Review
of
The Nuclear
Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico, by
Joseph Masco, Princeton University Press, 2006, 2nd edition 2020.
A superficial
understanding of the nuclear era is that it is a series of famous atrocities
and disasters that have occurred since 1945. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the
first events, followed by the Cold War showdown that peaked during the Cuban
Missile Crisis. Afterwards, there were the accidents at Three Mile Island,
Chernobyl and Fukushima. For the majority of people who have no interest in
learning what lies behind the headlines, these famous milestones are likely to
represent the common knowledge about the nuclear age. Nuclear technology is
something that is occasionally terrifying, but it disappears out of everyday
consciousness when the news cycle moves on.
Historians and
anthropologists who have studied the nuclear era find that this collective
amnesia is in itself an interesting aspect of the age because the advent of
nuclear weapons was perhaps the most significant and socially disruptive change
in human history. In The Nuclear
Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico, anthropologist
Joseph Masco wrote about the American nuclear program, in particular how it unfolded
in the birthplace of the atomic era. In this study, he illustrated quite
effectively that the nuclear weapons program has had, and will have far into
the future, deep economic, ecological, cultural and psychological impacts
which, ironically, appear to be inversely proportional to the collective
awareness of them.
The US nuclear
complex covers a total of 36,000 square miles, the size of the state of
Indiana. $6 trillion was spent on it over 50 years, and the US government
conducted 1,149 test detonations between 1945 and 1992, 942 within the
continental United States. The cost of remediating and containing the damage
caused by the nuclear age will cost far more because of the duration of nuclear
wastes into the distant future. The psychological and social impacts of these
facts become apparent when we gain awareness of how they force us to change the
way we understand citizenship, national identity, and relationships to the
land. What does it mean for politicians to talk about enduring American values,
or the lasting integrity of the nation, when the government must also plan for
a time one thousand or fifty thousand years into the future when a country
called the USA will no longer exist? What does it mean for individuals to realize
that their pursuit of security and comfort makes the present and the distant
future less secure and less comfortable? Humanity never before had to consider
much besides the near past and near future. In terms of our genetic evolution, we are hard-wired to be altruistic toward our immediate social group and the
few generations of genetic kin we know during our lifetime.
Masco contends that
our confrontation with the dangers of radiation creates a strange rupture in the
collective and the individual psyche. Adapting a Freudian concept, he labels this
phenomenon the “nuclear uncanny.” Freud himself struggled to find a definition of
unheimlich (translated as uncanny) which satisfied the theoretical
concept he had in mind. In the essay The
Uncanny, he wrote:
Many people experience the feeling [of
uncanny] in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the
return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts... some languages in use today
can only render the German expression ‘an unheimlich
house’ by ‘a haunted house.’ [1]
Masco stressed this sense of haunting when
he wrote that the uncanny refers to sensory experience becoming haunted and
untrustworthy, and to the return of the repressed. There seems to be a further
uncanny irony here in the fact that the scientific age did much to dispel irrational
beliefs but then revealed a fearsome secret of the universe that would be
dreaded like a malevolent ghost. The hidden energy from the birth of the solar
system was revealed to be—one might say “repressed”—below the earth’s surface
in uranium ore. Because radiation is intangible and dangerous, doing its harm
imperceptibly over time and distance, people react to it just as they would to
a perceived supernatural force. Thus radiation evokes what can be called the
nuclear uncanny.
Nuclear
Borderlands
describes the many ways by which the nuclear age has made our times uncannily out
of joint. I would add that the uncanny should include the instances of irony,
paradox and Kafkaesque absurdity one encounters in the nuclear era. The summary below
covers some memorable aspects of the Nuclear
Borderlands; however, I advise readers that this is only a cursory overview
of a book that deserves to be read in its entirety.
Uncanny #1.
Rule 1: Spend
$trillions on nuclear weapons
Rule 2: Hope you never
have to use them
The description of
absurd paradoxes begins with the Los Alamos scientists who have to manage the aging
nuclear arsenal without ever being able to test a nuclear weapon. The generation
that experienced the visceral effects of above-ground tests is no longer
working, and many of the scientists employed today are too young to remember even
underground testing, which ended in 1992. All they can do now is manage the
existing weapons, maintaining all their parts but never testing a weapon to see
if it actually works. They say it is like having to maintain an old car in
perfect condition but never being allowed to turn the key. The goal is to make the
weapons functional, but if they ever needed to really find out if they
functioned, that would be horrible because it would mean nuclear apocalypse had
begun.
If children
constantly receive contradictory messages from their parents, they will grow up
to be neurotic, and so one might expect that the contradictions of the nuclear
weapons program would create neuroses in the people who live with its trappings.
Maintaining the weapons stockpile and providing long-term stewardship of the
nuclear waste legacy have become a techno-scientific fetish. When Los Alamos
scientists talk about nuclear weapons they adopt human and animal metaphors to humanize
the maintenance of weapons of mass destruction. For example, the old weapons receive
“geriatric care.” Like a human face, nuclear core implosions are better when
they are symmetrical.
Masco notes that many
people consider the $6 trillion as money well spent because of what is called
the “Tang© effect,” the term which describes the famous freeze-dried orange
juice that was invented, as is widely believed, because astronauts had to take
orange juice to the moon. From the arms race came other benefits such as rocket
and satellite technology, computers, the Internet, interstate highways, and
nuclear medicine. However, this retroactive reasoning is illogical because it
dismisses alternative courses history could have followed, and it is an
arbitrary judgment to say that it was essential for the human race to have
Internet access. Tang© was, in fact, first made by General Foods in 1957. It
was later adopted by NASA but it was never
made for NASA. With this myth out of the
way, it seems reasonable to believe that computers and the Internet might have
appeared sooner or later regardless of the impetus given by the budget for
nuclear weapons. And if they hadn’t been invented, so what? Would life not be
worth living? The absurdity of retroactive justification is easier to see if we
note that Hitler restored the German economy and made the trains to Auschwitz
run on time, but no one would justify Nazi atrocities today by celebrating the
technical achievements of WWII Germany. In fact, if Americans and Russians
want to celebrate how they produced ballistic missiles, they really have
to thank the German scientists who developed the technology during the Nazi
period.
Uncanny #2
Claims on the Land,
Claims on Upward Mobility
Los Alamos and northern New Mexico were
occupied by Native Americans for thousands of years before the Spanish
colonized the area in the late 16th century. It was later part of Mexico after the
War of Independence ended in 1821, then it recently became American territory
in 1848. The Spanish settlers lived apart from industrial development in a
barter economy until the American takeover, so they had worked out how to
co-exist relatively well with the Pueblo Indians. That stability began to
unravel as America expanded westward and Spanish landholders were cheated out
of their titles, even though some of them still possess deeds granted by Spain that
go back “only to 1714” (original Spanish settlement occurred in 1598). The
upper Rio Grande area is so isolated that linguists from Spain came in the 20th
century to observe the last remnants of the language as it sounded in the time
of Cervantes (1547-1616), a fact which makes my choice of blog mascot a little
uncanny also. Local historian Larry Torres stresses that the arrivals from
Spain were so early that settlers never experienced the Renaissance or the Enlightenment.
They came straight out of medieval Spain, and in 1942 this culture met the nuclear age on its own land.
By the time the US military came to
expropriate land for the Manhattan Project, both the Pueblo Indians and the
Spanish/Mexican inhabitants were impoverished. To this day, many of them have
positive, but also ambivalent, feelings about the Los Alamos National
Laboratory (LANL). The lab provided jobs in the wage economy, and the Indians
and the Spanish inhabitants served in WWII. Because they accepted the narrative
that said “the bombs ended the war,” they were proud of the American
achievement.
This is why there is nothing
straightforward about how the history of Los Alamos is contested. Within each
group there are proponents and opponents, and sometimes the same person who is
grateful for economic opportunity is also the person who resents the fact that
his ethnic group has always done the menial work at Los Alamos, or that too
many of his relatives have died too early of cancer. Sometimes the
disadvantaged groups make alliances with the environmental and anti-nuclear
groups, which tend to be made up of recent arrivals in New Mexico. At other
times they resent the way environmentalists persisted with legal challenges to
land use that took no account of what traditional inhabitants wanted. Some
Indian groups threatened to accept above-ground storage of nuclear waste, but
they did so as a bargaining tactic against elements that would disallow them
from operating casinos. The bottom line for everyone is that there is no going
back to living off the land. Everyone needs to be part of the cash economy.
One of Masco’s more interesting findings
was a video made by some of the Hispanic workers who did cleanup work in Area G
of Los Alamos. The video shows a ruptured canister in a dump, and the panicked
reaction of the staff to the leak. The class distinctions of the workplace are
on display when the white Anglo scientists come to the scene in full protective
gear to take measurements of the radioactivity while the Hispanic workers stand
in the same spot in regular attire. Later in the video, one of the workers
recounts his memory of what happened to the remains of Karen
Silkwood, the famous whistleblower who was contaminated with plutonium on the
job and later died in a mysterious car crash. Some of her remains came to the
lab to be put in a tissue registry, but a refrigerator failed and the stored
tissues were dumped unceremoniously with other waste, according to the witness in the video.
Racism and disregard for human rights were evident in other aspects of operations at Los Alamos. Implosion experiments
required a stand-in for plutonium, and for this lanthanum 140 (half-life 1.6
days) was used. The experiments were conducted only when the winds blew in the
right direction, away from the town of Los Alamos but over “uninhabited” land
where there were Pueblo Indians. In another case, for research done on the
absorption of radionuclides in the body, tissue samples were collected without
consent from deceased members of the Los Alamos community.
Uncanny #3
Contested Narratives
At the end of the Cold War, a great deal of
information was de-classified, and this gave rise to a strong anti-nuclear
movement which was now armed with information about environmental
contamination, unethical experiments on human subjects, and the health effects suffered
by thousands of nuclear workers, downwidners and veterans of weapons tests. However, this
gave rise to anti-anti-nuclear groups who fought over the way the nuclear legacy would be
defined in Los Alamos. For them, the nuclear era had been a positive force because it was the peacemaker that ended WWII and kept the peace during the
Cold War.
In 1989, students at an elementary school
in Albuquerque planned to build a peace statue which they hoped would be placed
in Los Alamos in 1995 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the atomic
bombings. As news of the plan spread and financial contributions poured in, the
city council of Los Alamos was forced to vote on whether to allow a space for
the statue. By a narrow vote it was rejected. Although the statue displayed no
overt ideology other than a wish for peace, the opposing city council members resented
that it was an outsiders’ project. It smelled of backing from anti-nuclear
groups they suspected of wanting to teach that Americans should feel guilty for
the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This conflict played out the same way on a
national scale when the Smithsonian in Washington tried to create a
full-context exhibit about the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the bomb on
Hiroshima. After much political interference and lobbying, the plan was
rejected in favor of a display of the aircraft devoid of serious historical analysis.
The children’s peace statue was eventually given a space in a museum in
Albuquerque.
In another battle over access to public space,
anti-nuclear activists demanded space in the Bradbury Science Museum in Los
Alamos in order to teach about the environmental and human costs of nuclear
weapons. There had been a previous legal challenge that won similar space at a
museum at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, so the Bradbury museum
relented and permitted a contrary view to be displayed on a wall that measured all
of fifteen by eight feet (4.5m x 2.4m). The comment book became a popular place
for visitors to exchange heated views, and by 1995 veterans and former LANL
workers had, predictably, demanded and won their own counter-counter-exhibit. Managers
of the museum were taken aback by the passions displayed by both sides of the
controversy. They seem to have thought that their sterile and apolitical
exhibits extolling the virtues of the technical achievement would satisfy the
public.
Uncanny #4
Forest Fire =
Hiroshima
While Los Alamos citizens and veterans
groups insisted that the history of Los Alamos should be presented either as
ideologically neutral or as nothing to feel guilty about, the great Cerro
Grande forest fire of May 2000 evoked some reactions in them that Sigmund Freud
would have found very intriguing. Nothing besides a guilty conscience could
have made so many local residents relate the fire to Hiroshima. They readily conflated the two conflagrations, taking the event as a way of
making an empathetic connection with the city they were historically linked to.
