Foreword: The Atomic Now

Many people may remember where they were when news reached them of the 2011 nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. I was in Kazakhstan when it occurred, deep into my own ethnographic fieldwork about radiation and environmental change. The village where I lived sits on the unmarked border of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site. It was March and crisp snow still covered the ground. This is where the Soviets tested more than 450 nuclear weapons, 113 above ground that appeared as fiery mushroom clouds in the sky. The sum of the energy released by Soviet