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Jon Wiener, Kate Brown. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters; Gretchen Heefner. The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1479–1481, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1479
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Just when you thought the history of the Cold War had pretty much been written, two books appear that illuminate new terrain with impressive skill and beautiful writing.
Instead of starting with Cold War politics or policies or leaders or strategies, both books open on a distinctive landscape: the empty spaces of the inner American West. The desert of eastern Washington state, at Hanford, was transformed in the mid-1940s by something stupendous: the world's first plutonium reactor. Twenty years later, the rangelands of the Dakotas, and also parts of Montana and Wyoming, were transformed by something massive but almost invisible: a thousand concrete silos in the ground, each of which housed a Minuteman missile carrying a one-megaton nuclear warhead.
Kate Brown's Plutopia is an amazing book. It is a work of comparative history: a study of Richland, the town for the Hanford plutonium complex, and Ozersk, the town in the southern Urals where the USSR built its plutonium weapons. Plutonium is the most dangerous substance on the planet; one microgram can cause lung cancer in humans if ingested. Plutonium does not exist in nature; it can be manufactured from uranium, and the United States became the first country to do so and then use it in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. A week later, Joseph Stalin ordered Soviet scientists to produce their own plutonium for their versions of American nuclear weapons.
