Part of radiation’s potential danger comes in no small way from its invisibility, and this paper consequently explores strategies in recent installation art, collage, photography and literature for making radioactive danger visible. Drawing on the artwork of Jim Sanborn, Taryn Simon, and Lisi Raskin, I argue that their aesthetic projects go beyond merely confronting the epistemological problem of visibility, however. Instead their complicated aesthetic strategies for revealing site-specific invisible danger have the paradoxical effect of decoupling that danger from particular spaces and times, thereby revealing a nuclear economy as a continuing and constitutive part of everyday life even in post-Cold-War America. That is to say that even as their solutions to the problem of making radiation visible enable us to see its danger, they also reveal to us the poverty of thinking of the Cold War’s material nuclear legacy as restricted to a few key emblematic sites (Los Alamos, Hanford, Oak Ridge) and as something we have transcended. These points are extended in the second half of the paper where I turn to recent novels (Carter Scholz’s Radiance, Marianne Wiggins’s Evidence of Things Unseen, and Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon) that make nuclear (in)visibility central to their plots while complicating dominant conceptions of where (and when) the Cold War nuclear project was located.