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

In this important interdisciplinary work, Masco sets out to examine the multiple legacies of nuclear weapons development and the "plutonium economy" of New Mexico. After establishing a clear theoretical and historical framework in his first chapter, Masco focuses his second chapter on how scientists at Los Alamos have experienced their work. Merging historical and anthropological analysis, Masco shows how scientists during the early above-ground testing phase of nuclear weapons development characterized their work through "the nuclear sublime," where awestruck fear and pleasure was produced by directly witnessing the success of their projects (57). With the move to underground testing in 1963, Masco shows how scientists began to respond with greater abstraction to their work, an abstraction that has reached new heights since the testing moratorium that came after the end of the Cold War. This abstraction, Masco demonstrates, has been accompanied by a decreasing sense of the fragility of the human body (which was threatened by witnessing detonations) and an increasing emphasis on the fragility of the bombs themselves. This has come in part from the new emphasis on the "weapons gerontology" required for maintaining an existing nuclear arsenal instead of rapidly designing new weapons for an arms race. With this chapter, Masco begins a careful balancing act where he shows the complex interactions between the local, national, and global situations in regards to nuclear weapons. Through this and subsequent chapters, he provides an engaging perspective on the experiences of everyday life for the people of northern New Mexico.

Masco's interdisciplinary approach allows him to engage with many of the overlapping discourses of race, class, and colonization that are still understudied in American Studies scholarship surrounding nuclear weapons. In his third, fourth, and fifth chapters, Masco explores the histories and experiences of First Nations people, Nuevomexicanos, and environmental NGO activists. While these groups all have a tendency to see Los Alamos as a type of colonial institution, Masco carefully draws out the complex competing representations and experiences of nuclear weapons both within and between these communities. Though Los Alamos has extended the incursion of wage labor and the displacement of traditional subsistence lifestyles, it has also provided much-needed employment that has allowed many local people to have a better quality of life. Though environmental NGOs have pushed for the release of important information regarding nuclear projects and contamination in northern New Mexico, many locals see them as Anglo outsiders who are a threat to the future of the region. The clear presentation of these complexities is the greatest strength of Masco's work. His final section on the nuclear secrecy, endemic racism, and mutant ecologies of Los Alamos build on the work of the earlier chapters while providing a sobering examination of the contemporary problems facing the people of New Mexico—and the rest of the world—who now live with the toxic legacy of the Manhattan Project.