Plutopia Quotes

“In the United States from 1950 to 2001, the overall age-adjusted incidence of cancer increased by 85 percent.”
― Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

“Plutopia was locally popular also because it served up an ever-expanding economy delivering a continually increasing volume of consumer goods for an endlessly rising standard of living made possible by government subsidies for select workers. Residents of plutopia displayed a fantastic faith in scientific progress and economic efficiency. Many understood their city’s universal, classless affluence as the materialization of the American dream or Communist utopia, an affirmation that their national ideology was correct. Self-assurance and confidence bred patriotism, loyalty, submission, and silence.”
― Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

“I was raised to believe that you gave everything to your government and in return your government would always provide for you,” Manzurova told me one afternoon outside an oncology ward, where she was waiting for surgery on a tumor. “Now I realize how wrong I was.”
― Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

“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.”
― Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

“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.”
― Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters