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.  

Review of War Junk by Alex Souchen

 Cross-posted from MichiganWar Studies Review (https://www.miwsr.com/2022-017.aspx)

2022-017

14 Feb. 2022

Review by Gregory J. Dehler, Westminster, CO 

War Junk: Munitions Disposal and Postwar Reconstruction in Canada

By Alex Souchen

Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020. Pp. xv, 282. ISBN 978–0–7748–6293–6.

Descriptors:

Volume 2022, 20th Century, World War II, Canada

Print Version

As the fourth largest Allied producer of military material, Canada was an arsenal for democracy during the Second World War; Canada produced 800,000 military transport vehicles, 50,000 tanks, 40,000 guns and artillery, 1.7 million small arms, 16,418 aircraft, over 4,000 ships, and a vast array of sundry components and kit items.[1] What happened to all this detritus of war once the fighting ceased is the subject of Alex Souchen's War Junk. Souchen (PhD., Univ. of Western Ontario, 2016) used government records and reports, contemporary periodicals, and other primary documents in this well researched work that crosses the boundaries of military, environmental, waste, and material histories.

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This book argues that the death of war machines was really their rebirth…. In that sense, the death of war machines was not something to lament, nor was it the final chapter of an object's existence. Rather, it was a necessary reincarnation: between 1943 and 1948 Canadians fused the tools of war into the tools of peace. (5)

Swords refashioned into plowshares were just one of the contradictions Souchen discusses. He contends that the surplus military material, broadly defined, lived a second, peaceful life, and played a vital role in Canada's postwar political and social development. "In effect, the disposal of surplus assets became enmeshed in the early development of Canada's welfare state" (23).

Informed by their First World War experience and driven by a desire to avoid another Great Depression, the Canadian government established a system to slowly release surplus military items to the marketplace in a way that supported rather than hindered economic growth. By fall 1944, it had fashioned a legal framework to manage the transition to peace with a War Assets Commission (WAC) tasked as the responsible agency. 

The government assigned the WAC three critical objectives. In the first place, to promote economic growth and recovery by preventing the glut of goods that occurred after the Great War. Secondly, regarding the budget, to recover as much of the enormous expense of the war as it could through sales of surplus military items. Ironically, as Souchen points out, taxpayers paid twice for the same item: first, to build it, and then to decommission, sell, or destroy it. Sales of surplus items brought $500 million to the Canadian treasury. The third imperative was to dispose of ammunition, unexploded ordnance, chemicals, and other substances too dangerous for private use. 

The WAC created strict regulations through licensed companies (priority holders) that used existing commercial networks to deliver items to the market in a controlled and efficient way. Although the WAC was confident in its plan, the enormity of rapid demobilization after V-E Day quickly forced it to decentralize and loosen its more rigid rules.

Sales of wartime buildings and properties caused a major storage conundrum. The stress on cost cutting and recouping money led to low wages, few benefits, and no pensions, which forced the WAC to rely on temporary workers. Rapid demobilization also limited the ability to draw on experts in the armed forces who were trained in several unique areas, such as explosives and the mechanics of military vehicles. At the management level, the return of the "dollar-a-year" executives to the private sector created a brain drain. Equipment scattered in out-of-the-way places and the handling of hazardous materials presented serious logistical hurdles. Being a governmental agency liaising between the military and private sectors put the WAC in an unenviable middleman position. 

The WAC sometimes failed to meet these challenges, but overall, Souchen gives it a favorable rating. He cites examples of fraud or mismanagement, but theft was small scale, consisting of isolated cases of warehouse break-ins. 

War Junk is also part of an exciting recent merger of environmental and military history. Although the WAC moved as much surplus material onto the consumer market as it could, many items were unsuited for civilian purposes. These were abandoned in place, destroyed, or dumped. Seventy-five years later Canada continues to pay an environmental cost for its mishandling of this material. Ammunition was dumped in the ocean to prevent its finding a way into the international arms market. Souchen notes that over three thousand contaminated sites off the coast of Canada continue to leak harmful chemicals into the ocean. Other material was burned, releasing toxins into the air with little effort to protect workers or nearby population centers. Hardware, including vehicles filled with gas, oil, and other fluids in far off locations, particularly the Arctic, were deemed too costly to move. One can still see their rusted remnants where they were left seventy years ago. The attempt to redeem precious metals from ordnance led to long-term contamination in recreational areas like Simmes Lake and Georgian Bay, Ontario. 

On the other hand, decommissioned surplus provided many long-lasting social benefits. Liquidation of buildings and properties benefited hospitals, schools, colleges and universities, and alleviated the postwar housing shortage. The healthcare system and Red Cross received valuable medicines and equipment. Educational facilities, small businesses, and farmers purchased furniture, tools, and many other surplus items at bargain prices. 

With the third largest navy in the world at war's end, Canada's corvettes, frigates, mine trawlers, and other ships were transformed into fishing and merchant marine vessels and even yachts. Airlines purchased considerable amounts of materials and property. Large automotive firms acquired spare parts and components from tens of thousands of disassembled vehicles. Construction companies obtained both heavy equipment and parts like doors, windows, electrical wiring, flooring, light fixtures and switches, plumbing, grates, toilets, sinks, and a host of other objects sold from dismantled buildings. Manufacturers and suppliers of all types procured machinery and real estate from the WAC. In addition, radios, tools, wires, nuts, bolts, screws, and seats, lived another life refashioned as, or, made part of a new, consumer item. Even scrap dealers enjoyed a boom selling what others would not buy from "boneyards" of decommissioned airplanes, automobiles, and ships.

Individuals, too, could purchase items. The phenomenon of "barnyard bombers" offers a metaphor for the entire project of finding peaceful uses for war materials in Canada. 

In fact, the acquisition of "barnyard bombers" became commonplace and an integral part of farm life in the late 1940s. Since these aircraft contained several thousand components, they were veritable treasure chests of goods, materials, and technologies. When configured as an aircraft, the parts had little value for farmers, but if they were broken apart, the salvaged components could be reused for different purposes or integrated into new technological systems. In that sense, barnyard bombers (like many other surplus assets) were valuable to Canadians only if their forms and functions were transformed. (170)

Equipment left in Europe at the end of the war was given to allies, like the Netherlands, who used it in their attempt to re-establish its empire in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Canada used some military hardware in Europe as assets to pay off war debt or exchanged them for war credits. Such an arrangement liquidated Canada's debt to Great Britain. Unlike the case in other nations, few of Canada's firearms made their way onto the surplus market. If not sold to nations for military purposes these weapons were broken to prevent future use. 

With War Junk, Alex Souchen has made a well researched, interesting contribution to an emerging, very pertinent field of scholarship. The environmental problems caused by the destruction of surplus materials and the Canadian experience after its withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2013 in the wake of the 2009 Great Recession show that the lessons of 1945 remain relevant seven decades later.

[1] "Canadian Production of War Materials," Veterans Affairs Canada; "Canada and the War," Democracy at War, Canadian War Museum. Available online.

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Mill Town by Kerri Arsenault

I really liked this book. It is a memoir about the toll an enormous paper mill reaped on the environment, the workforce, and inhabitants of Kerri Arsenault's home town of Mexico, Maine. As an environmental history, Mill Town provides an excellent source on the the harmful effects of large factories, chemicals, and toxic waste have on the interconnected human and natural world. It is one more reminder that these are not two separate spheres with nature as some sort of other world. As Rachel Carson demonstrated in Silent Spring sixty years ago, people and birds share the same fate. Mill Town discusses environmental policies, corporate denial, collusion between politics and industry, and waste disposal. Arsenault offers a deeply personal account of the agonizing death of her father, a lifetime mill worker. Mill Town chronicles how Arsenault pieced together the story of Mexico's cancer epidemic through interactions with family members, neighbors, townsfolk, and the historical records. It is part socio-economic history of the mill, the town, the rise of industry in the early twentieth century and its precipitous decline in the 1980s, intermingled with the story of the rise and fall of the working class and the effects of automation. Towards the end she examines how  her generational  cohort, those who graduated high school in the 1980s, split into two different groups: one who left Mexico, as she did, and another who remained in the town and even took one of the declining numbers of jobs at the mill. As a reader, I got the sense that the latter harbors considerable resentment towards the former for abandoning their town and leaving their own parents behind to be cared for by others. 

On another level this is a very compassionate story of "fly-over" country, the one that was totally left behind in the post-Cold War economic boom of the 1990s but still felt the vicious sting of the great recession, opioids (something mentioned but not explored), broken families, and declining home values, among other traumas. Only a page or two are devoted to the 2016 election, but it is clear that the author, while personally opposing Donald Trump, understands why many in her former home town cast their ballots for him. If one is unfamiliar with the America Arsenault describes than this empathetic exploration of it would be a good starting point. 

Bismarck: A Life

 Otto von Bismarck was a towering figure in the late nineteenth century. In this 2011 biography Bismarck: A Life, Jonathan Steinberg argues that accomplishments and triumphs achieved by this historic statesman stemmed from the force of his personality. What was this personality? While he could be charming and witty, he was a narcissistic bully who shamelessly used people, even his own children. Bismarck lied repeatedly, openly, and could never tolerate being wrong on anything. He demanded absolute loyalty but gave none in return. He betrayed those who supported him. He hated his enemies with a Nixonian passion and could be equally paranoid in interpreting the motives of others. 

 

Politically, Bismarck was a master strategist who played the long game, looking years in the future. He was an equally ingenious tactician combining multiple plans and options, setting different constituencies and factions off one another. He used any means necessary to gain an advantage and accomplish his goals. His drive to unify Germany took three wars that he essentially precipitated. Bismarck’s extraordinary successes and ability to make the big play when needed, accounts for his longevity. 

