Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters book cover

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

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Price
$12.71
Format
Paperback
Pages
416
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-0190233105
Dimensions
9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
Weight
1.25 pounds

Description

Winner of the Ellis W. Hawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians Winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize of the American Society for Environmental History Winner of the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize of the Association for Slavic Studies, East European, and Eurasian Studies Winner of the Heldt Prize in the category of Best Book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Studies from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies Winner of the Robert G. Athearn Prize of the Western History Association "Turning up a surprising amount of hitherto hidden material and talkative survivors, Brown writes a vivid, often hair-raising history of the great plutonium factories and the privileged cities built around them... Readers will squirm to learn of the high radiation levels workers routinely experienced and the casualness with which wastes poured into the local air, land and rivers... An angry but fascinating account of negligence, incompetence and injustice justified (as it still is) in the name of national security." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "An unflinching and chilling account." -- Seattle Times "Harrowing... Meticulously researched... Plutopia has important messages for those managing today's nuclear facilities, arguing for caution and transparency." -- Nature "The book tells two intertwined stories. One is an appalling narrative of environmental disasters... The second narrative is about the towns, the townspeople, and the creation of a spatially segmented landscape that enabled those disasters... This is admirable comparative history." --Carl Abbott, Environmental History "Fascinating." -- Dissent "One of the Cold War's more striking perversities never made it to public view. ... Brown is a good writer, and she describes with precision the construction of the two sites (a difficult process in the U.S. case, an unbelievably horrid one in the Russian case), the hazardous occupations undertaken by their inhabitants, and the consciously contrived bubbles of socioeconomic inequality both places became." -- Foreign Affairs "Brown's account is unique, partisan and occasionally personal in that she includes some of her thoughts about interviews she conducted... But because she is open and thorough about her sources, those are strengths to be celebrated, not weaknesses to be deplored. It also means her book is engaging, honest and, in the end, entirely credible." -- New Scientist "An amazing book... Brown found many parallels between Richland and Ozersk that disrupt the conservative Cold War dichotomy between the 'free world' and the totalitarian one. Her research included not only uncovering previously secret documents in both countries but also tracking down and interviewing old-time residents of Ozersk and Richland. Her picture of the treatment of plutonium workers on both sides of the Iron Curtain is enough to make you gnash your teeth or cry." --Jon Wiener, American Historical Review "Arresting, engagingly narrated... Kate Brown skillfully mixes Cold War policy assessment and associated political intrigue with sociological study of the lives of those who lived and worked in those places... Plutopia is history told through the voice of drama and investigative reporting." --Stephen E. Roulac, New York Journal of Books " Plutopia is reporting and research at its best, both revealing a hidden history and impacting the important discussions about nuclear power that should be happening today." --Glenn Dallas, San Francisco Book Review "An untold and profoundly important piece of Cold War history, Plutopia invites readers to consider the nuclear footprint left by the arms race and the enormous price of paying for it." -- H-Soyuz "Kate Brown has written a provocative and original study of two cities -- one American, one Soviet -- at the center of their countries' nuclear weapons complexes. The striking parallels she finds between them help us -- impel us -- to see the Cold War in a new light. Plutopia will be much discussed. It is a fascinating and important book." --David Holloway, author of Stalin and the Bomb "Kate Brown has produced a novel and arresting account of the consequences of Cold War Nuclear policies on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Interweaving documentary research in government archives, reviews and revisions of the public record, and a host of personal interviews with the citizens -- perpetrators, victims, and witnesses -- Brown's Plutopia makes a lasting contribution to the continuing chronicle of the human and environmental disasters of the atomic age." --Peter Bacon Hales, author of Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project "It may be the best piece of research and writing in the nuclear history field in the last 25 years - perhaps the best ever... Extremely impressive." -- Rodney Carlisle, Prof. Emeritus, Rutgers University, author of Encyclopedia of the Atomic Age Kate Brown is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the author of A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland , winner of the American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Prize. A 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, her work has also appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, American Historical Review, Chronicle of Higher Education , and Harper's Magazine Online .

Features & Highlights

  • While many transnational histories of the nuclear arms race have been written, Kate Brown provides the first definitive account of the great plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet Union. In
  • Plutopia,
  • Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia-the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Fully employed and medically monitored, the residents of Richland and Ozersk enjoyed all the pleasures of consumer society, while nearby, migrants, prisoners, and soldiers were banned from plutopia--they lived in temporary "staging grounds" and often performed the most dangerous work at the plant. Brown shows that the plants' segregation of permanent and temporary workers and of nuclear and non-nuclear zones created a bubble of immunity, where dumps and accidents were glossed over and plant managers freely embezzled and polluted. In four decades, the Hanford plant near Richland and the Maiak plant near Ozersk each issued at least200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment--equaling four Chernobyls--laying waste to hundreds of square miles and contaminating rivers, fields, forests, and food supplies. Because of the decades of secrecy, downwind and downriver neighbors of the plutonium plants had difficulty proving what they suspected, that the rash of illnesses, cancers, and birth defects in their communities were caused by the plants' radioactive emissions. Plutopia was successful because in its zoned-off isolation it appeared to deliver the promises of the American dream and Soviet communism; in reality, it concealed disasters that remain highly unstable and threatening today. An untold and profoundly important piece of Cold War history,
  • Plutopia
  • invites readers to consider the nuclear footprint left by the arms race and the enormous price of paying for it.

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
60%
(178)
★★★★
25%
(74)
★★★
15%
(45)
★★
7%
(21)
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-7%
(-21)

Most Helpful Reviews

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Worth a read if interested in the history of nukes.

