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

Kate Brown

4.17 · Rating details · 825 ratings · 98 reviews

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 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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Hardcover, 406 pages

Published April 5th 2013 by Oxford University Press, USA (first published 2013)

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Sep 02, 2013 Michael rated it liked it

I found something about this book puzzling and troubling - but I am having difficulty putting it into words. Because of my background in Russian studies and a personal connection to Richland, Washington, I was interested in reading this comparison of these two unusual cities that served as the homes of the workers who manufactured plutonium for the Soviet Union and the United States.

I am not an academic Russian specialist myself, but I was an area studies librarian specializing in Russia for abo I found something about this book puzzling and troubling - but I am having difficulty putting it into words. Because of my background in Russian studies and a personal connection to Richland, Washington, I was interested in reading this comparison of these two unusual cities that served as the homes of the workers who manufactured plutonium for the Soviet Union and the United States.

I am not an academic Russian specialist myself, but I was an area studies librarian specializing in Russia for about ten years and have visited Russia or lived there for periods of time starting in the mid-1970s. In 1997-98 I was in Ekaterinburg for eight months and visited a closed city much like Ozersk, Novouralsk. So I have seen one of these closed cities myself. Besides that, my wife grew up in Richland - and I myself have visited there many times, although not so often since we moved to the east coast (of the U.S.).

As someone with some understanding of what the Soviet Union was (although not going back as far as WWII, of course) I think many readers might be confused by the suggestion of strong parallels between Richland and Ozersk. The journal Foreign Affairs has a brief positive review that makes the following points (in italics) that consider somewhat simplistic:

Over their multidecade existence, each pumped into their environs a volume of radioactive isotopes twice as large as that released by the Chernobyl disaster. - The author, a historian, provides some documentation of nuclear contamination but (in effect) discounts the relative importance of the Kyshtym explosion - whatever else happened at Hanford, nothing blew up.

They ravaged the health of their workers under the half-knowing eyes of superiors. Admittedly this is the wording of a review, not the book itself, but it reflects the kind of emotional approach to the topic that I found the book to have - and the kind of parallelism drawn between what happened in the two different countries that seems less compelling than stated.

But both cities offered their residents privileges they would not have enjoyed in any normal setting: tellingly, when given a choice to stay or leave, most preferred to stay and keep their material abundance at the expense of worrying about their health and that of their families. This theme I found particularly odd - given the relative standards of living in the post WWII Soviet Union and the U.S., any comparison like this shouldn't be made in the kind of direct way that it is in this book. More importantly, I simply don't think that was what happened in most cases.

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Apr 30, 2013 Rebecca Huston rated it really liked it

Shelves: america, 20th-century, non-fiction, russia, science, washington-state, 2015-around-the-us-in-52-books

This is one of those books that stay with you, and not in a good way. The author looks at two 'nuclear' cities, built in the 1940's and '50's in Washington state and in the Soviet Union, to process the nuclear material -- plutonium -- for atomic bombs. How they were built, how the residents lived, and the terrible accidents that would have a long reaching effects on everyone. I found it a fascinating, but damn depressing. It's well written, but not for everyone. Four stars overall.

For the longe ...more

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Dec 29, 2017 Debbie Deerwester rated it really liked it

Fascinating read about about two towns Richland, WA and Ozersk, Russia in a race to create nuclear bombs and the first two cities to create plutonium. The author interviewed hundreds of people and did a lot of research to tell the tale of these two towns with similar stories. In the race to be the first to produce and meet deadlines, safety was overlooked leaving workers and the community exposed to radioactivity.

Having been raised in Richland, WA, it was interesting to read about all that was ...more

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Mar 06, 2020 Sonja rated it liked it

Very sad. It was a tuff read.

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Mar 25, 2013 Rita rated it it was amazing

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the declassification of studies (done over 60 years) where the US conducted 2,000 radiation experiments on as many as 20,000 US citizens, including pregnant women. That's only one fact mentioned briefly in the book. There is so much more to the story of plutonium manufacturing and the people who were used to make sure two nations would have more than enough of it to destroy the world several times over.

