Brown, Kate. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Disasters. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Review written for coursework in 2017.

In the mid-1940s, plutonium plants in Hanford, Washington, and Ozersk, USSR, independently leached double the toxic waste into neighboring environments than the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown in the Ukraine. Whereas many environmental histories have focused on the tail-end of nuclear disasters, namely bomb explosions and their impacts on bombing victims, Kate Brown’s unique transnational history channels the comparative experiences of ordinary people working in day-to-day operations. By privileging declassified documents and oral interviews, she teases out a tense and intimate narrative.

Just as U.S. plant managers initially struggled to keep rowdy military personnel occupied in remote locations, so did Russians, who experimented with gulag prison labor. In seeking a resolution to the labor issue, Plutopia argues that in the U.S., plant designers and managers engineered a racially-segregated, carceral society centered around a newly-formed, white suburban “monoclass” who would happily exchange civic freedoms for financial security. Russian class divisions in the Urals were based more on national and regional differences than “race,” but the expensive, taxpayer-funded, corporate-sponsored socialist experiments in Richfield—the community just south of Hanford—were the model Russians emulated just after the U.S. annihilated the Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The irony was that both countries backed a state-subsidized consumer society as a form of labor pacification.

In the foreground, Brown offers a well-researched, thematic and chronological history of rushed plutonium manufacture in both Hanford and Ozersk, dividing the book into four parts that compare labor concerns and the design period (parts one and two), a series of disasters, and the dual efforts to improve access to and contain information on the environmental and medical ramifications of nuclear waste entering the ground, water, and air. The very brief chapters in the form of vignettes almost come at the expense of maintaining the narrative thread, especially where it jumps back and forth between Russia and the U.S., but the book overall is very well written and suitable for both the undergraduate and graduate level.

Plutopia would be valuable to students of race and class, environmentalists and environmental historians, ethnohistorians, labor historians, and historians of the Cold War; however, Brown’s signature gift is to the oral history profession. Brown invites the reader on a deeply personal journey where just at the right moments, she includes herself in the narrative, alerting the reader that she is both participant-observer and researcher-activist.