One scientist even did calculations to compare the heat of both events. Another
LANL employee said, “We are all thinking of Hiroshima. We know what that was
like.” Yet aside from being very hot, the two events had nothing in common. The
forest fire, horrible though it was, was not an act of human aggression
designed to kill thousands of people, and no one died because of it. The forest
fire came with no shock wave or radiation, except for the relatively small suspected
amounts caused by the release of radionuclides that had accumulated in the
forest after years of operations at LANL.
 |
| Immense forest fires came close to Los Alamos again in 2011. |
Uncanny #5
Are secrets still
secrets when millions of citizens have security clearance?
In the closing chapters, Nuclear Borderlands posits that the post
9/11 obsession with security was an expansion of what had been established during
the Cold War arms race. The national security fetish that arose in the Cold War
had a profound influence on all aspects of life while it presented citizens
with numerous contradictions, ambiguities and absurdities. Masco wrote,
“Secrecy… creates not only hierarchies of power and repression, but also
unpredictable social effects, including new kinds of desire, fantasy, paranoia,
and, above all, gossip.”
As an example, he describes how the rules
sought to define in granular detail the permitted number of times a nuclear
scientist could have sexual encounters with a foreign national. Security
clearances involved investigations of family and friends, and required
employees to report on each other. As such regulations piled up, the enemy had
become the citizens who were supposedly being protected. National security
became national sacrifice. The security state turned nuclear workers and all
citizens into the enemy because public understanding of the weapons, or knowledge
of ecological damage and health effects, would threaten the mission.
The definition of an act of espionage was also
highly contextual. For example, one could not bring an orange or other round
objects into the secure work area at LANL because the shape might be a hidden
message that a plutonium core was spherical rather than ovoid. Yet it was
alright to leave the orange in the non-secure area.
The obsession with secrecy led to
forgetting that in many cases a government with access to enough resources often
overcomes technical obstacles without having to steal secrets. The LANL
scientist Wen Ho Lee was accused in the 1990s of giving to the Chinese the
secret of how to make an ovoid plutonium core, a significant step allowing for
lighter high-yield weapons. China succeeded in testing a bomb with such a core,
but American investigators had to admit later that the information Lee
allegedly gave was not enough to teach the Chinese how to succeed. Either they
got the information by other means, put the pieces of the puzzle together from
information that was openly available, or (surprise surprise) figured it out from scratch
just as the Americans had.
Lee was eventually exonerated, but the lengthy
investigation reignited Cold War paranoia and demotivated many of the
scientists working in the nuclear program, especially those who were foreign-born
American citizens now aware of the racial profiling that was in effect. In the
end, many wondered if the Americans had been played by China. The whole affair
served to discourage foreign-born Americans from working in the nuclear program,
which might have been China’s objective. It is plausible that the Chinese
deliberately provoked the Americans into believing a foreign-born national had
betrayed them.
The Lee case underscored the essential
racism of building nuclear weapons in the first place. They are, after all,
deployed in order to kill foreigners. In the process of developing them, anyone
who is racially or ideologically different is suspect. Moreover, marginalized minorities
are dispossessed when land is taken over to build weapons facilities or they
are abused when weapons are tested on their homelands. Just as the Lee case
erupted into the news, LANL was hit with lawsuits from Hispanic and indigenous
groups over the confiscation of their land in 1942 (note how uncanny it is that
the four digits are a rearrangement of the year Columbus landed in America).
Once the Cold War was over in the early 1990s and documents were declassified, these
long-suppressed grievances came to the surface.
Uncanny #6
Long-Term
Stewardship
Perhaps nothing produces the sense of
uncanny more than a full understanding of the contamination that has been created
by the nuclear era. Various regulatory agencies like to soothe the public and
their staff with assurances that the waste problem can be dealt with, so they
write memos like this recent one by a high official of Canada’s Nuclear Safety
Commission:
The recent tailings dam breach that
occurred at the Mt. Polley mine in British Columbia on August 4, 2014 has
raised awareness of issues associated with tailings impoundments. This is a
reminder that vigilance must be maintained by ensuring that tailings dams continue
to be properly designed, constructed, operated, maintained and monitored to
prevent such occurrences.[2]
Such language avoids mentioning what is actually
at stake, for the last sentence should really continue by stating “… prevent
such occurrences for the next 100,000
years.” However, most often the unpleasant reality is repressed in both internal
and public communication.