Essentially, the book explores how the US and Russia ...more

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Jun 20, 2013 Krysti rated it it was ok

This book was unsurprisingly subjective. I agree with the overall issue, that the American and Soviet governments have grossly overstepped their bounds during the Cold War with regard to nuclear weapon production. The concern Brown has for the communities around the nuclear sites is definitely warranted. Their homes, livestock, crops, and own bodies were contaminated by a source outside of their control. They were kept in the dark about the physiological harm that became them, which is unjust. S ...more

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Feb 26, 2015 Paul rated it it was ok

If you are going to write a non fiction book you should have real passion for the subject not just an axe to grind. I bought this book hoping to learn more about what went on at Hanford, how plutonium was manufactured, as well as the accidents that took place. Instead you get a book written by someone who seems to know nothing about science, nothing about how the world was in the 1940's during WWII. the first 8 or so chapters are all about how sleazy DuPont the company was in the way it operated If you are going to write a non fiction book you should have real passion for the subject not just an axe to grind. I bought this book hoping to learn more about what went on at Hanford, how plutonium was manufactured, as well as the accidents that took place. Instead you get a book written by someone who seems to know nothing about science, nothing about how the world was in the 1940's during WWII. the first 8 or so chapters are all about how sleazy DuPont the company was in the way it operated as well as the way it and the military handled hiring women and minorities to work at the factory. Who cares? You can't take your liberal social belief system from 2013 and blanket it over something from 1943. Richard Rhodes is no fan of nuclear weapons but his book "the making of the atomic bomb" is an amazing achievement in chronicling that event. Kristen Iversen the author of "Full Body Burden" is no fan of the manufacture of Nuclear weapons, having grown up next to the Rocky Flats nuclear trigger plant. But her book was interesting well detailed, and had the element of being about people. Plutopia, is written by a woman with zero science background who throws together a bunch of meaningless statements and thinks it is ok because she used footnotes. ( in chapter 7 footnote 15 she is discussing how experts knew how dangerous radioactivity was and ignored it for the sake of the project, and cites the famous example of the women who had radioactivity poisoning who worked at a watch company. What she failed to point out is that those women working there would wet the tip of the brush in their mouth repeatedly every day as they painted the watch face with radiated paint to make the watch face glow. To this day science can tell us that uranium, plutonium and all the other dangerous radioactive elements can kill you, what science can't do, is tell us why some die and some don't, why some get cancer and some don't. But this author couldn't be bothered with honesty if it lessened her point. This author has done a major disservice in pretending to chronicle what happened at Hanford, because she was more concerned with laying out her modern political beliefs, and editorializing at every opportunity to document the injustices she perceives took place. In addition to the two books I have already cited another far better book is "The Girls of Atomic City" by Denise Kiernan, who does a wonderful job detailing life and the work that took place in Oak Ridge, another huge Manhattan project endeavor. Plutopia winds up being a jumbled bunch of documented facts, none of which are questioned, rather than being a book about plutonium and the places where it has been manufactured in the world. To ignore these two aspects is to gloss over the fact that if it weren't for the manufacture of plutonium there would have been no Hanford or similar sites in the USSR, and no book to write. ...more

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May 26, 2018 Tomasz rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: russia, science, modern-history, united-states

The book covers important topic and a thesis that American and Soviet nuclear programs caused comparable social consequences is persuasive. Unfortunately, I can hardly stand author's writing style. ...more

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Oct 14, 2019 Jarrod S rated it really liked it

Shelves: uwm, 20th-century-us-history, wwii, international-history

Tells the story of two plutonium-producing communities, one in the Soviet Union and one in the United States. They are remarkably similar in their design, oversight, fears, and biological and environmental consequences. These myriad risks were accepted by the population that worked in the plants because they were given an affluent lifestyle.

