Joseph Masco Libri

Focusing on the sociocultural impacts of the atomic bomb, this anthropological study delves into the lives of those in and around Los Alamos, New Mexico. Joseph Masco investigates the long-term effects of the Manhattan Project on various communities, including scientists, Pueblo Indian Nations, Nuevomexicano residents, and antinuclear activists. He highlights their efforts to reshape the discourse on national security in the post-Cold War era, revealing the complex interactions between technology, culture, and political activism.

Joseph Masco examines the psychosocial, material, and affective consequences of the advent of nuclear weapons, the Cold War security state, climate change on contemporary US democratic practices and public imaginaries.

The anthropologist Joseph Masco locates the origins of the present-day U.S. counterterrorism apparatus in the Cold War's balance of terror. He shows how, after the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. Global War on Terror mobilized a wide range of affective, conceptual, and institutional resources established during the Cold War to enable a new planetary 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.