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Joseph Masco is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction, or, Why Do the History of Heterosexuality? -- Part I: Difference and Desire since the Seventeenth Century -- 1. Toward a Cultural Poetics of Desire in a World before Heterosexuality -- 2. The Strange Career of Interracial Heterosexuality -- 3. Age Disparity, Marriage, and the Gendering of Heterosexuality -- 4. "Deviant Heterosexuality" and Model- Minority Families: Asian American History and Racialized Heteronormativity -- Part II: Difference, Bodies, and Popular Culture -- 5. Defining Sexes, Desire, and Heterosexuality in Colonial British America -- 6. Spectacles of Restraint: Race, Excess, and Heterosexuality in Early American Print Culture -- 7. Heterosexual Inversions: Satire, Parody, and Comedy in the 1950s and 1960s -- Part III: Embracing and Contesting Legitimacy -- 8. Holding the Line: Mexicans and Heterosexuality in the Nineteenth- Century West -- 9. Suburban Swing: Heterosexual Marriage and Spouse Swapping in the 1950s and 19Frontmatter -- Contents -- Prologue -- 1 The Age of Fallout -- I DREAMING DESERTS AND DEATH MACHINES -- 2 5:29:45 a.m. -- 3 States of Insecurity -- 4 Desert Modernism -- 5 The Billboard Campaign -- II BUNKERS AND PSYCHES -- 6 Rehearsing the End -- 7 Life Underground -- 8 Atomic Health -- 9 The End of Ends -- III CELLULOID NIGHTMARES -- 10 Target Audience -- 11 The Age of (a) Man -- 12 Catastrophe's Apocalypse -- 13 Counterinsurgency, The Spook, and Blowback -- IV AFTER COUNTERREVOLUTION -- 14 Shaking, Trembling, Shouting -- 15 "Active Measures" -- 16 Boundless Informant -- 17 The Crisis in Crisis -- Epilogue: An Alternate "What If -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- References -- Index

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- INTRODUCTION The "New" Normal -- CHAPTER ONE "Survival Is Your Business" -- CHAPTER TWO Bad Weather -- CHAPTER THREE Sensitive but Unclassified -- CHAPTER FOUR Biosecurity Noir -- CHAPTER FIVE Living Counterterror -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- INDEX

How did the most powerful nation on earth come to embrace terror as the organizing principle of its security policy? In The Theater of Operations, 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. Tracing how specific aspects of emotional management, existential danger, state secrecy, and threat awareness have evolved as core aspects of the American social contract, Masco draws on archival, media, and ethnographic resources to offer a new portrait of American national security culture. Undemocratic and unrelenting, this counterterror state prioritizes speculative practices over facts, and ignores everyday forms of violence across climate, capital, and health in an unprecedented effort to anticipate and eliminate terror threats--real, imagined, and emergent.

This paper assesses the conceptual and technological negotiation of an absolute end. The idea of a total ending is sublime: it is located outside of language and powerful precisely because of its sheer incomprehensibility. Yet, through the 20th century the United States built large-scale technological systems capable of achieving an absolute end to civilization. This paper engages both the idea of an end, and the means to an end, informing US nuclear strategy. It begins with an assessment of Cold War nuclear war plans that, if enacted, would certainly have eliminated most, if not all, life on Earth. I then examine how this expert fixation on nuclear crisis was itself circumscribed by new technological systems—notably secret space satellites that provided images of Earth in its totality as well as a vital check on the American projections of Soviet power. The exploration of outer space was thus a crucial means of checking American fantasies of an imminent and total danger, establishing a new limit on thought while opening up the possibility of an "end of ends" in the nuclear age.

This essay tracks the conversion of the United States from a countercommunist to a counterterrorist state formation via an examination of the expanding logics of state secrecy. Starting with analysis of a new category of state information known as "sensitive but unclassified," the essay theorizes a secrecy/threat matrix as a core project of the national security state. In doing so, it assesses the ideological linkages between "weapons of mass destruction" and the "secret" from the Cold War through the "war on terror." The essay argues that the long-term effect of state secrecy is to fundamentally devalue knowledge and expertise and assesses the impact of such devaluation on the democratic state form.