The book needs to be organized better and the author could more clearly show her argument throughout the book but, in general, these two intertwined histori ...more

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Apr 20, 2013 Terrie rated it it was amazing

One of the best nonfiction books I've read recently. Well-written, fascinating, and every bit advanced the thesis. Great comparison/contrast of the Soviet and US nuclear weapons plant cities. The more I read on the history of nuclear weapons manufacturing, the more amazed I am that we haven't blown ourselves up and/or polluted the entire planet beyond repair. ...more

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Dec 11, 2020 Francesca Calarco rated it really liked it

If you are looking for a great environmental history read comparable to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, then I absolutely would have to recommend Kate Brown’s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. I think it’s safe to say that any community, be it in the United States or Soviet Russia, that was burdened with plutonium development inherently suffered from both health and social consequences. For as different as the two country’s governmen If you are looking for a great environmental history read comparable to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, then I absolutely would have to recommend Kate Brown’s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. I think it’s safe to say that any community, be it in the United States or Soviet Russia, that was burdened with plutonium development inherently suffered from both health and social consequences. For as different as the two country’s governments were, the sad universal truth remains that the powerful exploit the weak.

Brown looks at Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia, two of the first cities in the world to engage in plutonium manufacturing. Both were subsidized and presented as modern-day communities where the nuclear family could achieve a better future. In reality, the role of the nuclear family (juxtaposed to an extended family) mainly thrived as the more isolated an individual was, the more dependent they grew on their respective community.

The strongest element in this book, is how Kate Brown recounts her interviews with an almost post-processual reflection, and in a way that humanizes the accounts. It’s one thing to read about how young women were hired without being notified of the risks and given little to no protection from radiation, and another to see a firsthand account recalling how a climate of secrecy prevented college educated colleagues from sharing basic safety information with their working-class counterparts operating in the same lab.

In the end, each of these communities’ work were exploited, not rewarded. While in the spiritual sense it’s hard to envision any type of Utopia forming around an economy rooted in creating materials used for harm, it is even more horrifying to see the actual health consequences with children developing high levels of cancer, and people dying in their 30s. Downwinders’ culture is a topic for further investigation that I look forward to reading more about.

Overall, this was a great book and if this is a topic you are interested in, please give it a read.
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Oct 26, 2020 Elizabeth rated it really liked it

Shelves: 20s, to-read-2020

Well, I was not expecting this book to teach me about the history of the American suburb, or the etymology of the term "nuclear family," but there you have it. While I was previously aware of the problems that has plagued the nuclear industry - cancer clusters, indigenous environmental injustices, ecological degradation, (lack of) waste management, and more, my critiques of plutopia are now more specific and strengthened by data. Ugh, the failures of the American experiment are so abundant...

I b Well, I was not expecting this book to teach me about the history of the American suburb, or the etymology of the term "nuclear family," but there you have it. While I was previously aware of the problems that has plagued the nuclear industry - cancer clusters, indigenous environmental injustices, ecological degradation, (lack of) waste management, and more, my critiques of plutopia are now more specific and strengthened by data. Ugh, the failures of the American experiment are so abundant...

I became interested in reading this book when I noticed it was added to the curriculum for the freshman writing seminar in my college when I was a senior. I never learned all that much about the looming Hanford nuclear reactor 60 miles from where I went to school, and I thought it would be interesting to book up on the subject. And wow, this book revealed some horrifyingly interesting radioactive nuggets, confirming hunches I had and now making me wonder if living in the area exposed myself to more than a "healthy" amount of radiation.

The American education system does a horrible job teaching all of history, but especially so for anything occurring after World War II, such as the Cold War. The descriptions of conditions building the Maiak reactor was chilling and was so much more effective at communicating the Soviet poverty of the Stalin years than a classic history textbook sparing one sentence to say "the Soviet Union had a hard time rebuilding after World War II." I feel like I learned so much about the Cold War just by diving into this case study, and it helped all the more because I was familiar with the American location.

