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Fallout, security, and alternative planetary futures 

 
Masco, Joseph. 2021. The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making. 

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 440, ISBN 978-1-4780-1114-9. 

 
Keywords: danger, fallout, nuclear warfare, security, United States 
 
The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making is a bold attempt to 

unravel a set of mechanisms that make contemporary crises seem inevitable and unremarkable. Its 

focus is nuclear warfare and environmental devastation in the U.S., and in particular a security 

culture and violent technopolitical order that impede alternatives to current ideologies of 

permanent war. By skillfully bringing into view historical moments when other avenues were 

momentarily open but quickly foreclosed, Joseph Masco gestures towards different understandings 

of (postnational) security and encourages us to imagine another planetary future. Written for a 

broad academic audience, the book is a 440-page-long tour de force, convincingly argued through 

a combination of ethnographic descriptions, conversations, media analyses, historical accounts and 

extensive visual material, together comprising 17 chapters of varying length, the majority of which 

are distributed between four parts. 

 

Following a prologue that summarizes the book’s main arguments, the first chapter, “The Age of 

Fallout,” outlines a critical framework departing from radioactive fallout’s connection to 

conceptions of an earth system totality. An illustrative example is the first U.S. hydrogen bomb 

experiment in 1952, which produced a fallout cloud that laid bare hitherto imperceptible 

interactions between earth, ocean and atmosphere. Along with later experiments, these detonations 

were “planetary-scale environmental events” (31). While the term terraformation is often 

associated with outer space, Masco suggests that nuclear nationalism and petrochemical 

capitalism, through their various cumulative and recursive effects, have already conducted a 



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terraforming project here on Earth. However, the author also identifies a lag between the material 

fact of fallout and collective recognitions of fallout’s long-lasting implications. This lag is “a major 

psychosocial achievement of the industrial age” (33), extricating the consequences of fallout from 

the realm of politics. 

 

Against this backdrop, Part I, “Dreaming Deserts and Death Machines,” foregrounds an 

amalgamation of nuclear nationalism and settler colonial visions of empty space. Over four 

chapters, and with reference to Pueblo voices and a tour in a former nuclear testing site, Masco 

elicits the psychosocial spaces of insecurity that have emerged as a consequence of U.S. militarism, 

focusing on new forms of toxicity, dispossession and collective endangerment, including how 

infrastructural, imaginary and mass mediated mechanisms have given way to new grounds of 

power and modes of self-fashioning. For instance, the third chapter, “States of Insecurity,” 

demonstrates how Nuevomexicano participation in the U.S. plutonium economy, while allowing 

access to middle-class life, has simultaneously subjected northern New Mexico to Anglo-

American and U.S. governmental interests. In accounting for this process, Masco points to a link 

between security and practices of national sacrifice, whereby the nuclear standoff of the Cold War 

worked to rule out the possibility for alternative definitions of security whilst also blocking 

attention to internal settler colonial relations. 

 

The second part, “Bunkers and Psyches,” attends to the infrastructures that have helped to 

reproduce a militarized nuclear society, along with frontier mentalities and assumptions about 

American exceptionalism. The bunker has been particularly effective in this regard, yielding 

fantasies about armored spaces, invulnerable bodies and an understanding of military 

technoscience as the only means to guarantee a collective future. The seventh chapter, “Life 

Underground,” provides illustrative examples of the ways in which the underground bunker has 

been transformed “into a site of both global power and social dreaming” (137); a place where the 

future is held hostage and reimagined. Thus, as an answer to the question of how nuclear fear has 

gradually “remade American society as permanently insecure, even as the United States has 

become the most powerful military and economic state on earth” (137), Masco suggests that U.S. 

military spending never aimed to end violence but to prepare citizens to endure it, thereby spurring 

ever-more calls for security and the concomitant militarization of national life. 



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“Celluloid Nightmares,” which is the title of Part III, investigates how films have helped to instill 

apocalyptic images of the end. These shape understandings of collective danger and become the 

grounds for interpreting other crises, such as global warming. Central are the countless rehearsals 

of absolute forms of danger in American popular culture, and how these engender indisputable 

countersubversive sentiments. Accordingly, in the twelfth chapter, “Catastrophe’s Apocalypse,” 

Masco draws a connection between Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 blockbuster Pacific Rim and 

President Ronald Reagan’s fantasy about Cold War antagonisms as surmountable through the 

arrival of new forms of extraterrestrial threat. These fantasies naturalize assumptions about threat 

as constituting the basis for community and belonging. In doing so, they also shift focus away 

from actual, ongoing forms of destruction. While “Americans focused on the immediacy of nuclear 

war in the twentieth century,” these occlusions downplayed “other incremental but existential 

dangers” (263) caused by the rapid growth of consumer society. 

 

The last part, “After Counterrevolution,” analyzes retired intelligence professionals’ repositioning 

of Cold War confrontations in relation to the War on Terror, as well as the role of Big Data 

surveillance in reordering the global security space. How the ensuing political deadlock becomes 

sustained is exemplified in the seventeenth chapter, “The Crisis in Crisis,” where the author points 

to the way narratives about crisis and existential danger have turned into a counterrevolutionary 

force: “instead of the crisis/utopia that empowered the high modernist culture of the mid-twentieth 

century,” the U.S. is now entrapped in “a crisis/paralysis circuit” (342) that has increasingly 

curtailed the political horizon. Against narratives about permanent crisis, the section offers an 

understanding of crisis as an effect of political, financial, technological and militaristic 

processes—an infrastructural achievement that, in so being, might also be redirected. In this 

connection, Masco suggests that we begin to articulate alternative futures and, in this way, help 

galvanize the necessary collective action for generating them. 

 

In unfolding these arguments, the book occasionally draws on short ethnographic accounts and 

conversations, for instance with Pueblo members raising their concern about environmental 

justice, or a Cold Warrior turned guide in a former nuclear test site in Nevada. There is also an 

interesting episode on the author’s personal experience of a burglarized apartment in Chicago, 



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which develops into a discussion on counterterror and domestic surveillance. Still, most of The 

Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making oscillates between 

descriptions of large-scale developments and critical analyses of terms such as danger, crisis and 

apocalypse. As with all forms of writing, there is a price to pay: there is not much to find here for 

readers seeking the nitty-gritty of ethnographic encounters. But, to be fair, this is obviously not 

Masco’s objective. In tackling issues around large-scale disasters, atomic revolution and U.S. 

national security, the book is instead a timely contribution to nascent discussions on the planetary. 

It productively analyzes some of the ways in which certain imaginaries have taken shape so as to 

draw out alternative possibilities. 

 

Chakad Ojani received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester. His 

doctoral research was an ethnographic study of fog capture and atmospheric attunements in 

coastal Peru. Chakad is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Jagiellonian University in 

Krakow, where he is undertaking a project on Swedish outer space infrastructures and 

imaginaries. 

 

 

 

© Chakad Ojani 2021  


