we are talking today with kate brown kate brown is associate professor of history at university of maryland baltimore county she has published articles in the american historical review chronicle of higher education harper's online edition kritika slate magazine and the times literary supplement she is the author of a biography of no place from ethnic border land to soviet heartland and winner of the american historical associations george louis beer prize for the best book in international european history and she is here to talk about her new book put topia nuclear families atomic cities and the great soviet and american plutonium disasters so you start out tell us what was your motivation in writing but topia well i wrote a book about that ended up in the journal period about a book about ukraine and it's about this how this multi ethnic borderland in twenty five years has no ethnic minorities at all the jews the germans believe russians and poles were all gone and then twenty five years later everybody is gone it's the general zone of alienation and after i wrote the book i took a sort of a week summer holiday in the journalism and i wrote an article about it and negative contacted me and asked me to write a whole book about chernobyl and i thought wow a lot of books already about your novel i started sniffing around and i realized there are two places that had two to four times more spilled radiation and chernobyl and nobody never really heard of them their hand for of course is an well known and in washington state but not much outside of washington and then there was this my uk which is in southern russian urals and it's  answer to tony implant for the soviets and i thought about that you know journals a household word very few people have heard about my aachen hanford and i wondered why and why i thought about i thought you know  keep were sort of camera ready events they 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 in my awkward different day curb behind this military  barricades they had they called over four decades and there were no accidents and they were accidents but not really big ones that the real catastrophe occurred by design these were intentional daily dumping of radioactive waste into the air the ground in the water and that to me was a chilling realization because i thought there's tens of thousands of workers who've gone through these big factories and they all were witnesses not one of them said anything until the one nine hundred eighty s i thought how did that happen how could you have this place where this kind of disaster a slow motion disast going on and nobody speaks up and how do they get people to do that so i start looking into it and i realize that both places had these limited access cities exclusively for plant operators as richland of silence were those these these exclusive cities which i called to topia their plutonium utopias 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 and really sort of strange in mystifying ways so how did both of these facilities come about both hanford and my back well i tell the story as a sort of a tandem history going back and forth between this american landscape in the soviet landscape and and there's some surprising similarities because considering the great vast differences between these two countries leaders in both countries and these are military leaders who ran these places thought that they would build these vests factories with militarized labor living in camps and that's how they set it up and so at hanford they had campaigned for to sixty thousand people living in barracks and they brought in migrant workers from all over you were disobedient and very similar ways and and that really struck these military leaders and they realized that when they staffed these plutonium plants once they had them built they could not have workers who are as volatile as the product they're about to make you can imagine like a  brawl or a fistfight or a strike at a plutonium plant if some you know somebody has some luddite action and starts banging on the quitman 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 who people who were paid well whose families became dependent on this one product and that bought a lot of complicity and loyalty and silence and so these places were  federally subsidized people lived in these remote settings sort of rural and sparsely located where the surrounding population were poor farmers who live kind of hand to mouth if you can think of eastern washington in the forty's and fifty's certainly the soviet countryside was was virtually impoverished for the fifty's in the sixty's these places were lived well they had free standing houses and richland people got thirty percent more pay fantastic schools with d 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 and pascoe were in the past go ghetto were african americans had to live they paid under dollars a month for a shack with no plumbing a spigot and a dirty you know mud fence outside same thing in russia they had this gated city walled off from the rest of the community walled off from the camp the gulag camps and the garrisons of soldiers inside the gated community you could buy finnish overcoats and german shoes in romanian plums chocolate and sausage unheard of luxuries in the soviet provinces in the forty's and fifty's local started calling them the chocolate people just like they called richland the gold coast and you know outside of this this gated community were gritty industrial settlements with second and third shift of overcrowded schools and they started working when they were twelve so these these special communities these two topia 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 do or did they have people that moved out of that and still retained their social mobility yeah that's a great question so what you find in these towns is is a certain kind of fear and it's not a fear of the plant blowing up and it's not a fear of being bombed by the enemy those were very legitimate fears but people don't tend to i don't see any evidence that they harbor much instead they have biggest fear is getting tossed out of this dispute topia this garden of eden so in richland parents worried that their kids might misbehave and get you know get a ticket from the police and that that might be grounds for the father of the breadwinner of the family to be fired from the plant and 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 because grounds for termination same thing in your skiff you know worker drank too much slept with other men's wives that was taking up a party meetings and they threaten people with the vicks and if your kid dressed like elvis presley and listen to the voice of america that kid was 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 one nine hundred fifty seven of the soviet plant an underground waste tank the same kind of tanks are having problems with now hanford overheated and blew and  twenty million curies of radioactive waste into the air created a big cloud of fallout ash and fall and it was hard to hide and people who lived in the cities started to get nervous and they started resigning from the plant and leaving but after a couple of months i find all these latter years of people requesting to come back they said we can't live out here in the big quarrels it's too difficult i was stupid please take me back i think for me the message for that is that they preferred this the risks of living in their pluto p a to you know on the you know the certainty of being fed and living well to the possible risks of putting themselves and their families in don't worry about radiation there's a lot of you know my cheese mo and this sort of relativism and minimizing so you'd hear if you lived in richland it was more dangerous to operate your household appliances and to work in plutonium plant you would hear that a lot about background radiation in denver right and that radiation is a part of normal part of life and this is of course manufactured this plutonium is a well manmade product the most volatile product human kind of ever made and it's it's  there's nothing natural about it there's nothing natural about the tens the millions of gallons of radioactive waste that come from radiating one hundred tons of your rhenium processing it down to a few kilograms of plutonium to make a nuclear bomb plants are the messiest stop in the assembly line for nuclear weapons and these plants generated a great deal of ways part of the reason why this is going to your question about what people know 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 fifty's and so they did what humans do with ways 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  temporary solutions when they came up with a new this could not be a long term solution now sixty years later we still have those same tanks that are leaking and heading towards the aqua firs and heading towards the columbia river and these temporary solutions have become semi permanent and and it seems almost unfixable to this day we have no technological solutions to what to do with that waste and again you mention the explosion in fifty seven with the tank there where they basically having and doing the same having the same problems five right after they two weeks later the soviets get a hold of an air force bomb emap targeting you know these these nuclear weapons who would be possibly bombed they realize that there are fifty soviet cities on that map  nineteenth forty five the soviets in americans are still allies this was you know shocking to the soviets feel we need to build a nuclear shield as they call that we need to do it yesterday and so they set about what they think they're doing is securing the nation from an imminent american nuclear apocalypse you know attack that would create nuclear apocalypse in the soviet union so this is something that really can't wait and so in one thousand nine hundred ninety eight they build these underground tanks that they're following the american model and they run out of tanks and so they could stop production and build new tanks and then start producing again or but that would slow down their production of weapons so they decide to keep producing and to dump that high level waste instead into the job river no unlike the columbia river that's job river is a slowed turgid muddy river that gets bogged down in a number of swamps and legs on its way down river where twenty eight thousand 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 and you're getting their crops and their livestock in this river they didn't know in forty nine this was happening and only nine hundred fifty one did they go down and with some geiger counters and take some measurements and the scientists who went there were horribly shocked the kids everything was radiated the cooking supplies the kitchens the homes the food and the bodies of the people who live there the kids stomachs were dangerous sources of radiation so they set about evacuating ten out of sixteen of the villages on the river but that was a very slow process it took about ten years and they left a number of villages there the biggest ones probably because it was expensive to move them the bigger ones to rebuild facilities for them elsewhere but over time and sixty's they thought oh this is kind of a natural experiment we're going on the third generation of people living on contaminated territory it be interesting to know what happens to people living on contaminated territory so they started showing up doctors are showing up every year taking blood samples when they develop them running people through whole body scanners taking readings of the ambient environment for radiation radioactive contamination and they have this amazing database now which they sell you know they advertise we have there are only three generational cohort of people living on radiated territory if you want to buy a medical data sets you know bush also you can have it but the people who live there of course did not know about this until after chernobyl and now they have political organizations called the white mice for instance where they feel like they were left there to be tested and that's a suspicion they have and there might be something to it so what they got was what something that so far has been diagnosed only in the russian urals and it's called chronic radiation syndrome and it's a syndrome that comes from long term exposure to low doses of radiation and  problems with the circulation system and circulatory system and digestive tracts kids people trouble with fertility and the kids their offspring have all kinds of birth defects auto immune disorders and so on and so on so what happens is it is a whole community of people and for instance muslim of still living there on the job river who just don't feel right and their kids are minimally functioning and when i would show up they would offer me a meal there's there are no jobs in this community because how can you have any kind of thriving economy and redid territory so their farming their living off the land which takes on new meaning contaminated ground and they offer you goose and veal and cucumbers and potatoes and tomatoes none of which you can eat and so that's the real tragedy about these places and i think in the american context with the winders if you go to those communities they have very many of the same complaints that these people muslim of a 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 were going to a corporation for contamination what you need is a singular disease that can be clearly traced to a singular radioactive isotope so iodine in the air  cancer that that's a rock solid case but vague complaints from a number of different kinds of radioactive isotopes that are synergistically working with d d t in the environment and other chemicals we don't have the kind of sophisticated medical science to even evaluate that and scientists who've done mostly work in labs not among populations haven't even really asked those questions in the american landscape and that's one of the strange things about the story is that there are some uses to a closed society americans and richland at the hand for labs were nervous about asking questions about what happened to the winders when they're breathing in all this you know from the green run for instance you know thousand curies of radioactive iodine what happens next they can ask these questions because they're worried as they say 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 you know the public finding things out so as one official put it when i asked whether studies have done winters were never carried out in the sixty's they said well what if we found something  soviet case is not an open society there's no independent press so the doctors were freer to ask open ended scientific questions about these populations secure what and then what they thought would be the knowledge that nobody would ever open their classified medical records of course after the soviet union fell apart these records were open and we find all these you know what they call data sets of people who've been living long term in these places and and in many ways 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're very much in conversation with each other throughout the cold war hanford is created  ak plant is its answer and there too are like these to say in the u s that if you dug drilled a hole straight in through the earth you would end up in richland and that's why i see them as two cities that are rotating on an access around the globe and the e you know one plant builds more reactors the other plant has to answer with more reactors and more processing plants and more plutonium so in nineteen forty nine august one thousand forty nine the soviets tested their first bomb americans had you know pilots circling the globe with air filters there to detect just this eventuality and so they knew right away that this over the test of this bomb and they were shocked because they didn't think this soviet to have a bomb for maybe ten maybe twenty years they underestimated the soviets greatly so they're scared by this terrified what are we going to do we need to know how much the soviets are producing how much patrolling they've got going there they guessed quite rightly that in a hurry the soviets would produce bombs with green fuel meaning that they you know when you radiate 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 can do kate but if you're in a hurry you know you got three months so you do more like 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 you process it through the plants radioactive gases and much higher concentrates 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 nine hundred forty nine out of hand for the process green fuel  the whole experiment went wrong the they was waiting for they would like to have waited for whether that was clear with the wind you know picking up aloft an insta spur seeing this radioactive gas widely across the landscape but instead they said a day when  it was the winds the death the winds were drafting down towards the earth and then top of that there was a rain that was bringing the gases right down to the ground they tried to track this is 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 and what they found is that rather than radioactive waste dispersing evenly across the landscape in some diffuse pattern so everywhere there just be a little bit of radioactivity and when that w anyone what they found is that radioactivity goes with the pathways of the ground or the water or the air to certain spots repeatedly creating what they called hot spots so w places and wall it tended to be hot spots places on you know up slopes the valleys tended to have hot spots and if you were unfortunate enough to be in those spots you were in places where the radioactivity had concentrated rather than being diffuse and so there are a lot of people who feel like the green run specially if they're young at the time and they were in some of these pathways they feel like the green run was the cause of some of the problems with thyroid cancers thyroid disease and and other maladies that they've had i've interviewed down wonders who lived in while all of the time and one of the women there took us to a cemetery there that they have specific baby cemeteries and you can just see like dozens of these babies that died in the same time period that seems highly unusual to me yeah so i saw that there was a similar very similar spokane cemetery same kind of  thing about thirty percent of a hundred fifty year old cemetery thirty percent of the bodies in there are babies from the fifty's so i asked a grad student of mine to run a study of the census of benton in franklin county is around richland and  hundred fifty to nine hundred forty nine she found that there was this big spike in infant mortality that's children dying within the first years of life in exactly franklin been counties and 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 sort of 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 that the americans responded though we've got to do that if they're doing these testing on their own people you'd think the americans would have said w hundred sixty the people in richmond 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 american families major investment so they were desperate to have a another economy to depend on and one of those was in fact research in the hand for the lab so they did start doing for the first time research on what they call human subjects around the area and they developed a whole body counter and they went around and like a community ringgold right across the river from the planet small farming community they ran a study in the early sixty's there's only twenty people in the study and two kids in the study with very high counts of radioactive iodine in their bodies  even when they find that they say we don't we the gratifying result of the studies we only found two kids out of twenty with high counts so even when they did very small and limited studies they still were sort of  pollyannas about looking at the results of these studies or or looking any farther and what they tended to do is come up with research programs that generated income but didn't have much medical value and one of these was the prisoner study in walla walla at the state penitentiary one hundred sixty two there was a critic ality accident and three guys were exposed to the blue light of a small limited chain reaction they got very sick from it they were put in the you know the shielded hospice special hospital ward you know doctors within spacesuits treated them because they're these guys are so radioactive for a time after their exposure and the one of the things they discovered is that these guys all lost their sperm and became infertile for a period time after this accident and you can see this is a factory full of men and a lab full of male scientists and that this made them very nervous and so they wanted to find out you know what this was and why this was cause and if they could reverse it and so they came out of this prisoner test to study where they went to all and they got volunteer prisoners paid five dollars and then set up a special bed in which the men laid face down in there they're just these were submerged and you know body temperature water and then they shot them both sides with with x rays and they started to rad's no sperm they went to four rads no sperm they kept going higher and higher to sixty rads as a twelve year study with no change in the results and i i asked a lot as i would like what what's the medical value of continue to go higher and higher on these guys when you know that they're not going to have any sperm after two rats why go to sixty and why do it for twelve years and 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 university of washington another in university of oregon ran the study they worked with him for labs and people him for labs were very nervous about this and nobody wanted to press the button to zap the testes you know they're going back and forth in the correspondence because nobody wanted to be liable they realized that there was something a little fishy about the study and so finally they have prisoners press the button for each other they call them inmate technicians and a year later the prisoners who came up with cancers and became sick and found this to be very painful said you know this this inmate didn't like me and he held the button extra long right i mean there's something highly immoral about the whole project but yet it went on for twelve years so that's the kind of medical studies that the americans were up to did you run across and also heard from people that they remember from when they were kids maybe they participated in that whole body counter testing  occur anywhere beyond that particular city action yeah they went around to schools and they had a bus and in the bus was a whole body counter and they invited the kids in they gave them comic books and lollipops and made it fun and these kids went through these whole body counters in the farm communities outside for instance o'connell pascoe and then in richland itself and you know people remember and especially the farmers and mason pascoe they they talk about how you know they had to go through these whole body  then they had these green books that were distributed by the scientists at the plant asking them to write down everything they ate you know in this crazy detail and they would sort of laugh about you know all that crazy detail can't believe we had to do that  and at the time you know i think people thought it was maybe a sign that we were being cared for they're looking after us and if they find something wrong they'll tell us and 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 problems you know there were some parents who said that they were never consulted when their kids were going through those programs of school you know remarkable how it just happened to school without any kind of releases yeah that's how they just went to the schools and did it as well as there was another account of households there would be a drop off in the morning empty like milk bottles that people would give urine samples into and then put out and there'd be you know the equivalent of the milkman coming by later in the day to pick up here in bottles yeah it's amazing i mean when i think about it you know here are these americans living in a thriving democracy they're making bombs to defend american democracy yet in their town they have no free market corporation selects businesses and give them monopolies and then since the businesses have monopolies they make sure they set prices and go around and check prices so it's sort of like a little bit of a planned economy there's no free press they set up the you know g e set up the richland villager and  they hired a former army censor to be the editor and you know he knew just the kind of stories they wanted or they the the p r department of g e just wrote the stories so there's no free press there's no local governments because  e set up an advisory council and selected people to be on it and those people were paid employees and had to be docile there's no you know city hall there's no town council there's no mayor a lawyer you know ran the town there 's no local governments and there's no you know freedom of assembly and freedom of speech you 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 these americans giving up their basic rights and they're even giving up their rights over their bodies by putting you know willing to put their urine samples on the front stoop every morning willing to let their kids run through these whole body counters and so i think one of the compensations for them was they gained in the exchange consumer rights and game that you know the right to have this cheap affordable housing secure pay thirty percent more than the surrounding counties and available goods and great opportunities for their kids and these superior schools with these to piri recreational programs all tax free local taxes did not exist all federally subsidized and that's sort of a you know this notion of a consumer's republic that you know all across america in the post war period americans sort of gave up on notions of american  opportunity quality for all equal opportunity for everyone in exchange for moving into limited access all white suburbs with and housing that was federally subsidized by the federal government in the form of f h a loans and then  subsidies to build national defense highways out to them from the increasingly blighted inner cities where minorities were left behind and i think the difference between pascoe were temporary construction workers lived and construction workers who  black who lived and pascoe had to live in the past go ghetto and sort of jim crow situation and richland the gold coast are pit in my eyes these stark contrasts as an all across america between the blighted inner cities increasingly blighted increasingly all white affluent suburbs and in that all white affluent suburb as in ridgeland people believe that everybody lived like that the american democracy that everybody was the same it was a classless society and everybody had equal opportunity they didn't see because they were cut off from it because it was better not to see the pascoe got 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 rich than where only the chosen few lived and i think this sort of a pit in my eyes is a lot of true shifts we find in american society in the post war years so that making these kinds of exchange of body right but 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 the that really benefited financially and and still security are the ones who are now coming forward and trying to through lawsuits trying to get compensation for their long term exposures to the radionuclides coming out of hanford yeah and well you know most of these done wonders are people who are in the farming communities people who worked at the plant were monitored and they were badges and their environments were monitored so  the there was it's much easier to reconstruct their exposure and to say oh yeah that cancer you have could possibly be caused by hand for exposures so here is compensation so workers got compensation cancer is caused by hanford it's much harder to make the case so once again there is this divide between the sort of the people who worked at the plants who agreed to take these risks who also get compensated for the risk that they take to the and then there was this other divide in the who did not agree to take these risks who did not work at the plant and were still not compensated these done when their lawsuits have been going on for twenty five years you know people who are plaintiffs have died of their cancers by now the plaintiff's 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 was part of the original agreement and a law firm in chicago kirkland and ellis is as you know made a lot of money in fees defending these corporations with taxpayer dollars and again that gets back to what you brought up earlier is that this is a military run city and installation but they were people who came in work temporarily and were sent out to do construction work on you know contaminated ground underneath you know the smoke streams of the smoke stacks where this yellow plume is coming out that you know eroded women's nylons those were construction workers a lot of those construction workers and eastern washington women and minorities they did not live in richland they lived in north richland or in pascoe and they worked for a couple of years and then maybe they'd move on that when there was a spill or something need to be cleaned up those people often did it too they were not monitored they you know that was part of the you know corporate policy is you don't monitor these temporary workers so they left you know there's you know probably three hundred thousand workers who worked in these places left we don't know they took with them their ingested radioactive isotopes it took with them their possible medical complications so 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 and the same thing happened in russia they brought in prisoners and conscripted soldiers to do the dirty  cleanups local farmers had to do cleanup work on this river when they evacuated these places and those people were never monitored also so jumpers temporary workers who served as jumpers were instrumental in creating a mirage of healthy pink copious did the us use any in addition to the radioactive experiments they did on the prisoners they use prisoners in any other capacity for building  created a secure labor force with whiteness so they did not want to hire the night of the army corps nor do pot they did not want to hire african american workers nor mexican american workers and there was a surplus of both of these categories of workers because as we know it was a segregated u army so there was three hundred thousand approved a one african american draftees that weren't going into the army because there was no place for them since they weren't fighting there was you know lots of mexican american labor that was organized  n farm administration mobile camps to do work you know migrant workers for harvest those to those guys could've been called and to do a lot of this manual labor for the for the jobs there but they didn't want these people didn't think they were secure enough finally got involved and said you have to take a minimum quota of ten percent of african americans so they did build a special segregated part of campaign for for what they called the negroes at the time they have separate facilities they introduce jim crow to the pacific northwest but they also build prison industries inc a private company comes and says listen we can put up of a labor camp right here and that will help you with your your labor force and so they bring in white conscientious objectors from mcneil island set up a plot hole separate facilities a labor camp for them they spend several hundred thousand dollars building this thing and then these guys are used to dismantle campaign for it at this and  five to harvest fruits that were left rotting on the vine in this in this new territory that have been zoned off from the local farmers and do other kinds of sort of jumper related work and 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 the dismantling of the campaign for that was due to the end of the war they didn't need the military barracks and we know that you know they built camp hanford right on the plant premises and so once they started producing plutonium it's a dirty landscape and so they needed to get the people out of they could have sixty thousand people living right directly next to these reactors which they could blow the in their brand new they didn't really know how they would work and right next to these processing plants in the processing plants were really the most dirty who they thought the reactors were would be sort of more dangerous but it turns out the processing plants where they take the radiated uranium fuel cells and run them through a series of chemical bath to distill away these tiny grams of plutonium that job was often given in both countries to women even though those turns out where the dirtiest jobs and then a dupont there are saying well you know what do you think they'd write the army corps maybe you know because we're going to make this super poisonous product we shouldn't hire women who are younger than a menopausal age and what about fertility problems what about mutants and monsters and offspring you know they would write these letters they were real nervous about it when people say oh they didn't know much about radiation in the one nine hundred forty s that's absolutely not true they knew a great deal and they were worried but because again they had this labor crisis which was a an artificial you know 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 radio chemical processing plants and exposed them and this and they did the same thing in russia they they they gendered the physics in the reactors as male and radio processing is as either but i said i'd prefer to cook and they said ok then you go to the radio processing plant because they're your measuring potions and they thought women would be especially good workers because they were very accurate and they were good at following directions specifically and 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 or risk to the women when the women said you know i was real nervous about going to these places and when i they asked a lot of questions about safety and the men who were the supervisors and men were supervisors at these places were sent to chicago university chicago and they were given training and they were they were taught what the process was the women were  not sent anywhere for training they were given like you know sort of a three week very brief you know this is how to do things and not given any background about what the chemistry in 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 the women would worry less about what was happening but they they cut right out and there's a woman march to go a year and she told me that you know she said those 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 would even walk in our labs because they knew it was so dirty and as i talked to marge she was you know she had had cancer you know all over a body and she died just a couple months after i interviewed her  so with there was sort of a hierarchy of labor you know from you know working class all the way up to management and with it was a hierarchy of exposure of 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 and i have to assume there was no labor unions to protect these people there eventually was a nuclear workers  labor union that emerged later and what they seem to be interested in i was you know acknowledging getting the corporations to acknowledge that the workers working in hazardous environments not always so much of that so that they would change the hazardous environments but it seems more so that they would get them extra pay hardship pay that that was sort of what the union wanted to deliver to their workers there's also carpenters unions and i found most of those  records of disappeared but i did found some snatches of things where the carpenters unions are writing in and saying listen our guys are out there are in these fields working in there they're not being monitored and they're developing strange sores on their arms and the the doctors tell them not to worry about it it's not it's not cancer and but they don't feel very well they're having troubles with their lungs and so there are these issues that are coming up in that and the union representatives are worried about them but the union especially during the war years in the fifty's union representatives did not have access to the plant they could only meet plant workers outside of the gates so these big you know gated off factories sort of gave the corporations that ran them a bubble of immunity to do more or less what they to with inside those walls while they ran these plants and i would argue there's a little bit of that to the cleanup as well talk a bit about those people now outside of  richland the farmers that are trying to get recognition and our compensation one of the people in your book is tom bailey yeah when i first met almost everybody and used in washington knows tom bailey because he's a been a very outspoken proponent of the winders and he's a guy has the gift of the gab and he knows just about everybody around and he spends a lot of time in coffee shops picking up information and i first met  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 and be cars and to pascoe slaughterhouse and get the organs from our sheep in our cows after they'd been slaughtered and they'd take them off  stainless steel dishes and he would tell me stories about you know reverse wells where they dumped in medium level waste that then went into their shared awkward for and he would talk about babies born without heads in what he calls a cancer mile around maize saw and i just thought he was you know had the gift of the gab and he sort of was given to exaggerate but i found as i did research that a lot of what told me turned out to be true i could find evidence of it in the archives and a lot of what he knew about how the winds sweep up the valleys and he'd say you know i ran for public office and my campaign among all people because o people vote and and i would go to these communities and they'd have all kinds of old people and i'd turned to my friend and say what why don't we have any old people in our communities and they'd say well they all died of cancer and so tom said you know see the people who lived up the hillsides those communities all you know got poisoned people down the valleys were safer and i also thought that's not a very random but then i found studies that said exactly that and then tom would say i finally realize why i'm ok and all the goody two shoes i went to school with are dead is that why you said well when they were to parents to drink their milk and eat their vegetables they did and i snuck off to the store and eat twinkies and coke and i did find it actually a study in  over again these crazy seeming stories of this kind of apparently unreliable narrator turned out to have a good deal of truth and it sounds like we've finally found a single place where eating twinkies and coke are actually the healthy way to go maison is that sounds talk about where you got the bulk of the information for your book yeah you know our information is always a problem when you're talking about you know secret military installations in both russia and united states after the chernobyl disaster local populations in both places and these are these activists are really heroes and i think we need to try to reflect on that demanded to see the record of contamination in these closed nuclear facilities and so you know activists among the down winders and led by some seattle reporters and some reporters in spokane got the new york times got the department energy to declassify tens of thousands of documents and the department of energy sort of over declassified through all these documents at the foot of these activists and thinking that they would be intimidated in the welter of technical material and they would back off but they didn't they started reading and they they got scientists lined up and they got people took a lot of information they found all these amazing stories in these records and that really blew apart the hanford myth you know safety same thing happened out in the russian urals activists got together they started talking to the people in these villages they started talking to sort of defecting plant workers who had amazing stories to tell about these accidents these disasters in fifty seven and with the river and they got them declassify fair amount of information so i used those records that were declassified and then i would go talk to people and especially russia people were nervous about talking to me and i couldn't get into the clothes city so i camped out in a village just outside of the clothes that he and i lived in this little hut i had to jump my own wooden 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 and 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 a stone ian and so we would meet at a third neutral location in the senior center and i would interview these people and they would tell me their stories and 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 plans and that they had been denied compensation so they had reasons that they wanted you know they had reason to talk to me too they thought that that would be good for them and so they talked to doctors who had done medical research and i talked to people who had worked as engineers  at the plants i talked to everybody i could who was willing to talk to me and so 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 to read it and judge for themselves and some of those documents are available in addition to your book available online now right there's a de o e open that which has i don't know more than sixty thousand documents and photographs and you can just click on them and download these documents and read them for yourself it's it's fascinating stuff and there's there's more stories to be told when people have the patience to go through them and did you find people in the tri cities over to him for a fairly open about this fairly open but not always you know that open then there's a communities and and the local local farming communities who are sometimes can be a bit resentful of richland on its preeminence in the tri cities so there's all these tensions going on so you know i summed up one time i was invited to a dinner dinner party and i got disinvited you know those kinds of things would go on and i was working in the rich than that of a local museum in an archive to the museum i was working in that archive in two thousand and eight i worked on it in two thousand and nine i showed up again and the whole archive had disappeared had been taken by the feds as the archivist said to be vetted for post nine eleven you know material and this archive had like people's memoirs and family photographs and i think nothing that would threaten national security but in the post nine eleven climate access to information was getting more and more limited each year they did research on this book finally what do 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 didn't i radioactive contamination in the public health effects in both the soviet socialist soviet union and 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 and that was so 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 and also create these plutonium disasters the full impact of yet we really have the full impact of which we've got to really fully digest both