Technology and Culture

In this book Lucie Genay, who teaches U.S. civilization at the University of Limoges in France, undertakes an ambitiously panoramic historical overview of seventy years of nuclear institution building in New Mexico. As she points out, New Mexico acquired pretty much every part of the nuclear weapons life cycle: uranium mines and mills; two nuclear weapons laboratories; three sites where nuclear weapons were tested; the largest missile test range in the world; nuclear weapons storage facilities; three Air Force bases from which to launch nuclear attacks; and lots of nuclear waste sites. Her overarching frames for interpreting the construction of this complex are "nuclear colonialism" and "internal colonialism." She is referring here to the processes through which one of the poorest states in the United States, deeply reliant on agriculture and with a population that was 50 percent Hispano and Native American in 1940, was "colonized" by the military, Anglo scientists, and military-industrial corporations. Genay concedes that New Mexico's nuclear story has been told many times—but usually from the point of view of scientists and political leaders, while the perspectives of Pueblo Indians, displaced ranchers, Hispano homesteaders, and humble workers at the weapons labs "have fallen into a historical void" (p. 94). She is determined to give us a social history from below.

Zigzagging between various sites in New Mexico within each chapter, Genay's narrative of nuclear colonialism is built from the following dismaying elements: ranchers near the first nuclear test being dispossessed of their land with minimal compensation; Hispano homesteaders being paid $7 an acre while a white landowner got $225 an acre to clear land for Los Alamos in the 1940s; Native American Pueblos losing sacred sites to the burgeoning [End Page 386] nuclear complex; the best housing and education at the best public schools (subsidized by Washington, D.C.) going to Anglo scientists' families, not Hispanos, in Los Alamos and Albuquerque; Hispano workers at Los Alamos finding that they were often relegated to the lowest paying jobs and denied promotions, while being the first to get laid off when budgets tightened; and operational procedures leaving Hispanos and Native Americans most exposed to toxic waste and nuclear risk. Particularly horrifying here is the story of uranium mining on Navajo land (home to 1,000 uranium mines). In 1979, in the Chuck Rock spill, a dam broke, and 1,000 tons of radioactive tailings and 93 million gallons of acidic and radioactive water were spilled near Navajo homes. Unlike the Three Mile Island accident a few months earlier, no state of emergency was declared, and there was almost no media coverage.

But there was another side to the nuclear colonial bargain. By 2011, Los Alamos County was, per capita, the third wealthiest in the country. Pueblo Indians and Hispano homesteaders who gave up their traditional way of life to work for Los Alamos National Laboratory may indeed have become "double outsiders" (p. 115), discriminated against by their Anglo bosses and alienated from their communities of origin, but they got jobs with good wages and benefits and ended up with nice houses and cars they could never otherwise have afforded. In the archived oral history interviews that Genay mines extensively, many workers struggle to weigh the value of their increased standard of living against workplace humiliations and estrangement from some of their kin that they experience.

The last third of the book takes on a more polemical tone as Genay briskly catalogs the health and environmental costs of New Mexico's nuclear activities and maps a diffuse return of the repressed: the mushrooming of lawsuits and citizens groups seeking to block the activities of the weapons complex or to squeeze compensation for past injuries from it. Pointing out that New Mexico was, in 2011, the second poorest state in the country, Los Alamos' wealth notwithstanding, and that it was pockmarked with waste sites, it is clear that Genay sees...