vi, 431 pages : 24 cm

"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 US 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 form of nuclear weapons and petrochemical capitalism) informs life in the Twenty-first century, Masco identifies key moments where other futures were still possible, and seeks to activate an alternative, postnational security, political imaginary in support of collective life today"--

Includes bibliographical references and index

Age of Fallout -- Part I: Dreaming Deserts and Death Machines -- 5:29:45 a.m. -- States of Insecurity -- Desert Modernism -- The Billboard Campaign -- Part II: Bunkers and Psyches -- Rehearsing the End -- Life Underground -- Atomic Health -- End of Ends -- Part III: Celluloid Nightmares -- Target Audience -- The Age of (a) Man -- Catastrophe's Apocalypse -- Counterinsurgency, The Spook, and Blowback -- Part IV: Surviving the Counterrevolution -- Shaking, Trembling, Shouting -- "Active Measures" -- Boundless Informant -- The Crisis in Crisis -- iv -- Epilogue: An Alternate "What If"

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