We are talking today with Kate Brown.
Kate Brown is associate professor of history
at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
She has published articles in The American
Historical Review,
Chronicle of Higher Education,
Harper’s Online Edition, Critica, Slate
Magazine
and The Times Literary Supplement.
She is the author of A Biography of No Place:
from Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland,
winner of the American Historical Association’s
George Louis Beer Prize for the best book
in international European history,
and she is here to talk about her new book
Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities
and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters.
So, to start out,
tell us, what was the motivation in writing
Plutopia?
Well, I wrote a book that ended in the Chernobyl
period,
a book about Ukraine.
It’s a book about how this multi-ethnic
borderland
after 25 years had no ethnic minorities at
all.
The Jews, the Germans, Byelorussians, the
Poles
—they were all gone.
And then twenty-five years later, everybody
was gone.
It’s the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation,
and after I wrote the book
I took a week summer holiday in the Chernobyl zone,
and I wrote an article about it.
Then an editor contacted me and asked me
to write a whole book about Chernobyl.
I thought there are a lot of books already
about Chernobyl.
I started sniffing around and I realized
there are two places that had two to four
times
more spilled radiation than Chernobyl,
and nobody had ever really heard of them.
Hanford, of course, is well-known in Washington State,
but not much outside Washington,
and then there’s this Maiak
which is in the southern Russian Urals,
and it’s the answering plutonium plant for
the Soviets.
I thought about that, and Chernobyl is a household
word,
but very few have people heard about Maiak and Hanford,
and I wondered why.
The more I thought about it
Chernobyl and Fukushima were sort of camera-ready events
that occurred in one day.
They blew up, the cameras were running,
and they played out in a couple of weeks as big media events.
Hanford and Maiak were different.
They occurred behind military barricades,
they occurred over four decades, and there
were no accidents.
There were accidents, but not really big ones.
The real catastrophe occurred by design.
There was intentional daily dumping of radioactive waste
into the air, the ground and the water,
and that to me was a chilling realization
because I thought there are tens of thousands of workers
who have gone through these big factories
and they all were witnesses.
Not one of them said anything until the 1980s.
I thought, “How did that happen?
How could you have this place
where this kind disaster, a slow-motion disaster,
is going on, and nobody speaks up about it.
How did they get people to do that?”
So I started looking into it,
and I realized that both places
had these limited-access cities exclusively
for plant operators.
That’s Richland in eastern Washington,
and the Russian equivalent of Richland is
called Ozersk.
It was first called Chelyabinsk Forty.
It was a code name meant to trip up the CIA.
And I think the key to this complicity of
silence,
this conspiracy of silence,
was these exclusive cities which I called
Plutopia,
which were set up so that working-class plant
operators
could live and get paid like the upper-classes,
and in that way they started to align themselves
with their bosses and their superiors,
in really strange, mystifying ways.
So how did both of these facilities come about,
both Hanford and Maiak?
I tell the story as a tandem history
going back and forth
between the American landscape and the Soviet landscape,
and there are some surprising similarities
because considering the great, vast differences between the two countries,
leaders in both countries
—and these were military leaders who ran
these places
—thought that they would build these vast
factories
with militarized labor living in camps.
And that’s how they set it up,
and so at Hanford they had Camp Hanford.
It was 60,000 people living in barracks,
and they brought in migrant workers
from all over the country to build this vast
plant.
These, mostly guys, but also single women,
boozed and brawled and ran off and had sex
in really sort of alarming ways.
In Russia, the same thing:
they brought in gulag prisoners, German POWs, deportees
—ethnic deportees from other parts of the
country
—and the set them to work building this
vast plant.
They bruised and brawled and had sex
and were disobedient in very similar ways,
and that really struck these military leaders.
They realized that when they staffed these
plutonium plants,
once they had been built,
they could not have workers
who were as volatile as the product they were about to make.
You can imagine a brawl or a fist fight
or a strike at a plutonium plant
—if somebody has some luddite action
and starts banging on the equipment.
That terrified them.
They were terrified of these working-class
people.
They really didn’t like them much,
so they decided that the solution to securing nuclear weapons
would be the nuclear family, strangely enough.
And so they set up these special towns
where they had workers who were embedded in their nuclear families,
living in these atomic cities,
people who were paid well,
whose families became dependent on this one product,
and that bought a lot of complicity and loyalty and silence.
These places were federally-subsidized.
People lived in these remote settings, rural,
sparsely located,
where the surrounding population
were poor farmers who lived kind of hand-to-mouth
--if you can think of eastern Washington in
the 40s and 50s.
Certainly, the Soviet countryside was virtually impoverished for the 50s and the 60s.
These places lived well.
They had freestanding houses in Richland.
People got thirty percent more pay,
fantastic schools with PHD’s teaching in
them,
wonderful recreational programs,
and everything was very affordable.
People rented houses for maybe thirty-five
dollars a month.
Across the river in Pasco,
in the Pasco ghetto where African-Americans had to live,
they paid a hundred dollars a month
for a shack with no plumbing,
a spigot and a dirty mud fence outside.
The same thing in Russia.
They had this gated city,
walled off from the rest to the community,
walled off from the gulag camps and the garrisons of soldiers.
Inside that gated community
you could buy Finnish overcoats and German shoes
and Romanian plums, chocolate and sausage
—unheard-of luxuries in the Soviet provinces in the 40s and 50s.
Local people started calling them “chocolate people,”
just like they called Richland the Gold Coast.
Outside of this gated community were gritty industrial settlements
with names like Asbestos and Asbestos II
where people could buy gray macaroni
and then stood in line for that gray macaroni,
then went home to the their dugout hovels,
stooping and coughing as they went in.
Their kids went to the second and third shift
at overcrowded schools
and they started working when they were twelve.
So these special communities, these Plutopia,
bought working class people in these child-centered communities
a chance for social mobility
and the kind of life that they
never expected to lead in their lifetimes.
And did they only have that while they were
working there?
Did they have people that moved out
and still retained their social mobility?
That’s a great question.
So what you find in these towns is a certain
kind of fear,
and it’s not a fear of the bomb plant blowing up,
and it’s not a fear being bombed by the
enemy.
Those were very legitimate fears,
but the people didn’t tend show it…
I don’t see any evidence that they harbored
them much.
Instead, their biggest fear was getting tossed out of this Plutopia,
this Garden of Eden.
And so in Richland parents worried that their kids might misbehave
and get a ticket from the police,
and that that might be grounds for the father,
the breadwinner in the family,
to be fired from the plant.
Everybody knew if you got fired,
you had a month to move out of Richland
and lose all these privileges that living
in Richland entailed.
If you did something wrong at the plant,
if you said to your boss,
“I think these conditions in which we’re
working are particularly dirty,”
that would be grounds for termination.
The same thing in Ozersk:
if a worker drank too much, slept with other
men’s wives
—that was taken up at a party meetings,
and they threatened people with eviction.
If I your kid dressed like Elvis Presley,
listened to the Voice of America,
that kid would be sent to boarding school
outside the gated community and could never return,
and parents were OK with that.
They let their kids go because they so wanted to stay in this Eden.
There was a big explosion in 1957
at the Soviet plant in an underground waste
tank
—the same kind of tanks they’re having
problems with now at Hanford
—it overheated and blew.
It blew twenty million curies of radioactive
waste
into the air and created a big cloud of fallout,
ash and fallout, and it was hard to hide.
And people who lived in the city started to
get nervous,
and they started resigning from the plant
and leaving,
but after a couple months I find all these
letters
of people requesting to come back.
They said, “We can’t live out here in
the big world.
It’s too difficult. I was stupid. Please
take me back.”
I think for me the message from that
is that they preferred the risks of living
in their Plutopia
—the certainty of being fed and living well
—to the possible risks of putting themselves and their families in danger.
Now did they know when they were living there
the danger… of the risks that are evident
today from nuclear materials?
Well, there was a lot of minimizing of the
risks,
and a lot of “real men don’t worry about
the risks of radiation,”
a lot of machismo, and this relativism and
a lot of minimizing.
So you’d hear if you lived in Richland
it was more dangerous to operate your household appliances
than to work in the plutonium plant.
You would hear a lot about background radiation in Denver,
and that radiation is a normal part of life.
This is of course manufactured,
this plutonium is a man-made product
—the most volatile product humankind has
ever made
and there’s nothing natural about it.
There is nothing natural about the millions
of gallons
of radioactive waste that come from irradiating a hundred tons a uranium,
processing it down to a few kilograms of plutonium
to make a nuclear bomb.
Plutonium plants are the messiest stop in
the assembly line
for nuclear weapons and these plants generated a great deal of waste.
Part of the reason,
and this is going to your question about what people knew,
is that there wasn’t a lot of talk about
this waste
and there wasn’t a lot of focus on it.
They spent more on the Richland annual school budget
than they spent on dealing with radioactive
waste in the fifties.
And so they did what humans do with waste.
They buried it.
They dug holes in the ground and poured in
medium-level waste,
they put low-level waste in the river
and they took high-level waste and they dug holes,
made tanks and stuck it in the tanks.
These were temporary solutions when they came up with them.
They knew this could not be a long-term solution.
Now, sixty years later we still have the same tanks that are leaking,
heading towards the aquifers and heading towards the Columbia River.
These temporary solutions have become semi-permanent
and it seems almost unfixable.
To this date we have no technological solutions
to what to do with that waste.
And again you mention the explosion in 1957 with a tank there.
Were they basically having the same problems
and doing the same things we were here?
Yeah, they didn’t spend much on waste.
They didn’t invest much in it.
In fact, in 1949 the Soviets were racing to
catch up with the Americans
in terms of the number of bombs.
They started their project in 1945 right after Hiroshima.
Two weeks later the Soviets got ahold of an Air Force bombing map
targeting with these new nuclear weapons who we would possibly bomb.
They realized that there were fifty Soviet
cities on that map.
Now it was August 1945,
the Soviets and Americans were still allies.
This was shocking.
So the Soviets felt they needed to build a
nuclear shield as they called it…
needed to do it yesterday, and so they set
about…
what they thought they were doing
was securing the nation from an imminent American nuclear Apocalypse,
an attack that would create nuclear apocalypse in the Soviet Union.
So this was something that really couldn’t
wait,
and so in 1949 they built these underground tanks.
They were following the American model
and they ran out of tanks,
and so they could have stopped production,
and built new tanks, then start producing
again,
but that would have slowed down their  production of weapons
so they decided to keep producing
and to dump that high-level waste instead
into the Techa River.
Now, unlike the Columbia the Techa River is
a slow,
turgid muddy river that gets bogged down
in a number swamps and lakes on its way down river
where 28,000 people were living directly on
the river.
They had no wells and they were drinking from this river,
bathing in it, fishing in it, swimming in
it.
Irrigating their crops and their livestock
in this river.
They didn’t know in 1949 this was happening,
and only in early 1951 did they go down with some geiger counters
and take some measurements.
Scientists who went there were horribly shocked.
The kids, everything was irradiated, the cooking supplies,
kitchens, their homes the food,
and the bodies of the people who lived there.
The kids’ stomachs were dangerous sources of radiation,
so they set about evacuating 10 out of 16
villages,
but that was a very slow process.
It took about 10 years and they left a number villages.
They left the biggest ones,
probably because it was expensive to move
them
—the bigger ones—to rebuild facilities
for them elsewhere,
but over time, in the 60s,
they thought this was kind of a natural experiment going on
(the third generation of people [is now] living on contaminated territory).
It would be interesting to know
what happens to people living on contaminated territory,
so doctors started showing up every year taking blood samples,
and when they developed them,
running people through whole body scanners,
taking readings of the ambient environment for radiation,
radioactive contamination.
They have this amazing database now  which they sell.
They advertise, “We have the only three-generational cohort
of people living on irradiated territory.
If you want our biomedical data sets, you
can have it,”
but the people who live there of course
did not know about this until after Chernobyl.
Now they have political organizations called the White Mice,
for instance, where they feel like they were
left there to be tested.
That’s a suspicion they have and there might be something to it,
so what they got was something that so far
has been diagnosed only in the Russian Urals
and is called chronic radiation syndrome [CRS]
and it’s a syndrome that comes from long-term exposure
to low doses of radiation and a body eventually comes up with cancer
with this kind of exposure,
but long before you get cancer
people get symptoms such as chronic fatigue,
anemia, severe anemia, diabetes,
problems with the circulation system and digestive tract.
People have trouble with fertility
and their offspring have all kinds birth defects,
autoimmune disorders, and so on.
So what happens is a whole community of people, for instance,
in Muslioumovo, still living there at the
Techa River,
who just don’t feel right and the kids are
minimally functioning.
When I would show up they would offer me a meal.
There are no jobs in this community
because how can you have any kind of thriving economy in irradiated territory?
So they are farming.
They are living off the land,
which takes on new meaning on  contaminated ground.
They offer you goose and veal and cucumbers,
potatoes and tomatoes,
none of which you can eat.
So that’s the real tragedy about these places
and I think in the American context with the
downwinders,
if you go to those communities
they have many of the same complaints
that these people in Muslioumovo have,
that Russian doctors have diagnosed as chronic radiation syndrome.
Now chronic radiation syndrome
is too vague of a complaint to really hold
up in an American court.
If you are going to sue a corporation for
contamination,
what you need is a singular disease
that can be clearly traced to a single a radioactive isotope.
So iodine in the air, iodine in the thyroid,
thyroid disease, thyroid cancer: that’s
a rock solid case,
but vague complaints from a number of
different kinds of radioactive isotopes
that are synergistically working with DDT
in the environment
and other chemicals?
We don’t have the kind of sophisticated
medical science to even evaluate that.
And scientists who’ve been mostly working
labs,
not among populations,
haven’t even really asked those questions
in the American landscape.
That’s one of the strange things about the
story.
There are some uses to a closed society.
The Americans at Richland at the Hanford labs
were nervous about asking questions
about what happened to the downwinders
when they were breathing in all this:
from the Green Run, for instance,
eleven thousand curies of radioactive iodine.
What happens next?
They can’t ask these questions
because they’re worried about undue alarm, public hysteria.
They talk about not the threat radiation,
but the threat of public exposure,
not exposure to radiation,
but exposure to the public finding things
out.
As one official put it
when I asked why these studies of downwinders
were never carried out in the 60s,
he said, “Well, what if we found something
out?”
In the Soviet case, it’s not an open society.
There’s no independent press,
so the doctors were freer to ask open-ended scientific questions
about these populations,
secure in what they thought would be
the knowledge that nobody would ever
open their classified medical records.
Of course, when the Soviet Union fell apart,
these records were opened,
and we find all these what they call “data
sets”
of people who’ve been living long-term in
these places.
And in many ways these are a more sophisticated understanding
of what radiation does to the human body
long before cancer manifests itself.
Talk more about the Green Run.
So the premise of writing about these two
towns together
is that they are very much in conversation
with each other
throughout the Cold War.
Hanford is created;
the Maiak plant is its answer, and the two
are alike…
They used to say in Ozersk if you dug a whole straight through the earth
you would end up in Richland.
And that’s how I see them,
as two cities that are rotating on an axis
around the globe
and when one plant builds more reactors,
the other plant has to answer
with more reactors and more processing plants and more plutonium.
So in August 1949,
the Soviets tested their first bomb in Kazakhstan, in Semipalatinsk.
Americans had pilots circling the globe
with air filters there to detect just this
eventuality,
and so they knew right away
that the Soviets had tested this bomb,
and they were shocked because
they didn’t think the Soviets would have
a bomb
for maybe ten, maybe twenty years.
They underestimated the Soviets greatly,
so they were scared by this, terrified.
What are we going to do?
We need to know how much the Soviets are producing,
how much plutonium they’ve got going there.
They guessed quite rightly that in a hurry
the Soviets would produce bombs with green fuel,
meaning that when you irradiate uranium fuel cells,
the safest thing to do
is to put them in a pool of water for three
months
so that they can decay the short-lived radioactive isotopes
like radioactive iodine.
But if you’re in a hurry, you don’t have
three months,
so you do thirty days, and then you get what’s called green fuel.
This is very dirty radioactive fuel
that then you process through the plants.
As they process it through the plants,
radioactive gasses and much higher concentrations of radioactivity
go up through the stacks and spread into the environment.
And one can detect them on the global pathways.
So that’s what the Americans were probably
trying to do when they ran the Green Run in
November,
just two months after the Soviet test of 1949.
Out at Hanford they processed green fuel
and the whole experiment went wrong.
They would like to have waited for weather
that was clear with the wind picking up,
lofting and dispersing this radioactive gas
widely across the landscape,
but instead they set a day when the winds
were drafting down towards the earth
and then on top of that there was rain
that was bringing the gasses right down to
the ground.
They tried to track this
—there was about eleven thousand curies
of radioactive iodine
that came out that day, out of the stacks.
They tried to track it
but they found that their filters clogged
up,
that their planes got lost,
but they did notice that there was just as
much
radioactivity in Walla Walla sixty miles away
as there was right next to the plant stacks.
What they found is that
rather than radioactive waste dispersing evenly
across the landscape in some diffuse pattern
—so everywhere there would just be
a little bit of radioactivity that wouldn’t
hurt anyone
—what they found is that radioactivity goes
with the pathways,
either in the ground or in the water or the
air,
to certain spots repeatedly
creating what they called hotspots.
So places in Walla Walla tended to be hotspots.
Places on up-slopes of valleys
tended to have hot spots,
and you were unfortunate if you were in those spots
where the radioactivity had concentrated rather than being diffuse.
So there are a lot of people who feel like
the Green Run
—especially if they were young at the time
and they were in these pathways
—they feel like the Green Run was the cause
of some of their problems with thyroid cancers, thyroid disease,
and other maladies that they had.
I’ve interviewed downwinders
who lived in Walla Walla at the time
and one of the women there took us to a cemetery there
—they have specific baby cemeteries
and you can just see dozens of these babies
that died in the same time period.
That seems highly unusual to me.
I saw that and there’s a very similar Spokane cemetery,
same kind of thing.
About 30% of a 150-year-old cemetery.
30% of the bodies in there are babies in the
50s.
So I asked a grad student of mine
to run a study of the census of Benton and
Franklin counties
around Richland from 1950 to 1959
she found that there’s this big spike in
infant mortality.
That’s children dying within the first years
of life
in exactly Franklin and Benton counties, especially in Richland.
Now, I find it strange that fifty years later
I’m the first one to uncover this?
And I think that reveals the lack of curiosity
about public health around this plutonium
plant
that has been manifest all these years
because to find out too much would be a problem.
And yet it seems from your earlier statement
about how if the Soviets were doing something
then the Americans responded,
“Oh, we’ve got to do that.”
If they’re doing this testing on their own
people,
you would think the Americans would have said
we’ve got to do testing on our people, too.
Yeah, you would have thought that,
and it’s true that in the 1960s the Americans…
at the Hanford Labs… the plant closed really about 1964.
They ceased to produce much plutonium after 1964.
They moved the plutonium production facilities
more to Savannah River in Georgia,
and they were looking for something to do
to keep these people employed…
in these nice houses… at this point by 1964
people in Richland had bought their own houses,
and they didn’t want to be living in a ghost
town
and lose their investment in their real estate,
which is usually an American family’s major investment,
so they were desperate to have another economy to depend on.
One of those was in fact research in the Hanford Labs,
so they did start doing for the first time
research on what they called “human subjects” around the area,
and they developed a whole body counter
and went around in the community of Ringold
right across the river from the plant,
a small farming community.
They ran a study in the early 60s.
There were only twenty people in the study,
and two kids in the study came out
with very high counts of radioactive iodine
in their bodies.
But even when they found that,
they said the gratifying result of this study
is
we only found two kids out of twenty with
high counts.
So even when they did very small limited studies,
they still were Pollyannas about looking at
the results of these studies,
or looking any farther.
What they tended to do was
come up with research programs that generated income
but didn’t have much medical value.
One of these was the prisoner testes study
in Walla Walla
at the State Penitentiary.
In 1962, there was a criticality accident.
Three guys were exposed to the blue light
of a limited chain reaction.
They got very sick from it.
They were put in the shielded special
hospital ward.
Doctors in spacesuits treated them
because these guys were so radioactive for
a time after the exposure.
One of the things they discovered is that
these guys
all lost their sperm and became infertile
for a period of time after this accident.
You can see this is as a factory full of men
and a lab full of male scientists.
This made them very nervous and so
they wanted to find out what this was and
why this was caused…
if they could reverse it.
So they came up with this prisoner testes
study
where they went to Walla Walla and they got volunteer prisoners,
paid them five dollars and then set up a special bed
in which the men laid face down,
and then their testes were submerged in body-temperature water
and they shot them from both sides with x-rays.
They started at two rads; no sperm,
went up to four rads, no sperm.
They kept going higher and higher to 60 rads.
This was a twelve-year study with no change in the results.
I asked a lot of times,
“What’s the medical value of continuing
to go
higher and higher on these guys
when you know that they’re not going to
have any sperm after two rads?
Why go to sixty and why do it for twelve years?”
The only answer I can come up with is
that it was a lucrative government grant for
a long-term study.
Two professors, one at the University of Washington,
the other at the University of Oregon, ran
the study.
They worked in Hanford Labs.
People at Hanford Labs were very nervous about this.
Nobody wanted to press the button to zap the testes:
“You press it.”
“No, you press it.”
This was going back and forth in the correspondence because no one wanted
to be liable because they realized
that there was something a little bit fishy
about this study.
So finally they had prisoners press the button for each other.
They called them inmate technicians.
Later some of the prisoners who came up with cancers and became sick,
and found this to be very painful, said,
“You know, this inmate didn’t like me
and he held the button extra-long.”
There was something highly immoral about the whole project,
yet it went on for 12 years.
So that’s the kind of medical studies that
the Americans were up to.
I also heard from people who remember
when they were kids maybe participating in
that whole body counter testing.
Did that occur anywhere beyond that particular city you mentioned?
They went around to schools and they had a bus,
and in the bus was a whole body counter.
They invited the kids and they gave them
comic books and lollipops and made it fun.
These kids went through the whole body counters
in the farm communities outside Mesa,
for instance, O’Connell, Pasco and then
in Richland itself.
People remember, especially the farmers in
in Mesa and Pasco.
They talk about how they
had to go through these whole body counters
and then they had these green books
that were distributed by the scientists at
the plant
asking them to write down everything they
ate in this crazy detail.
They would laugh about all that crazy detail:
“I can’t believe we had to do that.”
At the time, I think people thought it was
maybe
a sign that they were being cared for.
“They’re looking after us [they thought],
and
if they find something wrong they will tell
us.”
I think in some ways these studies
gave people a sense of assurance that the
scientists,
who know so much,
who in our open democratic society
are looking after our best interests,
would let us know if there were some problem.
There are some parents
who said that they were never consulted
when their kids were going through those programs at school.
Yeah, remarkable, huh?
It just happened at school without any kind
of releases.
Yeah, that’s how they just went to the schools and did it.
There was another account of households
where there would be a drop-off in the morning
of empty milk bottles that people
would give urine samples into, and then put
out,
and there’d be the equivalent of the milkman
coming by later in the day to pick up urine
bottles.
Yeah, it’s amazing.
When I think about it:
here were these Americans living in a thriving democracy.
They were making bombs to defend American democracy,
yet in their town they had no free market.
The corporation selected businesses and gave them monopolies,
and then since the businesses had monopolies,
they made sure they set prices,
and went around and checked prices.
So it was sort of like a little bit of a planned
economy.
There was no free press.
GE [General Electric] set up the Richland
Villager
and they hired a former army censor to be
the editor.
He knew just the kind of stories they wanted.
Or the PR [public relations] department just
wrote the stories.
So there was no free press.
There were no local governments
because GE set up an advisory council and selected people to be on it,
and those people were paid employees and had to be docile.
There was no city hall.
There was no town council.
There was no mayor.
A GE lawyer ran the town.
There were no local governments
and there was no freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.
People knew quite clearly they could not say what they wanted to say.
They couldn’t join a political party that
would be too far to the left
or they would lose their place in the town.
So here were these Americans giving up their basic rights,
and they were even giving up their rights
over their bodies
by putting… being willing to put
their urine samples on the front stoop every morning,
willing to let their kids be run through these
whole body counters.
So I think one of the compensations for them
was they gained in exchange consumer rights.
They gained the right to have this cheap,
affordable housing,
secure pay at thirty percent more than the
surrounding counties,
and available goods and great opportunities
for their kids in these superior schools
with the superior recreation programs—all
tax-free.
Local taxes did not exist.
All federally subsidized.
And that’s this notion of a consumers' republic.
All across America in the post-war period
Americans gave up notions of American egalitarianism and opportunity
and equality for all, equal opportunity for
everyone,
in exchange for moving into limited access
all-white suburbs
and housing that was federally subsidized
by the federal government
in the form of FHA loans, and then subsidies
to build national defense highways [the interstate highway system] out to them
from the increasingly blighted inner cities
where minorities were left behind.
I think the differences between Pasco
where temporary construction workers lived
—construction workers who were black
who lived in Pasco had to live in the Pasco
ghetto
in a sort of Jim Crow situation
—and Richland, the Gold Coast,
epitomize these stark contrasts all across
America
between the blighted inner cities, increasingly blighted,
and increasingly all-white affluent suburbs.
And in that all-white affluent suburb, as
in Richland,
people believed that everybody lived like
them,
that America was a democracy,
that everybody was the same.
It was a classless society and everybody had an equal opportunity.
They didn’t see because they were cut off
from it
and because it was better
not to see the Pasco ghetto on the other side,
just as they didn’t see the blighted inner-cities
and think it had anything to do with them.
