear security state to reinvent itself in a post-Cold War world, and in so doing exposes the nuclear logic supporting the twenty-first-century U.S. war on terrorism.

Genres: Anthropology, History, Nonfiction, Technology, American History

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Joseph Masco is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror and The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico, winner of the J. I. Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research and the Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

Reviews

[Louis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a trip. You will never think of New Mexico, the United States, and the Manhattan Project in the same way again. Masco, in his history and ethnography of the consequences and the lasting impact of the Manhattan Project on the people and landscape of New Mexico, shows us how scientific experimentation with nuclear physics upends our commonsense distinction between past and present, simply because the durability of nuclear debris exceeds the temporal scales that humans are used to think with. How can we think of the Manhattan Project and the many subsequent nuclear experiments in the New Mexico desert as part of the past when their fallout continues to affect our environment still? This is a book that is both insightful scholarship and a page-turner.

[Joy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masco's book is riveting. I don't often say this about academic books. If you have any presupposition that this is another boring military history book, think again. Instead of giving us a technological history of the bomb or a political history of what people did with it, Masco wants to understand the lasting psychosocial and infrastructural effects the bomb had on the US, and he shows how taking this perspective challenges the assumption that America "won" the Cold War.

In the first section of his book, Masco shows how "the Manhattan project is not simply a techoscientific project in New Mexico. The bomb is now a multigenerational, national-cultural, economic, and environmental mutation, one that has already colonized a deep future (38)." The first chapter, which I found marvelous, looks at how nuclear scientists themselves viewed and handled the bomb. Masco excavated the original feelings of the scientists upon watching the bomb explode above-surface, and compares it to Kant's dynamic sublime (amazement/incomprehensible fear from a safe distance). After 1963, when people began to realize the global environmental consequences of those tests, the nuclear scientists had to modify their testing techniques to detonate bombs below the ground. This immediately took away the visceral, bodily experience of watching the explosion. Instead, scientists experienced something closer to Kant's mathematical sublime, or contemplation of infinity or other incomprehensibly large/complex problems. Again in the 1990s, when the US agreed to nuclear disarmament, the scientists of Los Alamos had to find a way to reorient their expertise towards building mathematical models of bomb explosions, which Masco calls a prosthetic sense. Also, changes in regulations forced weapons scientists to turn their attention to maintaining weapons over time, and figuring out how to dispose of the nuclear waste produced by the project since 1943. Not an easy task. The problem of storage especially turned scientists attention to more basic problems in nuclear physics. Masco labels these changes "nuclear technoaesthetics": "The bomb is America's response to forces unleashed at that historical moment, and the post-Cold War transformation of each U.S. nuclear device from a weapon of mass destruction into an opportunity for exotic material science and cutting-edge computer simulation advances the aestheticization of politics through a reconfigured sense perception to a new order for a new century (98)." Masco thinks that we need to recover the politics that the aesthetic spectacle of the bomb obscures.

In his next chapter, "Econationalisms," Masco discusses the immediate impacts of the Manhattan project on the surrounding Pueblo peoples, who have occupied the area for over a thousand years, and whose spiritual system is intricately tied to the land. The Manhattan project polluted and made unavailable vast swathes of Pueblo territory important for ceremonial activities. Masco goes on to present a fascinating story of the "colonization" of the Plateau by the Manhattan Project. He shows how weapons scientists and Peublos began to mirror one another. For example, the scientists named some of their bomb containers "kivas" and one of their nuclear tests "Tewa" after the native language. At the same time, as disarmament began and the scientists began to archive all the data and tests that had been performed at Los Alamos for posterity, the Peublos began their own archiving project to document the destruction or pollution of various secret sites, as well as the lasting impacts of the bomb on the health of their community. This document, like the Los Alamos archive, was secret. From this chapter we see clearly that the lab was a boon to the local economy at the same time that it made the inhabitants vulnerable to radiation, sickness, and cultural loss. These tensions culminate in the battle over whether to allow nuclear waste to be buried on the Reservation for a very steep price. The local "plutonium economy" is such that this seems like a good option for them, but Masco shows us again and again the racialized nature of the bomb project and its consistent abuse of the most vulnerable populations.

