In the domestic realm of U.S. politics, the nuclear weapons complex has always maintained two extreme attributes: phenomenal cost and social invisibility. While seemingly opposed, these aspects are actually reinforcing, a structural effect of compartmentalized secrecy, patronage networks, and an implicit nuclear security consensus among policy makers. Stephen Schwartz (1998) has documented that between 1940 and 1996 the United States spent at least $5.8 trillion on nuclear weapons. This makes the bomb the third largest federal expenditure since 1940, ranking just after nonnuclear military spending and Social Security—accounting for roughly eleven cents out of every federal dollar spent (Schwartz 1998: 3). Yet despite this colossal investment and the widespread distribution of nuclear production, testing, and waste sites across the continental United States, most Americans have little or no knowledge of the historical or continuing investments in weapons of mass destruction by the United States. It remains a disturbing truth that today most Americans can say more about Iraq’s nuclear ambitions (which, in 2003, were the target of the first explicit policy of preemptive warfare in U.S. history) than those of the United States. Most would be surprised to learn that the 1990s witnessed not a post–Cold War movement away from nuclear weapons but rather the establishment of a new nuclear status quo in the United States, one requiring a massive reinvestment in the nuclear program. Nuclear weapons budgets at the national laboratories, for example, have exceeded their Cold War averages since 1995 and have doubled since 1998. In short, the most active nuclear weapons program on the planet is in the United States, and much of that nuclear infrastructure is located in New Mexico. For New Mexicans committed to disarmament and peace activism, the dilemma of the post–Cold War period has thus been how to engage this resurgent U.S. nuclear project in a way that breaks the structures of silencing and patronage that keep America’s investments in weapons of mass destruction from public view.

Beginning in 1998, visitors to New Mexico could encounter one of the most direct and imaginative efforts to engage New Mexico’s nuclear economy simply by driving out of the Albuquerque International Airport. Positioned on the main exit route from the airport, a large billboard confronted motorists with an image of a rainbow-enhanced desert and the words (see fig. 1): “Welcome to New Mexico: America’s Nuclear Colony.� Seeking to defamiliarize the desert landscape through shock, the billboard both evokes and inverts the familiar portrait of New Mexico as the “Land of Enchantment,� a zone of pristine nature and exotic culture. A Web site address on the billboard—www.lasg.org—serves as both a signature and an invitation for viewers to learn more about the scale of the U.S. nuclear project in New Mexico (which includes two of the three national weapons laboratories, the largest missile testing range in the continental United States, the largest arsenal of U.S. nuclear weapons, and the most active U.S. nuclear waste dumps). By recontextualizing a centrally located commercial space, the billboard challenges residents and visitors alike to recognize an invisible presence in New Mexico, one that colonizes the austere beauty of the landscape with the nuclear science, toxicity, and militarism of a global superpower (see Masco 1999, 2004).