THE MORNING LIST
There is something for every taste. The journalists from the weekly Science & Medicine supplement have read and chosen books that will help you discover how the Americans and Soviets built secret cities with unusual operating rules around plutonium factories, learn about the kidney transplant saga or still diving to the bottom of the oceans where the first forms of life appeared barely 100 million years after the formation of the Earth.
The secret cities of the bomb race
No, Chernobyl (Ukraine), in 1986, was not the first nuclear accident in the USSR. No, Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania), in 1979, was not the first in the United States either. Well before these two disasters, two other territories and their populations of tens of thousands of inhabitants were each contaminated by radioactivity for decades, in the greatest secrecy. And for good reason, the smoke, irradiated liquid or solid releases, even the polluting explosions, equivalent in forty years to two Chernobyls, came from two secret military sites, housing the plutonium production factories for the atomic bombs of the two great powers.
The impressive parallel history of these two regions, of the Maïak factory, in the Urals, and that of Hanford, in the State of Washington, and especially of their towns built for their managers and their workers, respectively Oziorsk and Richland, is narrated by Kate Brown, professor of science, technology and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Boston), and is finally translated into French, eleven years after the original version. The reading is edifying and painful.
Before tackling the long and inglorious (for those in power) chapters of environmental contamination and their effects on humans, the author details the urban and especially social organization of the two projects: surveillance, segregation, absence of democracy, maintenance order… And it was the USSR which, in addition to copying the plans for the nuclear reactor, took inspiration from American population control techniques for its own factory and city project. The teacher baptized “plutopias” these “golden spaces of captivity”to highlight how, despite the risks, residents accepted extraordinary constraints, even renouncing some of their civil rights, including in the United States, which was expected to be more open.
You have 79.02% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