I am very appreciative of the short-but-sweet chapters that made bite-sized reading possible before bed and during lunch breaks. The abundant storytelling helped turn the pages. While I sometimes tire of the "navel gazing" authors and reporters engage in telling of how they felt when talking to their interview subjects, Brown's narration tended to be critical of her own assumptions. She would comment on how she underestimated poor villagers, jeopardized her welcome as a guest by refusing to eat what she believed to be radioactive food, and then later correct her initial assumptions showing that the villagers--not her--were correct, which I appreciated. Over all, a solid read. ...more

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Aug 13, 2020 Kelly rated it it was amazing

A great history of the way nuclear material made its way into the lives, bodies, environments, economies, and cultures of mid-twentieth century America and Soviet Russia. This is both work of journalism and a work of history; it's probing, inquisitive, interdisciplinary, and razor sharp. Having spend a good number of years in my youth not far from the banks of the Columbia River - and having never heard of its highly contaminated headwaters - much of Kate Brown's story came as a bit of a shock. ...more

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Aug 23, 2014 Wendy Bousfield rated it it was amazing

Shelves: chernobyl

Plutopia (2013) tells the shocking, utterly credible story of plutonium production in two nations and of the government-owned and administered towns that housed plant workers. Written in a clear, erudite, occasionally lyrical style, Plutopia is the result of Kate Brown’s historical and archival research, travels, and interviews in two countries. Equally fluent in Russian and English, Kate Brown “worked in more than a dozen archives in the United States and Russia” (8) and conducted interviews wi
Plutopia (2013) tells the shocking, utterly credible story of plutonium production in two nations and of the government-owned and administered towns that housed plant workers. Written in a clear, erudite, occasionally lyrical style, Plutopia is the result of Kate Brown’s historical and archival research, travels, and interviews in two countries. Equally fluent in Russian and English, Kate Brown “worked in more than a dozen archives in the United States and Russia” (8) and conducted interviews with persons whose “bodies themselves now serve as nuclear waste repositories” (336-7). Startlingly, Plutopia demonstrates that the two closed, government-owned communities, Richland (eastern Washington State) and Ozersk (Russian Urals) were are mirror images of one another. Brown says of the mutual awareness and cross-influences: “People in Ozersk used to say that if you drilled a hole straight through the earth, you would end up in Richland. That is how I imagine the two cities: Orbiting each other, linked on the same axis” (4). Though the two communities served the interests of societies radically different ideologically and economically, the social engineering that produced them was identical.

Brown is deeply interested in the motivation of the Richland and Ozersk workers dedicated to the hazardous business of manufacturing plutonium, as well as in the workers’ two-tiered social order. Residents in both gated communities lived comfortably, but gave up civil liberties. Both the U.S. and Soviet workers Brown interviewed were content to endure scrutiny by informants, phone taps and mandatory medical exams in exchange for good schools, freedom from crime, cheap housing, and abundant consumer goods. Besides the residents of these heavily subsidized enclaves, both the U.S.and the Soviet Union employed “jumpers”: a work force composed of soldiers, prisoners, or ethnic minorities. The employment of these disposables ended when they became too sick to work.

Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union displayed callous disregard both for human life and the environment. During the Cold War arms race, but, shockingly, even after the breakup of the Soviet Union, U.S. and Russian plutonium plants secretly poured radioactive waste into rivers and stored it in leaky containers. Scientists in Richland and Ozersk knew that radioactive isotopes, the byproduct of plutonium production, “saturated the food chains and entered bodies—plant, animal, and human—where they lodged in organs and damaged cells (6). Nevertheless, the administrators of the Hanfoird and the Maiak plutonium plants knowingly polluted rivers and farm land. Though far less known than Chernobyl, the Hanford and Ozersk plants emitted, respectively, a total of 200 million curies of radioactivity—twice what Chernobyl emitted-- over their four decades of operation.

In my reading about nuclear accidents, I’m struck with how invisible and amorphous is the threat posed by radioactive isotopes in the soil, food chain, rivers, and human body. At high levels of exposure to nuclear radiation is lethal, but at lower levels, the human body exhibits symptoms that may readily be attributed to other causes. While radiation in plants and animals may be measured with dosimeters, the naked eye may not detect the damage to woods and farms. Brown writes of her visit to Techa, the most radioactive river in the world: “Usually when you are looking at an environmental catastrophe, you know it. . .. In my mind, disasters should smell, smoke, or produce ugly scars. Yet nothing was out of place along this inviting little stream. The air was fresh. Swallows darted back and forth over the current. . . . I had never encountered a disaster more lovely and tempting, one less worthy of its name” (305).

