Although scholarly attention to the U.S. nuclear arsenal is usually limited to issues of international peace, Joseph Masco’s book is about the post–Cold War security culture and the internal effects of the U.S. nuclear project on U.S. citizens, on U.S. land and water, and on U.S. security. Masco’s ethnography deals with the region most directly affected—northern New Mexico—and the communities most immediately involved—the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the scientists who produced the bomb and the Hispanics, Native Americans, and antinuclear activists who for over 50 years have been affected by a nuclear economy that has dramatically reshaped their everyday lives and modes of thinking. He began his fieldwork in 1993 and over the next decade spent three years studying a world that has controlled the terms by which citizens confront issues of their own survival.

The long-term effects of the Manhattan Project have included more than technoscientific and environmental issues. The project has changed the way Americans think about life and death, and psychologies and social organizations have been permanently altered. The nuclear arsenals have changed the way Americans think about nature, reproduction, technoscientific progress, and the democracy we are supposed to be. Masco is dealing with complexity of a high order, a technological achievement, a “revolution” he calls it, one that catapulted the United States to superpower status while also creating crises in our democratic form and practice of government. He sees the United States as the nation-state most colonized by the bomb, a national obsession. The Manhattan Project is multigenerational, a biosocial experiment that has not only reorganized our national purpose but international life as well. Although the effects are global, Masco’s work lies in the detailing of the communities in northern New Mexico—the Nuclear Borderlands.

After an impenetrable introductory chapter, Masco analyzes the community of nuclear weapons science, its ideological and technoscientific practices in which bodies and machines are confused, a common technique for internal control of laboratory workers. He notes that the expertise necessary for maintaining those machines is separated from an understanding of the consequences of using the technology.

For the Pueblo Indians, the permanent technoscience presence on the plateau with an unending possibility for reinvention not only causes a national cultural rupture but also a loss of land and sacred area. Federal management of Pueblo lands meant lost title to 18,000 acres, a loss of subsistence economy. LANL is foreign to the Pueblo philosophy of man–nature relations; their lands are expendable; they are a sacrifice to another colonialism. Ironically, high-tech scientists borrow from an imagined Tewa ritual to make high-tech kivas: modern mysticism channeling the spirits of Pueblo religious leaders while ignoring local, living Pueblo cultures. The testing is more unpredictable intrusion, and the buried nuclear waste a multimillennial hazard. But with the end of the Cold War, there is active resistance. The Hispanics are caught in the “tri-ethnic trap” and feel they have no political recourse. They predate the U.S. Forest Service and the “enviromaniacs” in Santa Fe. Many work at the laboratory, which is both a resource and a threat, and they become aware of race, class, and health issues.

In the late 1980s, antinuclear activism was energized by the ending of the Cold War and the opening of records hitherto secret. The politics of nuclear secrets are part of Masco’s subject as are the types and degrees of radiation exposure and the hazards of moving nuclear waste. Masco’s analysis is guided by key statements from diverse informants. Readers are never far from the participants, whether scientists or local citizens, whether nuclear is normalized or made exotic.
As ethnography, this work is in a class by itself—subtle, careful, thoughtful, and, in places, brilliant. In an era of preemptive war, Masco helps readers understand current U.S. debates as they relate to the legacies of the Cold War nuclear project. The Cold War rhetoric leads to post–September 11 mobilization around the “war on terror” and “weapons of mass destruction,” and citizens are left hanging between fear and denial. Anthropology at its best.
[photographs, notes, references, index.]