Plutopia:
Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium
Disasters
by Kate Brown, 2013
Do we all live
in Plutopia? This is the disturbing question implied by Kate Brown’s
book. By describing the towns where Americans and Soviets made plutonium for
their nuclear weapons, she raises troubling questions about how the project
influenced urban design and social structures of the post-nuclear world. We all became unwitting participants in the plutonium economy. She says toward the end of this
interview, “… this epitomizes a lot of shifts we find in American society in
the post-war years… 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.”
If you can’t
find the time to read the whole book, this interview serves as the next best
thing. It was so good that I realized a transcript of it could serve as a
comprehensive journal article that summarizes the contents of the book and all the research that went into
it. I found a way to download the terribly inaccurate automated subtitles
that Youtube produces, then transformed them into a proper transcript.
(Slightly edited
for better presentation as a published text)
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 people have 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 then set them to work building this vast plant. They boozed 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 PhDs 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 of 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 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 in 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 of 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
(airways). 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 were 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 hospice, a 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 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 thought] “They’re
looking after us, 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
contrast 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 cross 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 going 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 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 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 of 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 [of all the facilities]. They thought
the reactors would be more dangerous, but it turned out that 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 [was more
dangerous]. 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? [Such things as] “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 [not
women] 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 labs 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.
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.
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... [activists] 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 kinds 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 on 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.
*The Jim Crow laws in the Southern United
States, lasting from the time of Reconstruction until 1965, enforced racial
segregation in a “separate but equal” status which actually produced grievous
inequality.