 

Lacking any adherence to an external ideology, Bismarck was a party of one. His objective was to maintain and enhance his own power. Although he depended on the will of the sovereign, his intensely histrionic performances full of threats and offers to resignation played King and later Emperor William I. The old monarch once commented that Bismarck was more important to Germany than he was. Steinberg points out how lucky Bismarck was that William I lived to be ninety years old. These pathetic emotional performances fueled Bismarck’s hypochondria, gluttony, and frayed his nerves to the breaking point time and time again. It did not help that Bismarck refused to share power or delegate tasks. Instead, he kept all the decision making – and stress -- concentrated in his own hands. 

 

Unfortunately, such personal control over the construction of a united Germany infused the state with some significant flaws. In international affairs, he set the stage for the alliance system that would become a contributing factor to the First World War. On the domestic scene, his lack of respect for the legislative branch (such as it was) remained a feature of German politics until 1918. His playing groups off one another hampered national unity and plagued social relations. His intense anti-Semitism was a harbinger of much worse to come.

 

I came away from this biography convinced Bismarck was a thoroughly repellant person.  

 

There are several things that I liked about the book. First, it was focused and coherent with clear arguments. That is an accomplishment with a subject so full of contradictions with both stunning accomplishments and total failures. Second, I liked the liberal use of primary source block quotations. Typically, I prefer them to be used sparingly, but Steinberg skillfully uses them to build the story and give the reader a sense of the times and what people thought. And, finally, I liked the authorial voice. Steinberg is present and part of the conversation, sharing his opinions and thoughts with the reader.  

 

There were a few negatives. First, I felt a lack of context to some issues. I do think that I understood some of  the political issues, especially around German unification and the Prussian king’s attitude towards it ,because I read Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom as well (a work Steinberg cites) simultaneously. Ditto the Prussian culture of Bismarck’s time. I certainly  would have struggled to grasp them had I not been reading Iron Kingdom. Second, I think Steinberg handles Bismarck’s marriage well, but his children go almost unmentioned until they are adults (at which point Bismarck dominates and uses them as he did to everyone else). His eldest son first appears in the text when he is thirty-one or two years old on page 406. The index is organized around people, not subjects. As an active index user, I found this quirky and a little frustrating. 

 

As a Gilded Age Americanist, I could not fail to notice Bismarck’s political domination in the decades when, except for Abraham Lincoln, the presidency of the United States was at its weakest point. Still, on a personal  level, I would much rather hang out with Chester Arthur than Otto von Bismarck. 

 

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach is an entertaining read. As the title suggests, she focuses on those animals and plants that cause disturbances, ranging from manslaughter to vandalism to more mundane nuisances. Roach travelled the world investigating these case studies and how local authorities respond to them. She describes a wide range of different techniques from bear “crime scene” investigations used in British Columbia to birth control experiments on monkeys in India, with just about everything in between. Roach is quite serious about the topic but uses a lot of humor in the telling. There are a couple of passages that made me laugh out loud. Roach seems sympathetic to those who suffer from wild animals, such as farmers in India whose entire livelihood could be trampled under foot by a small group of elephants. She is less sympathetic to those, especially in the USA, who value their pets and their freedom over wild animals, writing: “Keep your pet inside at night! How is the life of a beagle or goat worth more than the life of a wild mountain lion?” (p. 135). There is a bibliography, but no reference notes. There are no maps and no index.

 

My three takeaways from Fuzz:

 

Nations respond in different ways. Shouldn’t be too much of a surprise in this, of course, but there is a stark contrast between the United States and India, for example. In the former, the default is to kill wildlife, especially “guilty” animals. This can be an animal suspected of killing a human, but can also include species, like black birds, that eat cash crops. I was a little taken aback by the poisoning of starlings, cowbirds, and black birds to protect the sunflowers, even though other non-lethal forms of mitigation are more effective. In India, to the counter, the inclination is the opposite, to not kill animals as the default policy, and rely on other methods. These could include birth control and sterilization of monkeys (although there is a long way to go on this) or using electric fences to keep elephants from agricultural lands. 

 

Roach comes back a couple of times to the role garbage plays in shaping human-animal interactions. In my home state of Colorado, the obvious example is of trash can and home raiding bears. Don’t lock down the garbage and the omnivorous bear will get into it. Once the bear realizes they can get an easy and tasty meal, they keep coming back, increasing the likelihood of dangerous encounter. Yet, there is an easy fix, which is to lock down the garbage. In another example from Fuzz, Roach points out that the huge, open garbage dumps significantly contribute to the monkey population in India, something local authorities seemed oblivious to. 

 

Thirdly, the importance of perceptions. What is really happening versus what do we believe is happening. Are their more mountain lion encounters with humans or in recent decades, or are “more” incidents being seen through outdoor or doorbell cameras? Does our fear of bird strikes distract us from the more likely occurrence of a airplane collision with a deer during takeoff, taxiing, and landing? Does fear of leopard attacks in the Himalayan region stand in for other unaddressed social anxieties? As an example from the book, concerned parents used to the boogeyman of their children being attacked by leopards on the way to school because the state did not provide school buses for them.