In The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making Joseph Masco examines the strange American intimacy with and commitment to existential danger. Tracking the simultaneous production of nuclear emergency and climate disruption since 1945, he focuses on the psychosocial accommodations as well as the technological revolutions that have produced these linked planetary-scale disasters. Masco assesses the memory practices, visual culture, concepts of danger, and toxic practices that, in combination, have generated a U.S. national security culture that promises ever more safety and comfort in everyday life but does so only by generating and deferring a vast range of violences into the collective future. Interrogating how this existential lag (i.e., the material and conceptual fallout of the twentieth century in the form of nuclear weapons and petrochemical capitalism) informs life in the twenty-first century, Masco identifies key moments when other futures were still possible and seeks to activate an alternative, postnational security political imaginary in support of collective life today.

Acknowledgments  vii
Prologue  1
1. Age of Fallout  17
I. Dreaming Deserts and Death Machines
2. 5:29:45 a.m.  45
3. States of Insecurity  51
4. Desert Modernism  83
5. The Billboard Campaign  113
II. Bunkers and Psyches
6. Rehearsing the End  127
7. Life Underground  137
8. Atomic Health  157
9. End of Ends  179
III. Celluloid Nightmares
10. Target Audience  199
11. The Age of (a) Man  219
12. Catastrophe's Apocalypse  237
13. Counterinsurgency, The Spook, and Blowback  265
IV. After Counterrevolution
14. Shaking, Trembling, Shouting  287
15. "Active Measures"  301
16. Boundless Informant  319
17. The Crisis in Crisis  339
Epilogue: An Alternate  363
"What If"
Acknowledgments  371
Notes  37
References  389
Index  415