Scientists have been tasked with
guaranteeing something that is utterly unprecedented and probably impossible.
They must plan for the perpetual management of a dangerous waste product, and
doing so presumes that the task can be handed off in perpetuity to a society
that has the required competence and resources.
Alternatively, it is hoped that
the wastes can be left in passive storage, requiring no action by future
generations, but this cannot be guaranteed either. In February 2014, waste
canisters at New Mexico’s WIPP storage facility exploded underground after only
fifteen years of operation, long before the site was to be sealed for eternity.
Masco found that a bizarre product of the
long-term stewardship program was the science fiction that nuclear waste
scientists were tasked with writing. They were told to imagine the political
and technological changes that might occur over the next few hundred years and
plan nuclear waste storage accordingly. The sample that Masco found imagined a 26th
century in which the United States no longer existed. It described an American southwest that had become a failed state where people lived in a
pre-industrial state of chaos and poverty. Characters in the story find maps
and diagrams in the ruins of a laboratory and head out to look for the buried
treasure, which is actually the contaminated clothing and equipment that had
been buried at WIPP in the 21st century. With this creative writing assignment, the United States government
had, perhaps for the first time, officially commissioned government workers to envision
the demise of the United States government.
Thus it is that the government, nuclear
workers, and eventually all citizens will realize the awesome legacy that has
been created. There are contaminated sites being promoted as wildlife refuges
simply because this is a convenient way of keeping people from living on them
while not admitting the impossibility of restoring them. Another 109 sacrifice
zones in the US are so badly contaminated that they can’t even be passed off as
wildlife habitat. Because the burden stretches out to a practical eternity, the
future environmental and health costs, and the costs of maintenance and cleanup
are sure to be more than the damage inflicted on enemies and more than the cost
of building the nuclear arsenal. The legacy tells us that there will never be a
“nuclear-free” world, but there could be a time when we at least stop adding to
the problem. Yet among the five nuclear powers, the same nations that also make
up the UN Security Council, none has shown the slightest interest in stopping
proliferation by disarming itself and leading the world out of the era of
nuclear weapons production.
Uncanny #7
Hiding in Plain
Sight
Masco concludes his book by recounting the
strangeness of his own interactions with people when he talked to them about
his project. It was difficult to make publishers interested, and members of the
general public were puzzled that there would be anything at all to write about
nuclear weapons. In the popular consciousness, the era was over in 1991 when
the USSR collapsed, or perhaps earlier when atmospheric testing ended in 1963. The
public seemed to equate nuclear dread with ephemeral cultural fads like hippies
and Beatlemania. They have their time then they are gone forever.
Writing in 2006, Masco wondered how a $6
trillion-dollar project, which was still very much a going concern, could so
easily fade from public awareness. It was clear that it wasn't necessary to
have a nuclear war in order for the nuclear arms race to have devastating impacts
on society. The effects of “radioactive nation building” were plain to see
everywhere. Masco defined them as “the long-term effects of participating in
national-cultural logics that mobilize resources in the name of security and
community, but that do so in ways that are unsustainable and that create both
social and material toxicity.” The final uncanny absurdity is that these
effects have become the new normal that no one thinks twice about.
It’s worth mentioning here that not
everyone is convinced that the nuclear program played such a significant role
in shaping the modern world. The counter-narrative says that the “nuclear
uncanny” is just another fanciful construct of the social sciences. There are
those who say that nukes are just another kind of weapon and that the Cold War
would have played out in the same way without nuclear weapons.[3] Such
critiques tend to be welcomed by the nuclear energy industry which is always eager
to make the public think of nuclear technology as something mundane.
Certainly, the war machinery in use in the
years just before 1945 was doing a fine job of turning the world upside-down,
creating its own “mechanized war uncanny.” The byproducts of conventional
industries left their own nightmarish legacy of PCBs, dioxin, ozone holes and of course
fossil fuel by-products. The Alberta Oil Sands will leave their own giant
sacrifice zone. Nonetheless, I don’t know how one could see the opening of the
nuclear era as anything less than a quantum leap that goes beyond any comparison
with conventional threats. Within ten years there was enough weaponry to send
mankind back to the Stone Age in the space of an afternoon, as Einstein
famously said. The creation of plutonium and other radioactive elements was
pure alchemy, and through weapon testing, mining and nuclear accidents they
found their way into the tissues of every living thing on the planet.
