The Nuclear Borderlands

Joseph Masco is professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Theater of Operations. An important investigation of the sociocultural fallout of America's work on the atomic bomb In The Nuclear Borderlands, Joseph Masco offers an in-depth look at the long-term consequences of the Manhattan Project. Masco examines how diverse groups in and around Los Alamos, New Mexico understood and responded to the U.S. nuclear weapons project in the post-Cold War period. He shows that the American focus on potential nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War obscured the broader effects of the nuclear complex on society, and that the atomic bomb produced a new cognitive orientation toward daily life, reconfiguring concepts of time, nature, race, and citizenship. This updated edition includes a brand-new preface by the author discussing current developments in nuclear politics and the scientific impact of the nuclear age on the present epoch of a human-altered climate. "Masco's important and impressive study ably demonstrates that nuclear weapons need not be detonated to have profound effects."-David Kaiser, American Scientist "Masco seems to have taken to heart the tension between anthropology and science studies…. [His] book is fusion (that impossible goal of our nuclear culture) of the best kind."-Christopher Kelty, University of California, Los Angeles "[This book] alters the meaning of ethnography in a way that will challenge all of us in anthropology."-Susan Harding, University of California, Santa Cruz "No account of the post-Cold War environment can afford to ignore this study and the tangle of economic, political, and cultural rights, interests, and imperatives it maps."-Michael M. J. Fischer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology