Book review: the theater of operations: national security affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror

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.” Michail Zontos argues this is an important, well-argued book which comes as a welcome continuation of Joseph Masco’s previous highly praised and awarded The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico.