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.
Introduction
Part I: Incarcerated Space and Western Nuclear Frontiers
1. Mr. Matthias Goes to Washington
2. Labor on the Lam
3. Labor Shortage
4. Defending the Nation
5. The City Plutonium Built
6. Work and the Women Left Holding Plutonium
7. Hazards
8.
The Food Chain
9. Of Flies, Mice and Men
Part II: The Soviet Working Class Atom and the American Response
10. The Arrest of a Journal
11. The Gulag and the Bomb
12. The Bronze Age Atom
13. Keeping Secrets
14. Beria's Visit
15. Reporting for Duty
16. Empire
of Calamity
17. "A Few Good Men" in Pursuit of America's Permanent War Economy
18. Stalin's Rocket Engine: Rewarding the Plutonium People
19. Big Brother in the American Heartland
20. Neighbors
21. The Vodka Society
Part III: The Plutonium Disasters
22. Managing a
Risk Society
23. The Walking Wounded
24. Two Autopsies
25. Wahluke Slope: Into Harm's Way
26. Quiet Flows the Techa
27. Resettlement
28. The Zone of Immunity
29. The Socialist Consumers' Republic
30. The Uses of an Open Society
31. The Kyshtym Belch, 1957
32.
Karabolka, Beyond the Zone
33. Private Parts
34. "From Crabs to Caviar, We Had Everything"
Part IV: Dismantling the Plutonium Curtain
35. Plutonium into Portfolio Shares
36. Chernobyl Redux
37. 1984
38. The Forsaken
39. Sick People
40. Cassandra in
Coveralls
41. Nuclear Glasnost
42. All the Kings' Men
43. Futures
Notes
Index
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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.
The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction - Robert J. McMahon
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