The advent of the nuclear era is often cast as humanity’s Faustian moment, when scientific achievement allowed humans to arrogate the elemental powers of nature and hold the fate of the earth in their hands. We are all products of, and hostage to, this legacy. This class examines the culture and politics of what it means to live in the nuclear age and inhabit our common, contradictory, and always potentially catastrophic inheritance. How is our social and political imagination shaped by the legacy of the splitting of the atom and the first use of atomic weapons? To answer this, the course investigates the lived spaces between the “thinkable” world of strategy and policy and the “unthinkable” world of worst case scenarios. The class is thus ethnographically concerned with the social and cultural dimensions of politics, science, and technology and three intersecting temporalities: remembering the nuclear past, living in the nuclear present, and imagining the nuclear future. The class readings traverse sites of war, experimentation, everyday life, risks, accidents, memory, waste, and hope as we chart changes in social awareness, public culture, politics and protest. The urgency of understanding nuclear issues seemed to dim with the end of the Cold War, but now has come roaring back. The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize went to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons among ever rising fears of nuclear war with North Korea and other high-profile nuclear frictions, including Iran, India and Pakistan. The recent meltdown in Fukushima sent radiation round the world and remains a crisis. Depleted uranium is used in conventional weapons, radiation past and present haunts lives, and the President of the United States calls for significant expansion of the nuclear arsenal while arms control treaties erode. With the hands of the Doomsday Clock set by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists at 2.5 minutes to midnight, this class aims to provide a timely, human-centered perspective on our parlous contemporary situation.