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

The nuclear accident that occurred at Chernobyl in 1986 holds a distinct place in Western memory. The footage of the evacuation of the Soviet city of Pripiat, as well as the pictures of the city in the years after its abandonment, are perhaps the most enduring images of what remains the most significant nuclear accident of the atomic age. Yet, as Kate Brown shows in her remarkably well-crafted book Plutopia, disaster was an endemic product of nuclear regimes in both the US and Soviet Union that transcended singular events such as those at Chernobyl. The greater travesties of plutonium production and the social order that grew along side it remain with us today, the former of which is likely to be one of the most enduring consequences of the Cold War for generations to come.

Brown’s work takes as its focus the Hanford plutonium plant in Richland, Washington (USA), and the Maiak plutonium plant in Ozersk in the southern Urals (Russia), both of which were pioneering anchors for their country’s atomic program. Drawing on archival research, published accounts, and an impressive set of interviews with participants in plutonium production, Brown shows that the pressures generated by the Cold War led both American and Soviet leaders to cut corners, disregard red flags, and sacrifice the health of a tremendous numbers of citizens to secure primacy in the nuclear arms race. Enlisting workers in these projects required that leaders in the US and, later, the Soviet Union, appeal to the material interests of the skilled workers needed to staff these production facilities. This bargain—workers’ willingness to turn a blind eye to the potential dangers of their work and to endure an invasive regime of supervision, in exchange for material comfort unavailable elsewhere—is the defining feature of Brown’s “Plutopia.”

Plutopia was not, however, for everyone. As Brown does well to show, Plutopia’s sites of privilege were surrounded by much larger territories whose citizens were unaware of the degree to which their lives silently intersected with the radiation being dumped into their environment by a management regime that regularly played dice with nuclear crisis in order to fulfill the directives of their superiors. Of course, these outside participants were not totally ignorant of these dangers; both American and Soviet citizens recognized the detrimental effects that the plutonium plants could have on their families. In the end, however, the tight control over information on these facilities prevented significant studies on their impact, allowing those in power to limit research and to release only reports that parroted the regimes’ sunny assessments of the plants’ impact. Only in the last decades of the 20th century, when public pressure led to the release of data on these facilities, could the consequences be measured and the decades-long cleanup projects begin.

Brown’s writing in Plutopia is excellent. She weaves between evaluating documents and narrating her personal experiences interviewing those who lived and worked in the areas surrounding the plants. In both cases, Brown does an impressive job of intertwining the story of Plutopia with the greater social trends of the time, revealing the reciprocity between the production facilities and historical context in the creation of Plutopia. There are a few cases that are worthy of particular mention. Brown’s depiction of the Gulag workforce that was drawn upon early in the construction of the Maiak plant is a dismal account of the inhumanity and brutality of the camps that is as powerful as any that has been written. Furthermore, Brown’s account of her conversations with the survivors of these disasters is a heartbreaking reminder that the plutonium disasters of the 20th century are not simply those that produced spectacular footage and abandoned buildings. The true disaster has not come and gone, but lives on alongside those whose bodies continue to be marked by the policies of cavalier leaders whose quest...