Abstract
ABSTRACTWhile I was reading Joseph Masco's disturbing book The Future of Fallout, news media reported that China had successfully tested a hypersonic missile, a military technology so advanced it could bypass the US missile defense system. This, many nervous commentators noted, put China ahead of the US in the global arms race, justifying further urgent military investments to catch‐ up. Masco's book is a damning appraisal of such mobilizations of existential threat from the outside and the ways they conceptually underpin the US industrial‐military complex. After World War II fantasies of imminent threat have taken different forms—from the scenarios of nuclear war in the Cold War to those mobilized since 2001 in the so‐called War on Terror. The Future of Fallout examines how these forms of endangerment have seamlessly worked together to colonize American everyday life at the psycho‐social and affective level, while diverting attention from actual forms of planetary violence that the petrochemical industry and the military complex commit.
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