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

This is the startling story of the major plutonium manufacturing complexes in the United States in Soviet Union from World War II, through the Cold War, to the early years of the twenty-first century. This is a great work of historical research. In addition to the historian’s traditional archival work, Brown conducted numerous interviews in both Russia and the United States. She includes some behind-the-scenes views of what she was thinking as she talked to those who worked or lived near the plants or as she crossed landscapes that she knew were poisonous. It is no wonder that Plutopiawon the American Society for Environmental History’s George Perkins Marsh Award for best book in 2014.

 

Despite the ideological polarization of the Cold War, Brown discovered many similarities between the American and Soviet plutopias. They both:

 

·      Were constructed with almost no regard for safety. 

·      Created towns totally controlled by the central government without the hallmarks of local government common to other cities in the respective nations. 

·      Presented a “promise’ of prosperity and consumer affluence in exchange for doing dangerous work.

·      Used the cloak of secrecy and national security to hide and mislead workers and civilians in the area about the dangers of plutonium production to their health.

·      Subjected their employees to health experiments without their knowledge or consent, such as ingesting plutonium and measuring results.

·      Hid harmful releases of materials from the public. As Brown points out, the cumulative effect of these repeated occurrences greatly dwarfs the much more famous Chernobyl accident of 1986.

·      Left a toxic legacy in the atmosphere, land, and water that will continue to plague communities for generations. 

·      Falsified health records and bullied local civilian authorities to do so as well.

·      Attacked dissenters and those who demanded to know more about the medical  risks they faced.

·      Exposed the least powerful people to the greatest risks (convict and foreign laborers and soldiers in the USSR and African-Americans and Native Americans in the USA).

 

There were some interesting differences, however, in the initial construction of the plutonium complexes. As part of the Manhattan Project, there was no shortage of money in building the American plutopia. General Leslie Groves relentlessly drove plant officials to manufacture plutonium. He was determined to build the bomb before the end of the war. He did not want to face Congress to explain why billions of dollars did not produce results. Ironically, it was his questions about weaponizing plutonium as a chemical weapon, that led to the first studies on its impact to health. On the Soviet side, Joseph Stalin placed Lavrentiy Beria in charge of building a plutonium complex. Unsurprisingly for the man who commanded the Soviet security system, Beria’s hand-picked manager relied on forced labor from the gulags.  Criminals, political undesirables, German prisoners-of-war, all fed on substandard food and kept in decrepit quarters, weren’t the most motivated workers. Eventually, Moscow found the man to squeeze out the inefficacies and finish the plant. Thereafter, the plutopias began to more resemble one another. 

 

There were many parts of this story to make one angry at a system that had such little regard for the rights or the health of their employees and countryman, but the absolute hardest part for this reader were the medical horror stories relayed by workers, especially those that occurred to children. It is truly frightening stuff.