It seemed natural that those people just didn’t make the grade.
They weren’t good enough to get to a place
like Richland
where only the chosen few lived.
I think this epitomizes a lot of shifts we
find
in American society in the post-war years.
So making these kinds of exchange, of body rights,
rights over one’s body, and civil rights
and freedoms
for consumer rights and financial security,
and national security made sense to a lot
of Americans,
not just people in Richland.
It just seems like there’s a bit of karma
at play there,
that those that really benefited financially
and felt security
are the ones who are now coming forward
and trying through lawsuits
to get compensation for their long-term exposures
to the radionuclides coming out of Hanford.
Yeah. Most of the downwinders are people
who were in the farming communities.
People who worked at the plant were monitored
and they wore badges and their environments were monitored,
so it’s much easier to reconstruct their
exposure and to say,
“Oh, yeah, that cancer you have could possibly be caused by Hanford exposures,”
so here’s compensation.
Workers got compensation at the plant, already in the 90s.
A hundred and fifty thousand dollars was something
that came across right away in the 1990s.
Downwinders were not monitored.
They didn’t wear badges.
Their ambient environment wasn’t monitored,
so when they say, “My cancer is caused by
Hanford,”
it’s much harder to make the case.
Once again there’s this divide between the
people
who worked at the plant,
who agreed to take these risks,
who also get compensated for the risks that they take,
and then there’s this other divide in the
farmers
who did not agree to take these risks,
who did not work at the plant,
who are still not compensated.
These downwinders’ lawsuits have been  on for twenty-five years.
People who were plaintiffs have died of their cancers by now.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers are in bankruptcy,
and the federal government has spent sixty
million dollars
defending these corporations because
they had vowed to defend them from the start.
That was part of the original agreement.
A law firm in Chicago, Kirkland and Ellis,
has made a lot of money in fees
defending these corporations with taxpayer
dollars.
And again this gets back to what you brought up earlier…
that this is a military-run city and installation
but they doled out most of the work to these contractors
that came in and cleaned up, so to speak.
Right. And a lot of the dirty work in both
these places…
people now in the Fukushima context we call jumpers…
were not regular employees, long-standing
employees.
They were people who came in,
worked temporarily and were sent out
to do construction work on contaminated ground
underneath the streams of the smokestacks,
where this yellow plume is coming out
that eroded women’s nylons.
Those were construction workers.
A lot of those construction workers out in
eastern Washington were minorities.
They did not live in Richland.
They lived in North Richland or in Pasco.
They worked for a couple years and then maybe they’d move on.
When there was a spill or something needed to be cleaned up,
those people often did it too.
They were not monitored.
That was part of the corporate policies.
You don’t monitor these temporary workers.
So they left.
There are probably three hundred thousand
workers
who worked in these places and left,
and we don’t know.
They took with them their ingested radioactive isotopes.
They took with them their possible medical
complications.
When they tally up the number of workers
who were exposed and who are sick at Hanford,
that’s just a tiny fraction of the people
who were actually exposed on the job.
The same thing happened in Russia.
They brought in prisoners and conscripted
soldiers
to do the dirty work at the cleanups.
Local farmers had to do cleanup work on this river
when they evacuated these places.
Those people were never monitored either.
So jumpers, temporary workers who served as jumpers,
were instrumental in creating a mirage of
healthy pink Plutopias.
Did the US use any,
in addition to the radioactive experiments
they did on the prisoners,
did they use prisoners in any other capacity
for building Hanford?
Yes they did.
In 1944 they had what they called a severe
labor crisis.
This crisis was inspired not only by the fact
that it was wartime and workers were in short supply,
but also by the fact that they equated
a secure labor force with whiteness,
so they did not want to hire,
neither the Army Corps
nor Dupont [the private contractor], they
didn’t want to hire
African-American workers or Mexican-American workers.
There was a surplus of both of these categories of workers
because, as we know, it was a segregated US Army,
so there were 300,000 approved A1 African-American draftees
that weren’t going into the army
because there was no place for them since
they weren’t fighting.
There was lots of Mexican-American labor
that was organized in farm administration
mobile camps
to do migrant work for harvests.
Those guys could have been called in to do
a lot of this manual labor for jobs,
but they didn’t want these people.
They didn’t think they were secure enough,
so finally the NAACP [National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People] got
involved
and said you have to take a minimum quota of 10 percent African-Americans.
So they built a special segregated part of
Camp Hanford
for that what they called “the negroes”
at the time.
They had separate facilities.
They introduced Jim Crow to the Pacific Northwest,
but they also built Prison Industries Inc.
A private company came and said,
“Listen we can put up a labor camp right
here
and that will help you with your labor force.”
So they brought in white conscientious objectors from McNeil Island,
set up whole separate facilities,
a labor camp for them.
They spent several hundred thousand dollars building this thing,
then these guys were used
to dismantle Camp Hanford at the end of 1945,
to harvest fruits that were left rotting on
the vine
in this new territory that had been zoned
off from the local farmers,
and do other kinds jumper-related work.
It was a very expensive thing to do,
and it was all really to avoid hiring minority
labor
because minorities were associated with disloyalty or volatility.
So about the dismantling of Camp Hanford at the end of the war:
they didn’t need the military barracks anymore?
They built Camp Hanford right on the plant
premises
and so once they started producing plutonium
it was a dirty landscape,
so they needed to get the people out.
They couldn’t have 60,000 people living
right directly next to these reactors which
could blow.
They were brand new.
They really didn’t know how they would work…
The processing plant was really the dirtiest.
They thought the reactors would be more dangerous,
but it turned out that [what was more dangerous was] the processing plant
where they take irradiated uranium fuel cells
and run them through a series of chemical
baths
to distill away tiny grams of plutonium.
That job was often given in both countries
to women,
even though it turns out those were the dirtiest
jobs.
And at Dupont they were saying…
what do you think they’d write to the Army
Corps?
“Maybe because we’re going to make this
super poisonous product
we shouldn’t hire women who are younger
than a menopausal age.
What about fertility problems?
What about mutants and monsters in offspring?”
In these letters they were real nervous about it.
When people say,
“Oh, they didn’t know much about radiation
in the 1940s,”
that’s absolutely not true.
They knew a great deal and they were worried,
but because again they had this labor crisis
which was an artificial labor crisis
based on notions of class and race and loyalty,
they hired… they recruited women from across the country
and put them in these radiochemical processing plants and exposed them.
They did the same thing in Russia.
They gendered the physics and the reactors as male
and radioprocessing as female
because in there you have solutions
and you pour two cups into here.
It was like cooking, and the women at Hanford,
they would say the bosses…
when they applied for a job,
the bosses would say,
“Do you like to cook or sew?”
This one woman told me,
“I didn’t like to do either,
but I said I’d prefer to cook”
and they said OK,
you go to the radioprocessing plant
because there you’re measuring potions.
They thought women would be especially good workers
because they were very accurate
and they’re good at following directions
specifically.
They didn’t ask a lot of questions.
That was their notion of women.
And how did they present the job,
in terms of hazard to the women?
Well, the women said,
“I was real nervous about going to these
places.”
Then I asked a lot of questions about safety.
The men who were the supervisors
—and men were supervisors at these places
—were sent to Chicago, the University Chicago,
and they were given training.
They were taught what the process was.
The women were not sent anywhere for training.
They were given a very brief three-week
“this is how to do things”
and not given any background
about what the chemistry and the physics were
to the kinds of processes they were doing.
So they were basically made to work in ignorance,
and they were hoping that in so doing
women would worry less about what was happening.
But they caught right on.
There was a woman, Marge DeGoyer,
and she told me that those guys,
those chemists with their fancy college degrees,
"They would come to our lab,
and they would hand us formulas over the threshold.
They wouldn’t even walk in our lab
because they knew it was so dirty."
And as I talked to Marge…
she’d had cancer all over her body
and she died just a couple months after
I interviewed her… [She told me] there was
sort of a hierarchy of labor from working
class
all the way up to management,
and with it was a hierarchy of exposure.
The more you knew,
the more you could keep yourself safe from
exposures,
and the less you knew,
the more you could blindly stumble into harm’s way.
I have to assume there were no labor unions to protect these people.
There eventually was a nuclear workers’
labor union that emerged later,
and what they seemed to be interested in was acknowledging…
getting the corporations to acknowledge
that the workers were working in hazardous environments
—not always so much so that they would change the hazardous environments
but it seems more so that they would get them extra pay—hardship pay.
That was what the union wanted to deliver
to their workers.
There was also a carpenters’ union
and I found most of those records have disappeared,
but I did find some snatches of things
where the carpenters’ union was writing
in saying,
“Listen, our guys are out there in these
fields working
and they’re not being monitored,
and they’re developing strange sores on
their arms
and the doctors tell them not to worry about it,
it’s not cancer, but they don’t feel very
well.
They’re having troubles with their lungs.”
So there were these issues that were coming up
and the union representatives were worried
about them,
but unions, especially during the war years
and in the 50s,
union representatives did not have access
to the plant.
They could only meet plant workers outside of the gates.
So these big gated-off factories gave the
corporations that ran them
a bubble of immunity to do more or less what they wanted to
inside those walls while they ran these plants.
I would argue there’s a little bit of that
to the cleanup as well.
Talk about those people now outside of Richland,
the farmers that are trying to get recognition and or compensation.
One of the people in your book is Tom Bailey.
When I first met Tom...
Everybody in eastern Washington knows Tom Bailey
because he’s been a very outspoken proponent of the downwinders,
and he’s a guy who has the gift of the gab.
He knows just about everybody around,
and he spends a lot of time in coffee shops
picking up information.
When I first met Tom, I must tell you
I thought he was kind of crazy
because he was telling me the most crazy stories
about how the feds used to come in beige cars
to the Pasco slaughterhouse
and get the organs from their sheep and their cows
after they’d been slaughtered,
and they would take them off in stainless
steel dishes.
He would tell me stories about reverse wells
where they dumped in medium-level waste
that then went into the shared aquifer.
He would talk about babies born without heads
in what he calls the “cancer mile” around
Mesa.
I just thought he had the gift of the gab
and was given to exaggerate,
but I found as I did research
that a lot of what Tom told me
turned out to be true.
I could find evidence of it in the archives.
A lot of what he knew about how the winds
sweep up valleys…
He would say, “I ran for public office and
I campaigned
among old people because old people vote,
and I would go to these communities
and they would have all kinds old people.
I turned to my friend and said
‘why don’t we have any old people in our
communities?’
And he’d say they all died of cancer.”
Tom said the people who lived up the hillside;
those communities all got poisoned.
People down in the valleys were safer.
I also thought that sounded very random,
but then I found studies that said exactly
that,
and then Tom would say,
“I finally realized why I’m OK and all
the goody two-shoes
I went to school with are dead!
I said, “Why?” and he said,
“Well, when their parents told them to the
drink their milk
and eat their vegetables, they did,
and I snuck off to the store and ate  twinkies and coke.”
And I did find actually a study
in which pigs that were fed a local diet got
sick,
and pigs that were fed a poor and artificial
diet
(in Hanford they did these studies on animals) thrived.
So it was it was kind of odd that over and
over again
these crazy-seeming stories from this apparently unreliable narrator
turned out to have a good deal of truth.
It sounds like we’ve finally found a single
place
where eating twinkies and coke is actually
the healthy way to go.
Amazing as that sounds.
Talk about where you got the bulk
of the information for your book.
Information is always a problem
when you’re talking about secret military
installations
in both Russia and the United States.
After the Chernobyl disaster, local populations in both places…
and these activists are real heroes…
I think we need to reflect on that…
they demanded to see the record of contamination
in both of these nuclear facilities.
Activists among the downwinders,
led by some Seattle reporters and some reporters in Spokane
got—and The New York Times—got the Department of Energy
to declassify tens of thousands of documents.
The Department of Energy sort of over-declassified,
threw all these documents at the feet of these activists,
thinking that they would be intimidated
in this welter of technical material,
and they would back off, but they didn’t.
They started reading it.
They got scientists lined up
and they got people for technical information.
They found all these amazing stories in these records,
and that really blew apart the Hanford myth
of safety.
The same thing happened out in the Russian Urals.
Activists got together.
They started talking to the people in these
villages.
They started talking to defecting plant workers
who had amazing stories to tell about these accidents,
these disasters in 1957 and with Techa River,
and they got them to declassify a fair amount of information.
So I used those records that were declassified,
and then I would go talk to people
and especially in Russia people were nervous about talking to me.
I couldn’t get into the closed city,
so I camped out in a village just outside
of the closed city,
and I lived in this little hut,
and I had to chop my own wood and pump my own water
and carry it with a wooden yoke from the well.
But I had this modern cell phone
and I would wait for that cell phone to ring.
My contact inside the closed city would call me and say,
“I’m sending one out to you,
and this one’s kind of nervous,
so I couldn’t tell her you were American,
so I said you were Estonian.”
We would meet at a third neutral location
in a senior center,
and I would interview these people,
and they would tell me their stories.
Some took a look at me and realized I was
American
and turned around and left,
but others were quite brave and courageous
and told me what they could of their stories.
And a lot of people did
because they were sick and they felt
they had been made sick by these plants
and that they had been denied compensation,
so they had reasons to talk to me, too.
They thought that that would be good for them.
I talked to doctors who had done medical research.
I talked to people who had worked as engineers and physicists at the plants.
I talked to everybody I could who was willing to talk to me.
Those oral interviews I would cross reference with the archival documents,
and I got as close as I could
to what I thought was the truth.
But I would invite my readers to read it and
judge for themselves.
And some of those documents,
in addition to being in your book,
are available online now.
Right. There is a DOE [Department of Energy] open net which has…
I don’t know… more than 60,000 documents and photographs,
and you can just click on them and download these documents
and read them for yourself.
It’s fascinating stuff, and there are more
stories to be told
when people have the patience to go through them.
And did you find people in the tri-cities
over at Hanford to be fairly open about this?
Fairly open, but not always that open.
There’s a certain long-lasting boosterism
in the tri-cities:
“We don’t have a problem here,”
and there’s a divide between the people
in Richland
who are seen as sort of cut off from the local farming communities,
and the local farming communities can sometimes be
a bit resentful of Richland and its pre-eminence in the tri-cities.
There are all these tensions going on,
so one time I was invited to a dinner party
then I got disinvited.
Those kind of things would go on.
I was working in... Richland has a local museum...
... an archive of the museum. I was working there in 2008.
In 2009, I showed up again, and the whole
archive had disappeared.
It had been taken by the feds. The archivist
said,
"To be vetted for post-9/11 material."
This archive had people’s memoirs and family photographs
—I think nothing that would threaten national security,
but in the post-9/11 climate,
access to information was getting more and more limited
each year that I did research in this book.
Finally, what are you hoping will become of
your book?
I hope that people will look at this tandem
history
and see that there are some striking similarities
between how easy it was to deny
radioactive contamination and public health effects
in both the socialist Soviet Union and in
American democracy,
and that despite the vast differences in these two countries
and these two political systems,
there was something overarching about the
nuclear umbrella
that created very similar kinds of cultures
and social systems,
and systems of knowledge.
We need to take a really close look
at how the demands of nuclear technology and nuclear secrecy
and security create systems and communities
that are extremely undemocratic and hierarchical,
and also create these plutonium disasters,
the full impact of which we’ve yet to really
fully digest…
… both figuratively and literally.
Well, with that we are unfortunately out of
time.
I want to thank you very much for spending
time with us today.
Thanks, Mike, very much.
