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. 'From crabs to caviar, we had everything'.Stalin's rocket engine : rewarding the plutonium people.'A few good men' : in pursuit of America's permanent war economy.The Soviet working class atom and the American response Work and the women left holding plutonium.Incarcerated space and Western nuclear frontiers 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.Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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 "e staging grounds"e and often performed the most dangerous work at the plant. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias-communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. 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.

Plutopia by Kate Brown