Good book to add to my collection on the dawn and continuing saga of the nuclear age in Washington State and America.
3 people found this helpful
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Interesting Read

The book leans a little politically, but is still an amazing read. I really enjoyed it.
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Mourning an Eternity of Radioactive Pollution

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” These were Oppenheimer’s oft-quoted recitation of the Bhagavad Gita following the first nuclear weapons test in New Mexico in 1946, Trinity.

There are two kinds of death: regenerative death—such as the microbial decomposition of plant matter which creates a rich humus for new life, and degenerative death—the sort that saps the vibrancy from living systems. Fission products (the refuse from nuclear fission, such as those resultant from plutonium production, atomic bombs, and nuclear accidents) contribute to the latter.

Unlike many deadly hazards, such as fire, our bodies have no significant reaction or awareness to radioactivity until we’ve received extremely high doses, such as the kind that result in radiation poisoning. For me, this make them both fascinating and scary.

I came across this book when reading a chapter in Michael Lewis’ “Fifth Risk” on the Department of Energy, and the fact that it oversees the US nuclear arsenal. Having grown up within the fallout radius of Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, I’ve had a personal interest in learning more about this world.

The author, Brown, is a Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In this book, she tracks the parallel histories of Hanford (near Richland in Washington State), and Mayak (near Ozyersk in the Ural Mountains of Russia). These were the first two sites in the world to produce plutonium, supplying materials necessary for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. Brown chose a somewhat surprising angle, choosing to focus on social ironies and parallels of the two projects. The title, “Plutopia,” refers to a utopia created by plutonium production. Although employees in both facilities received higher pay than locals in the surrounding area, any wish of a utopia was dashed by the chronic exposure to radiation and the resultant diseases.

I read this book as a process of mourning of the practically eternal damage we’ve done to our peoples and ecosystems through radioactive pollution. Plutonium 239—the sort produced at Hanford and the Mayak plant—has a half-life of 24,110 years. 13.5% of fission products have a half-life exceeding 1.5 million years. In other words, much of the radioactive pollution we’ve created will endure on a geological time scale.

The book illustrates an impossible logic under which our governments operate on a daily basis. The only way to justify the immeasurable loss of life and vitality caused by plutonium production was the threat of loosing a nuclear war. Both projects have permanently contaminated thousands of square miles of land and water bodies.

In high doses, radiation leads to painful death. At moderate doses, radiation leads to leukemia, failure of the thyroid, autoimmune disorders, as well as numerous other ailments. At low doses, radiation leads to infertility and genetic mutation, resultant in genetic mutations and physiological disfigurement in offspring.

How did the USSR and United States manage unmanageable risks?

In the US, we hired corporations to run plutonium production, beginning with DuPont, followed by GE, followed by a series of other entities. When corporate and government scientists found that the plant was resulting in unaffordable environmental costs, they hired new scientists to produce new studies refuting those claims.

In Russia, they just didn’t tell anyone. Hundreds of thousands of villagers lived in deadly zones for decades without any assistance.

How did these governments run these projects?

Both were highly secretive. We failed to be secretive enough, in that Russians nuclear program directly copied our blueprints, rather than developing their own methods.

In the USSR, Mayak was run by the Gulag, which had 5 million prisoners at the end of World War II and employed one quarter of non-agricultural workers. Whereas in the US, we had some semblance of precaution, the USSR was able to burn through hundreds of thousands of soldiers and prisoners without even the most basic safety measures. The fate of this class of workers is poorly documented and likely atrocious.

Ultimately, our nuclear projects were morally repugnant, and their results be with us for the indefinite future. If you’re looking to bask in every detail of this misery, “Plutopia” is an excellent book on the subject.
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Social engineering at its best/worse: whether in Russia or in the US

Brown's concept is brilliant: put side by side US and Russian nuclear fuel secret production cities. The parallels are amazing. Same secrecy, same way to attract people to work in a city that officially doesn't exist. The same disregard for the welfare of surrounding communities, the same resulting environmental disaster. There are so many facets to this book, it is hard to give a true description of its depth. I'll choose one: beyond the obvious "make atomic fuel at any cost", there is the idea of planned communities. Check-out "Invented Edens" from Kargon & Molella and "Hoover Dam" from Stevens. Brown goes in depth in the social engineering of single purpose cities and how, in the end, they are incompatible with the concept of personal freedom; whether in Russia or US.
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"We are all citizens of Plutopia"

In her book, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, University of Maryland history professor Kate Brown, has crafted a unique comparative history of Cold War plutonium production in two towns, Plutopias, dedicated to its production, one in the United States and the other in the Soviet Union. Her Plutopias were carefully planned company towns, that foreshadowed the suburbia that spread across the U.S. in the postwar era. She argues that the U.S and Soviet Plutopias were more similar than different. More importantly, she argues that the aftereffects of Plutopias are with us today, in our bodies, and in our environment.
Among the striking similarities she demonstrates is that American and Soviet authorities chose similar locations for their Plutopias; those with sparse populations, poor agricultural prospects, and abundant flowing water. (16) (117) In fact, Brown notes that Soviet authorities used aerial photos of the U.S plutonium city in Washington’s Columbia Basin. (99) Another similarity is the appalling lack of knowledge about the human consequences of exposure to plutonium, especially of ingesting the substance. Even after the adverse effects became known, Brown notes that the medical information was manipulated and obscured, to the point of causing distrust and dissent. (332) Most of the medical research was tailored to suit the company narrative.
Brown uses both government and company documents, but it is her use of eyewitness interviews and personal observations that are most effective. She went to the home of a woman who participated in a Soviet cleanup that essentially removed her village from the map. Since that time, the woman, now dying of cancer, has been treated as unclean. Brown felt that by refusing to touch the tea and potatoes the woman offered her, she was no better than the government officials who have treated this suffering woman that way. (245) This regretful realization, more than any other evidence, supports Brown’s argument that “we are all citizens of Plutopia.” (338)

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