Masco's article is about two types of planetary-level crisis: nuclear and climate disasters. Masco shows the reader how the knowledge that had to be acquired (in the cold war logic) about the former financed and influenced the latter, and how this knowledge is mustered as power in order to mobilize people and resources. Our conception of the biosphere ("a new vision of the globe as integrated political technological, and environmental space,") Masco tells us, was formed by the research in the nuclear arms race. One serious problem with this appropriation is that nuclear weapons were meant as a national security solution, while climate change is to become an international security problem (among other things.) There is a strong connection between the two, though. The first environmental concerns of global scale are those resulting from nuclear detonations, most of them "tests." These concerns set the ground for the climate change science that we have today.
A contradiction emerged from this ambiguous relationship between nuclear security and scientific investigation. Geosciences studies where mandatory to the development of nuclear weapons, but as research advanced the danger presented by those weapons became clear enough to start to pose a danger to their own development. This ambiguity was reflected in the history of nuclear research, as shown by Masco: while scientific tests in the 50's such as the fallout studies or operation Upshot-Knothole were intended to pave way for an increasing nuclear arsenal, the 'nuclear winter' researches of the 80's were intended to contract arsenals for the sake of environmental safety. Observing knowledge fabricating power relations, we see that nuclear knowledge was employed to create a device that would repel aggression and impose decisions; as the outcome was an arms race, environmental knowledge was used to dissuade further nuclear armament.
Masco points out the great challenge we face today: preventing the response to climate change from becoming a militarized one. (Masco explores a similar 'bunker society' in another article.) In a likely future, climate change will disrupt food, water, and energy chains, setting off a harsh competition for resources. Instead of preventing this outcome, there is a possibility that governments will try to remedy it, by protecting resources if they have them, or securing resources from others if they don't. Masco puts this possibility as an undesirable, but a somewhat effective one -- as if the US could defend itself from resource-hungry countries with nuclear weapons. I would add that besides being a terrible measure, it probably wouldn't work. The degree of disruption caused by severe climate change would be enough to endanger societies, and the US would more likely be facing hungry and scattered mobs of invaders-refugees instead of national armies; nukes would only further endanger the troubled environment.
An interesting part of Masco's article is his analysis of how deeply-rooted is nuclear imagery in the american mindset. Masco investigates its origins, going from the images of operation Upshot-Knothole to images of Katrina, passing by images of the Apolo mission. It is curious to observe how the devastation of New Orleans was understood in terms of a nuclear attack (along with its imagery and its vocabulary,) especially how americans could only imagine such a destruction by invoking images of nuclear armaggedon. I can not help but imagine if this would have happened if it were Al Gore's presidency instead of Bush's. Would concerns about WMDs be in the spotlight? Would environmental concerns have prevailed over security concerns?
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