Land of Nuclear Enchantment: A New Mexican History of the Nuclear Weapons Industry by Lucie Genay (review)

The history of nuclear development endlessly fascinates, and the contrast between the seemingly timeless landscape and cultures of New Mexico with the development of modernity’s most destructive weapon has tempted artists, filmmakers, fiction writers, and scholars since the revelation of the bomb’s destructive power in 1945. Lucie Genay has answered the call with a well-constructed book that places New Mexican residents at its center. The national and global significance of the bomb’s development and the widespread notoriety of figures like Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller almost inevitably steal the spotlight in such works, but Genay is among a new generation of scholars paying attention to the people and the place that came before Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and the Trinity Site at White Sands were on the map. Her interest is in the Indigenous, Hispano, and Anglo rural residents who bore witness to the federal government’s fundamental alternation of their lives and lands, almost always to their detriment.

Genay argues that the American West is an internal colony of the American East; that colonization disadvantaged locals; and that “scientific conquest” reiterated the American political conquest of the region in the nineteenth century (p. 231). Already marginal to national politics and economic development, New Mexicans first lost their lands to the federal government as it sought an isolated region for development of the bomb. Although many residents believed that the federal land seizures were temporary, they became permanent as the Cold War arms race spurred the federal government to deepen its investment in nuclear weapons and energy technology. New Mexicans appreciated the job opportunities and promise of prosperity that came with federal investment in the region’s nuclear complex, but most benefits went to Anglo newcomers in the form of better, higher-paying jobs. Meanwhile, Pueblos lost access to sacred sites; workers of all races were exposed to harmful radiation; and radioactive waste contaminated land and water at San Ildefonso, White Rock, Pajarito Acres, Albuquerque’s South Valley, Carlsbad, and, in the largest radioactive accident in national history, Church Rock. Employment discrimination, health and safety lawsuits, and anti-nuclear activists finally broke the secrecy that had hidden the risks and damages of nuclear research and development from the public. Nonetheless, the most disadvantaged, usually Indigenous and Hispano rural and working-class New Mexicans, found themselves most trapped—without the resources of Anglo outsiders who came to work in the labs but no longer able to make a living on contaminated lands.

Land of Nuclear Enchantment rests on a solid source base of oral histories, government documents, and activist literature. Genay has dug deep into local collections like the Ferenc Morton Szasz Papers at the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico and the published writing of Jim Sagel, who is largely unknown outside the Southwest but wrote of the bitter betrayal that Hispanos felt in the face of discrimination and radioactive contamination at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Genay has clearly listened carefully to locals and endeavored to understand the place and its nuclear legacy as residents do. Her book will help put lesser-known sources and figures alongside the popular biographies and histories that draw public audiences to the topic of nuclear development.

While this New Mexican reader was satisfied to see her state and its less-powerful residents receive the attention they merit, historians of the American West might need to look elsewhere for the full context of the “scientific conquest” that Genay argues marks the region. Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and the Navajo Nation receive scant attention, although all five places have experienced the effects of above-ground testing, and their residents have served alongside New Mexicans on the front-lines of compensation and anti-nuclear activism. Genay also never fully explores the relationship between Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the University of California (UC). The...