Those who would like to make nuclear
mundane may just like staking out a contrarian position for the sake of being
contrarian. The unfortunate thing about working in counter-factual history is
that there are no facts and real events to contend with. I prefer to base my
views on the testimony of people who actually witnessed nuclear explosions and
lived in the time when they first appeared. Everyone who witnessed a nuclear blast, even people who were proponents
of nuclear weapons, was utterly transformed and traumatized by the experience. Robert R. Wilson, a physicist who witnessed the Trinity test, said, “I
was a different person from then on.”[4] I would bet that the same is true of the societies
that have had to live with nuclear weapons since
the day after Trinity.
 |
A final New Mexican uncanny.
Road Runner and Coyote:
Why did it always take so long for gravity to work? |
______________
Another review of Nuclear Borderlands:
New book in press:
Joseph
Masco, The Theater of Operations:
National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Duke
University Press, 2014).
Audio: Léopold
Lambert interviews Joseph Masco:
Excerpts from the author's preface to the 2020 edition of Nuclear Borderlands:
“What is the status of the nuclear
future, as the atomic bomb reaches its seventy-fifth year? More directly, how
should one locate or delineate the nuclear borderlands after nearly a half
century of Cold War and two decades of a U.S. “war on terror,” at a moment when
international order is radically uncertain if not breaking down and climate
disruption is violently changing environmental conditions literally everywhere?
By “nuclear borderlands” I mean the competing ideas of insecurity, nature, and
futurity that define any nuclear referent, and the contest over ways of living,
fearing, and hoping that inform the strange phenomenon of national security
itself. The atomic bomb is infrastructural to modern life—defining military
state power, international relations, as well as scientific and industrial
institutions. But its ultimate meaning, along with its affective circuits, and
its place in emerging ideas about a planetary future remain the contested
domain of the American social contract. Nuclear nationalism, as I hope to show,
functions as a counterrevolutionary formation fundamentally at odds with both
democratic life and the emerging demands for a collective future on planet Earth…
… At the center of this strange
impasse is an American commitment to the bomb, an assumption that possession of
a state-of-the-art weapon of mass destruction can suture together a violent
world instead of generating an ever more violent world. This is the core
conceit of U.S. nuclear nationalism, a construct that has changed the nature of
American politics across the spheres of presidential power, congressional
authority, and militarism; has redefined the social contract to generate
mounting insecurities, modes of dispossession, and sacrifice; and that at its
center remains committed to an idea of permanent conflict. One of the chief
legacies of eight decades of nuclear nationalism has been the inability of many
people to think outside this logic, to imagine a world not founded on
totalizing threat, to see past radioactive nation-building in favor of a
different kind of planetary order. In 2020, the bomb may become an illegal
technology as well as the basis for a new geological epoch; however, it also remains
at the center of U.S. strategy, and its continued development is increasingly
unrestrained by nuclear treaties, nonproliferation efforts, or even official
lip service to the ideal of a nuclear free world. This means that experiences
of the nuclear uncanny will proliferate in both forms and intensities in the
coming decades, continuing to structure the conditions of possibility not only
for politics but for life itself.”
Notes
1.
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919).
https://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/uncanny2.htm
3.
John Mueller, Atomic obsession: Nuclear
alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (New York: Oxford University Press,
2010). In a brief review of this book
in Foreign Affairs, the reviewer
wrote, “In a world of bad people and dangerous weapons, there is no room for
complacency, but Mueller has found it anyway.” The reviewer in the Wall Street Journal noted Mueller was
alarmingly dismissive about the blast effects of bombs and the biological
effects of nuclear fallout: “Mr. Mueller also offers a thinly sourced
disquisition on the health effects of radioactive fallout. Exposure to low
doses of radiation, he says, might actually be ‘beneficial by activating
natural coping mechanisms in the body.’”
4. John H. Else, The
Day After Trinity, Directed by John H. Else (1981; Pyramid Films) 00:49:45~00:50:05.
