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

Travelers seeking sunshine, hot air balloons, mesas, and mountains head for the Land of Enchantment. New Mexico's visitor's bureau promotes geographic wonders, cultural heritage, and exceptional cuisines. Wikipedia highlights oil and mineral development, agriculture, lumber milling, and retail as the state's primary economic drivers, while the government actively invites new businesses to New Mexico. Just out of view of these business and travel enticements, federal military investment in the state, and in particular the Manhattan Project and its legacy institutions, definitively shaped New Mexico as it is today. In Land of Nuclear Enchantment: A New Mexican History of the Nuclear Weapons Industry, American Studies scholar Lucie Genay pulls back the curtain to examine how the nuclear industry influenced the state's development during and after World War II. Genay argues that histories of nuclear development in New Mexico have offered, alternately, a "positive, even miraculous, perception of atomic science and its economic effect," (4) or a critique of the environmental and socio-cultural consequences. She examines the process that shifted perceptions from the positive to the negative.

Genay develops several theses. The first concurs with the scholars who correctly describe the U.S. West as a former colony of the East, but argues that New Mexico—unlike others—continues to function as an economic dependent of the federal government. The second argues that New Mexicans who welcomed the Manhattan Project made a devil's bargain: they gained economically in the short term, but suffered socially, environmentally, and economically in the longer term. The third thesis argues that the wartime and post-war transformation in New Mexico is a two-strand story in which people reshaped the environment to meet the nation's needs, and then adapted themselves to an economic regime imposed by outsiders.

Genay traces the history of nuclear development in New Mexico both thematically and chronologically. Chapters describe the state before 1942, the decision to locate the Manhattan Project's scientific research core in Los Alamos, how surrounding communities experienced both the bomb test and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the consequent economic expansion of nuclear science, the effects of secrecy and dangerous exposures to radiation, and the ongoing sociocultural impacts of the process. Genay identifies and acknowledges other scholars' important contributions to the state's atomic history and effectively weaves their synopses, findings, and arguments into her own narrative. But her real interest is in the experiences of residents who welcomed Project Y, lost land, took jobs, entertained and served newcomers, mounted opposition, suffered discrimination and radiation-related illness, and generally reflected on how their lives and their communities had changed. Relying on oral history collections, archived personal papers, and dozens of reports from multiple entities, Genay brings the voices of Hispanos, Native Americans, and Anglo ranchers to the fore. The reader learns about both revived local economies and locals left behind.

Genay successfully persuades the reader that New Mexico, despite its famous landscape and attractive business environment, has both succeeded through and suffered from the introduction and development of nuclear industries. The deeper irony within this monograph is that much of the attendant science and technology advancements have to do with war, death, and destruction, phenomena anathema to an enchanted place.

Within a growing literature about the atomic bomb, nuclear science, and the industry's "tributaries" (3), Land of Nuclear Enchantment provides an important reflection on how a place evolved as a result of scientific conquest. It intervenes in theses about domestic colonization of the western United States. Just as importantly, Genay's work provides a contemporary and complicated perspective on New Mexico's history. Through the eyes of New Mexico's pre-World War II inhabitants, readers learn of the state's multiple economies, cultures, and responses to change.