Radioactivity disseminated by nuclear accidents and plutonium production has no boundaries and no distinct signature. According to Brown, “as the firmament became saturated with fission products, monitors had an even harder time distinguishing Hanford’s by-products from atmospheric contamination floating in from Nevada, the Pacific testing grounds, Kazakhstan, and the Russian Arctic, where Soviets carried out mega-tonnage tests. . . . Radioactive isotopes, so readily combining with biological forms, had no discrete boundaries. In time, they were no longer distinct from the local environment, from scientists bodies, or from human evolution” (183). Because radiation is so difficult to detect or trace to its source, money-hungry corporations and desperate governments played fast and loose with human and environmental safety.

Kate Brown is an extraordinary researcher and writer. She has also written A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland. According to amazon.com, it is about the ethnic communities on the border of Russia and Poland that existed until 1925. Brown describes the process of ethnic cleaning, carried out by Stalin and the Nazis, that homogenized the region. I have placed her earlier book (2005) on my Want-to-Read list.
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Jun 29, 2019 Rachel Willis rated it really liked it

A disturbing, eye-opening read. Highly recommended.

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May 01, 2014 Ivan Grek rated it it was amazing

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown is a fascinating comparative historical account of everyday lives of people who stayed beyond the curtains of the Cold War, producing uranium for nuclear weapons. Through the comparison of Soviet Ozersk (a town in the Urals) and American Richland (a town in the Pacific Northwest), closed cities populated by nuclear factory workers, Brown breaks the ground of classical conceptualization
Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown is a fascinating comparative historical account of everyday lives of people who stayed beyond the curtains of the Cold War, producing uranium for nuclear weapons. Through the comparison of Soviet Ozersk (a town in the Urals) and American Richland (a town in the Pacific Northwest), closed cities populated by nuclear factory workers, Brown breaks the ground of classical conceptualization of the Cold War by showing striking similarities in means of weapons production and sufficiency of employing a comparative approach for studying two leading powers of the Cold War.
In reconstructing the history of the creation of these nuclear cities, Professor Brown acknowledges that both Soviet and American authorities experienced the same problems and solved them in similar ways. In particular she stresses two problems regarding labor forces in the USSR and USA. The first one was whom the authorities were going to sacrifice, appointing for the "dirty" work of manufacturing plutonium, which led to nuclear poisoning. Secondly, both states attempted to find out how to keep permanently employed workers and engineers silent.
Professor Brown argues that in the first case both the USSR and USA employed minorities. Vulnerable social groups were not monitored for radiation poisoning, their lives were not valued, and their deaths would not become a reason for a scandal. In the Soviet Union, authorities exploited GULAG prisoners and local minorities such as Tatars and Buriats. These people were not allowed to participate in the lifestyles of privileged, "reliable" workers that lived in Ozersk, mostly populated by Russians and Jews, whom the Soviet authorities started to rendition in 1948. The United States approached labor in a similar way with a difference that the American authorities segregated people not according to their ethnicity, but race. Surrounded by extreme poverty, Indians, Mexicans, and African Americans lived in the nearby ghetto of Pasco. As well as Soviet minorities, they had a high mortality rate and no social security. Professor Brown writes: “Discrimination practices triggered labor shortages, which delayed plant construction.”(31)
In her book, Professor Brown delves deep into the living conditions of permanent workers because accommodations, the author argues, were a key factor in the creation of reliable and silent societies of nuclear industry workers. After failed attempts to secure information by means of suppression and total control, both the USSR and the United States started to promote the value of working places in Ozersk and Richland by providing them with the best goods and services. Shops of Soviet Ozersk were not inferior to places where Moscow political elite went shopping. White workers in Richland enjoyed regulation of the market as well. As the result of price control, “reliable” workers could rent houses for an incredibly low price. Paradoxically, these attempts to build a "heaven on the earth" were recognized by Americans as socialism, while Soviets treated the consumerism of Ozersk as capitalism. However, no ideological label could affect people's decision to live a good life, so that workers did their best to stay in these cities with their families as long as possible.
Kate Brown vividly shows that the Cold War has not been entirely reevaluated yet. Her research presents that the Cold War was conducted not just by Socialist and Democratic powers, but by two hyper powers, which did not care about the means of production that would help them to achieve their goals. From Brown's interviews and research of the contemporary ecological situation in those regions, it is evident that the Cold War is still with us in water, soil, and crippled lives of people from ex-nuclear regions. Another significant advantage of this book is that it is written in a good and clear language, so that I would recommend this book for reading to anybody who is interested in the Cold War, environmental history, and human rights.
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May 04, 2013 Peter Sprunger rated it really liked it

Shelves: nuclear-issues

This is a fun read for anyone interested in the history of nuclear weapons complexes. Kate Brown tells two stories in parallel - that of the U.S. plutonium production facility, Hanford, and the nearby city of Richland, and that of the Russian counterparts Maiak and Ozersk, respectively.

The two stories are told from the perspective of the workers and focus primarily on their long term health issues. She begins with an early history of both plants and the uncertainties the plant managers faced in ...more

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Mar 06, 2018 Mzford rated it really liked it

I gave this read four stars because it was so unsettling to me, not because it isn't worthy of 5 stars.
This information seems thoroughly documented, so it is distressing that so much cover-up went on during a critical time in our history. We lived and raised our family in the fall-out area of Hanford nuclear reactors. We are well acquainted with the health issues now suffered by many of our friends in this area, but our own family is now burdened with serious health issues that could be traced ...more

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Nov 22, 2013 victor harris rated it really liked it

Revealing work on the carelessness of the atomic energy industry in monitoring and regulating plutonium and its destructive effects on humans, animals, and the environment. The areas in question are the Hanford facility in eastern Washington during and after WW II, and the fits and starts in the Soviet chase to catch up. The chapters alternate focusing on each site. Very informative and horrifying.

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Dec 28, 2012 James rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, political-science

Very, very interesting book on the history of the Atomic cities of both the USA and USSR/Russia and the human costs of plutonium enrichment. The author has written a well researched book and expanded that research with many, many interviews and trips to the cities (or as close as possible since the Russian city of Ozersk is still a closed city). Highly recommended reading.

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Dec 11, 2013 Forrest Link rated it liked it

Not quite what I expected. The book feels like a re-worked dissertation and much of the prose is quite bland. While I get the overall premise that the pressures of cold-war arms-building resulted in settlements not in character with their culture where dodgy worker safety was compensated for with material rewards, the point was made early on and beaten to death.

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Nov 22, 2019 Devogenes rated it really liked it

In hyper-capitalist post-war Washington is a closed city where blue-collar workers live in government-funded housing they aren't allowed to own. Corporate secret police monitor everyone everywhere, from their workplaces to the public pools. Workers are given lessons on proper speech and proper etiquette. Complainers and dissenters, along with their families, are removed. Along the banks of the Columbia river, plutonium is produced, and more radioactive particles are released into the environment In hyper-capitalist post-war Washington is a closed city where blue-collar workers live in government-funded housing they aren't allowed to own. Corporate secret police monitor everyone everywhere, from their workplaces to the public pools. Workers are given lessons on proper speech and proper etiquette. Complainers and dissenters, along with their families, are removed. Along the banks of the Columbia river, plutonium is produced, and more radioactive particles are released into the environment than were released at Three Mile Island. Today, downriver communities and local indigenous people suffer from extremely elevated levels of cancer and congenital disorders.

In Soviet Russia is a closed city serving it's own riverside plutonium plant. Amidst crushing poverty and chronic shortages of the bolshevik nightmare, the shelves in this city are never empty. There are no bread lines, and residents are encouraged to shop and develop a middle-class identity. Not only the nuclear reactors, but the civic organization is heavily influenced by intelligence on the reservation in Washington. Today, decades later, downriver communities and local Tatar people suffer from extreme cancer rates, living on the shore of the world's most irradiated river.

Hanford had the Green Run. Ozersk had the Mayak explosion. This history of the world's first two plutonium plants and the socially engineered communities built to support them tells not only the grim story of the personal and social consequences of humanity's most self-destructive quest to produce the nuclear armory which continues to hang apocalyptically above our heads, but also the story of how the supposed ideological underpinnings of the competing superpowers were so easily folded by the demands of the Cold War arms race.

If we survive climate change, we will be destroyed by the legacy of these two secret cities, where working-class people fed a mixture of patriotism, government subsidy, and self-importance, worked happily poisoning themselves, their families, and their neighbours in order to produce weapons of unimaginable horror. ...more

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Jul 31, 2020 Philip Kuhn rated it it was amazing

A very important and interesting book on the one American and one Soviet cities that produced the plutonium for the arms race. Very interesting the way the writer, Kate Brown, explores the similarities between the two cities. They were and still are a lot more alike than people from either country would like to admit.

I really loved the way Brown interviewed the people who used to work at both plants, as well as the truly unfortunate ones who lived near by either one.

You can not read the section ...more

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Nov 21, 2019 Craig rated it really liked it

Shelves: science, nonfiction, culture

In the mid-20th century, two plutonium plants went up in eastern Washington and rural Russia. This is an exhaustive and thoroughly researched history of these plants, the insulated communities built to support them, and the contamination that will outlive them by tens of thousands of years. Their effects are larger in scale than the great known nuclear catastrophes – Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima – but relatively obscure because of intense secrecy from within and more hidden disasters ...more

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Feb 14, 2020 Ian rated it really liked it

Brown provides a detailed and well cited historical overview of the race to produce nuclear material in the Soviet Union and United States. The author takes great care in providing a comprehensive comparison of the development, organization, and outcome of the Hanford nuclear site and the Mayak production site. In particular, the author frames the human side of the story, providing a clear and detailed narrative of the lives impacted, for good and for ill, by the production of nuclear material t ...more

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Aug 22, 2017 Farfoff rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This was a well researched book and I bet it rubs a lot of people involved in the cities and the work the wrong way. She tells of hurried construction, unsafe working conditions, accidents covered up, experiments done on unsuspecting people, and nuclear waste that will never be cleaned up in the lifetime of humans.

I like that she places these cities and their inhabitants in their political milieu.

1. Russians = communists/socialists that build themselves a little bastion of capitalism/consumeri ...more

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Nov 11, 2017 Simon Dobson rated it it was amazing

The all-but-unknown history of the US and Soviet nuclear weapons programmes contains some amazing parallels illuminated in this book. To get workers to agree to the claustrophobic and restrictive conditions in the plutonium plants, both sets of authorities created model cities that (in the US case) became models for a lot of later "gated" communities, but also gave residents a taste of an almost European social model they were reluctant to give up. The Soviet example is even more dramatic, almos ...more

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Nov 11, 2018 Julie rated it really liked it

This book was terrifying. But also extremely informative. But also terrifying...because it was so informative.

The amount of research that went into this work is staggering. But it's also something that weighs it down. Brown had so much crammed in that sometimes the pace and the stories of individuals suffer as a result of her needing to move on in order to share the next piece of mindblowing information.

I almost wish she had written this as a series of two to three books so she could linger lo ...more

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Jul 30, 2019 Dori Sabourin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, hoopla

In the aftermath of WWII, during the Cold War, in the arms race to develop an atomic bomb, both Russia and the U.S. installed fully subsidized atomic cities. These were Big Brother communities, sworn to secrecy. What better way to live thought the fully employed workers and their families. Time passed, nuclear accidents occurred endangering the health of the workers, their families, animals, land, and even rivers. When seeking restitution, they were accused of fake news,and in some cases, remove ...more

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Jul 30, 2019 Dori Sabourin rated it it was amazing

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About Kate Brown

Kate Brown

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Kate Brown is a Professor of History at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author of A Biography of No Place, which won the American Historical Association’s International European History Prize for Best Book.

Brown received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Books by Kate Brown

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A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland

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Manual for Survival Lib/E: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

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“In eastern Washington, the territory around the Hanford reservation is promoted as the last stand of original shrub-sage habitat in the Columbia Basin, yet periodically deer and rabbits wander from the preserve and leave radioactive droppings on Richland’s lawns.” — 0 likes

“Radioactive isotopes, so readily combining with biological forms, had no discrete boundaries. In time, they were no longer distinct from the local environment, from scientists’ bodies, or from human evolution.” — 0 likes

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