Brown Kate. Plutopia: nuclear families, atomic cities, and the great Soviet and American plutonium disasters

Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. — 416 p. — ISBN10: 0190233109; ISBN13: 978-0190233105.Kate Brown's Plutopia is an amazing book. It is a work of comparative history: a study of Richland, the town for the Hanford plutonium complex, and Ozersk, the town in the southern Urals where the USSR built its plutonium weapons. Plutonium is the most dangerous substance on the planet; one microgram can cause lung cancer in humans if ingested. Plutonium does not exist in nature; it can be manufactured from uranium, and the United States became the first country to do so and then use it in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. A week later, Joseph Stalin ordered Soviet scientists to produce their own plutonium for their versions of American nuclear weapons.Brown found many parallels between Richland and Ozersk that disrupt the conservative Cold War dichotomy between the free world and the totalitarian one. Her research included not only uncovering previously secret documents in both countries but also tracking down and interviewing old-time residents of Ozersk and Richland. Her picture of the treatment of plutonium workers on both sides of the Iron Curtain is enough to make you gnash your teeth or cry.Incarcerated space on the western nuclear frontier.
Mr. Matthias Goes to Washington.
Labor on the Lam.
Labor Shortage.
Defending the Nation.
The City Plutonium Built.
Work and the Women Left Holding Plutonium.
Hazards.
The Food Chain.
Of Flies, Mice, and Men.
The soviet working-class atom and the american response.
the Arrest of a Journal.
The Gulag and the Bomb.
The Bronze Age Atom.
Keeping Secrets.
Beria’s Visit.
Reporting for Duty.
Empire of Calamity.
A few Good Men in Pursuit of America’s Permanent War Economy.
Stalin’s Rocket Engine: Rewarding the Plutonium People.
Big Brother in the American Heartland.
Neighbors.
The Vodka Society.
The plutonium disasters.
managing a Risk Society.
The Walking Wounded.
Two Autopsies.
Wahluke Slope: Into Harm’s Way.
Quiet Flows the Techa.
Resettlement.
The Zone of Immunity.
The Socialist Consumers’ Republic.
The Uses of an Open Society.
The Kyshtym Belch, 1957.
Karabolka, Beyond the Zone.
Private Parts.
From Crabs to Caviar, We Had Everything.
Dismantling the plutonium curtain.
plutonium into Portfolio Shares.
Chernobyl Redux.1984.
The Forsaken.
Sick People.
Cassandra in Coveralls.
Nuclear Glasnost.
All the King’s Men.
Futures.