Okay, this is getting long. The final chapter deals with the surrounding Nuevomexicano population, who have inhabited the area for over 400 years. Essentially, Masco shows us how on the one hand the Manhattan Project gave them jobs, allowing many of them to keep their land and maintain aspects of their culture. On the other, the presence of the Lab fundamentally changed the community and economy in ways that smack of colonialism. The result is a highly entangled relationship, in which some Nuevomexicanos even resent environmentalist demands for a global peace movement that would shut down the lab. For them, this move might also shut down their way of life once and for all. In this way, the future of the Nuevomexicanos became tied to the fate of the lab. I should also point out the increasing awareness among both the Pueblos and Nuevomexicanos of having been exposed to radiation under hazardous working conditions and due to irresponsible care-taking by the lab of the surrounding areas. This leads to what Masco calls a feeling of the "nuclear uncanny," arising from the fear of an ever-present radiation that cannot be seen or felt, but that can kill. According to Masco, the possibility of exposure creates a constant trauma, to say nothing of the unannounced explosions often performed at the lab.

Okay, I'll cut to the chase. Masco has additional chapters about nuclear protest groups, the attempt to institute lie detector tests for weapons scientists to prevent espionage, and the strange and fascinating way that following disarmament, the DOE made many toxic waste zones into wildlife preserves. The major message is that the bomb has compounding effects on the U.S. by continually changing the bio-social-cultural-political order. Instead of using the theoretical concept of "hybridity" to think about the technological invasion of nature and our everyday lives, Masco suggests a term "mutation" to capture the generational compounding of the nuclear economy. Amazingly, more bombs have been detonated on our home soil than anywhere in the world, and we continue to deal with the repercussions of that- extreme government secrecy, a military-industrial-academic complex, "mutant ecologies", and the fact the testing turned the entire world into a "biosocial experiment."

The September 11 attacks reinvigorated the national obsession with nuclear attack, and Masco argues that even though the terrorist attacks were not nuclear, Americans saw it that way, and immediately connected the explosions with images and fears of nuclear holocaust, thereby submerging once again the political infrastructure supporting the bomb economy itself. Masco concludes, "Given the multimillennial longevity of plutonium, there may be no practical end to the Manhattan Project, but attending to the political, psychosocial, and environmental effects of the bomb may still offer us an alternative way of living in the nuclear borderlands (337)." In case I didn't make that clear, this is where we're all living.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is almost trippy - it's an anthropological look at the repercussions of the Manhattan Project and the Cold War on America, and northern New Mexico specifically. Nuclear tech is so rarely approached from that perspective that this book helps round out a lot of the study on these subjects.

The book covers a lot of topics, including:
* the way we cope with nuclear radiation being an invisible and (unless you're using a Geiger counter) undetectable threat, which he calls the "nuclear uncanny"
* the local politics surrounding Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the fight between Pueblo tradition and economic aspirations
* anti-nuclear and anti-anti-nuclear activism in Santa Fe
* is a nuclear secret really a secret if it's deliberately revealed?

If you're interested in America's nuclear history (which, as the author documents very well, certainly continues today), or New Mexican culture, or the interplay between national laboratories and their local communities, I recommend this book.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joseph Masco has written a thought-provoking ethnography of the US' aging nuclear arms program and its effects on the psyche of the American public. This worthy study can get a little too heavy on its theoretical framework to the point of obscuring the ethnographic data that is powerful on its own. Thinking about the long-term fallout of the Manhattan Project on the public and the landscape is an important contribution, as are Masco's insights into how the a-bomb has reconfigured socio-cultural relations within and between nations, people's sense of time and nature. More specifically, his case demonstrates how containment and safety are not as clear cut in spite of the scientific community's best efforts. Things like atomic bombs pollute the ground and what is beneath it. There are many lessons to be learned from this historical case and living in the age of the "War on Terror" should urge us all the more to learn the historical lessons we can from something like the Manhattan Project and the long-term hazards it presents.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book--and anything by Joseph Masco, in my opinion--is amazing.