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Plutopia - Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Paperback)
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Plutopia - Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Paperback)
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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 least 200 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.
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