The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror by Joseph Masco (review)

On Tuesday, 11 September 2001, I was backpacking in the Colorado wilderness. I didn’t learn about the attacks until Saturday. Having spent the interval looking at mountains and lakes instead of at incessantly repeated television images of destruction, I have had a hard time appreciating the trauma experienced by my fellow citizens, and its aftermath. At the center of this aftermath has been an astonishing (to me) transformation of American policies in pursuit of a “war on terror.” In a carefully considered new book, Joseph Masco has gone a long way toward explaining the deep historical roots of this transformation and the disturbing nature of the results.

A central theme of the book is the continuity between the cold war and the war on terror. Masco shows how fears of national destruction, developed after 1945 in reaction to the threat of nuclear war, were reinvigorated and further developed as a basis for national security policies after 2001. Images, ideas, and policies that grew out of nuclear fear turned up again, almost unchanged, in connection with hypothetical threats from terrorists. The result is a government that spends enormous funds, and enshrines radically problematic geopolitical and domestic policies, in open-ended pursuit of perfect safety. What was once a defense against missile attack has become a defense against a variety of existential threats whose plausibility is barely even considered. All this, Masco says, displaces resources away from immediate sources of severe insecurity such as decaying infrastructure and climate change.

Masco argues plausibly that secrecy has been a main driving force, after 2001 as after 1945. Excessive peacetime classification of documents grew out of apocalyptic fears connected with nuclear technologies. Yet government secrecy redoubled after 2001, including extensive re-classification of formerly open material. Masco further analyzes the damaging trend to withhold “Sensitive but Unclassified” information, all justified by treating ambiguous threats as equivalent to a nuclear apocalypse.

The book offers similarly penetrating analysis of the history of concepts and emotions surrounding nuclear war civil defense, other imagery of nationwide destruction, and biological terrorism. Masco mainly draws on extensive reading in the secondary literature, but he also quotes from primary published materials and adds some bits of firsthand reporting. The factual material will mostly be familiar to specialists in a given subject, but the range of subjects covered means that most readers will learn something new. Still, it is the book’s theoretical work and analysis that constitute its main value. A typical example is a comment on the U.S. government’s costly program to address a potential epidemic of smallpox, a disease that last killed an American in 1949: “This is an illustration of how the affective economy of the War on Terror proliferates specific potentialities as imminent dangers while rejecting others, making the domain of biosecurity, in this case, more dependent on the imagination than physical evidence or statistical comparisons of risk” (pp. 152–53). As this quote suggests, the book’s discourse is in the realm of cultural and critical studies influenced by Michel Foucault and his followers. It will appeal most to readers with a taste for phrases like, “the chapter theorizes a secrecy/threat matrix as a core project of the national security state” (p. 43).

The book’s actors are “the nation-state,” “authorities,” “officials,” and only occasionally semi-identifiable agents such as “the George W. Bush administration.” Masco only rarely mentions oppositional citizens’ movements, again usually nameless; this book is not concerned with policy fights in Washington, still less with economic and social configurations. It is almost as if the history was generated irresistibly by the existing governmental structures.

Could things have developed differently? What if the 9/11 conspiracy had been detected and forestalled, so that Americans were not traumatized by obsessive viewing of images of death? Or what if the attacks had taken place...