History professor Kate Brown’s recent discussion of Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Ivy Bookshop, Baltimore, Md., Sept. 18) is now available online through C-SPAN BookTV.
In Plutopia, Brown writes about the “atomic cities” of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia, where plutonium was first produced. To uphold secrecy during the nuclear arms race and compensate for the hazards of working in and around nuclear production facilities, the U.S. and Soviet governments offered generous salaries, educational and health care benefits in these “plutopias.” Brown argues that contamination to the cities and their surrounding environments occurred on a scale that dwarfed the disaster at Chernobyl.
Watch the full book discussion video on C-SPAN.
