Nuclear New Mexico

ABSTRACT

In 1926, C. G. Jung visited Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico, whose chief said, “How can there be another god? Nothing can be without the sun.” Nineteen years later and some sixty miles away, on land appropriated by the US government from the Ildefonso Pueblo, the Los Alamos National Laboratory was built. Here the first atomic bombs were designed and constructed. Then, in the summer of 1945, the first nuclear device was tested in the desert of southern New Mexico, lighting “a thousand suns.” In The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico, Joseph Masco, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, offers a unique ethnographic analysis of the people and land that was appropriated for the birthplace and continued research and development of nuclear weapons that have prompted, along with global warming, the so-called Doomsday Clock to be set at two minutes to oblivion.

KEY WORDS:

• C. G. Jung
• Los Alamos National Laboratory
• New Mexico
• nuclear weapons
• Pueblo Indians

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joel Weishaus

JOEL WEISHAUS is a poet, literary critic, and visual artist. He is presently the artist-in-residence at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, California, where he delivers lectures and counsels students on creativity and scholarship in the arts. His latest book, co-authored with Susan Rowland, Jungian Art-Based Research: Joel Weishaus’ Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico, will be published by Routledge in 2020. Correspondence: [email protected].