The B reactor at Hanford.
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Washington knows Richland as one of the Tri-Cities, but a historian is working on a book about Richland and its nuclear twin city half a world away.
Kate Brown, associate professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, will discuss her research in a public lecture at 1:10 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 4, in the CUB junior ballroom and again at a 3 p.m. seminar in Wilson-Short Hall 333. Her appearances are part of the Fall 2010 Columbia Plateau Seminar Speaker Series, sponsored by the WSU Department of History.
Richland and its Soviet knockoff, Cheliabinsk-40, were created to house operators of the world’s first two plutonium plants. In her book, “Enriched by Plutonium: The tandem history of the secret cities plutonium built,” Brown said she aims to put these cities in the cross hairs of human history.
Remarkable similarities
“I hope to shatter ideological assumptions cultivated during the Cold War by exploring remarkable similarities between the American and Soviet plutonium cities,” she said.
“I hope to shatter ideological assumptions cultivated during the Cold War by exploring remarkable similarities between the American and Soviet plutonium cities,” she said.
For example:
* Top secret, highly restricted and socially engineered, these government-run communities developed on parallel paths into model cities.
* Each received awards for planning, community development and education.
* At the height of Cold War tension, some politicians feared Richland was too “socialisitic,” while some Soviet officials called Cheliabinsk-40 too “materialisitic” and “bourgeois.”
* Both suffer a deadly legacy of radioactive contamination. When the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster blew the lid off the Richland and Cheliabinsk-40 plants’ security regimes, Brown said, newly de-classified documents revealed that each plant had, over time, issued more than 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes – twice the amount of Chernobyl.
Downwind and downstream neighbors began to attribute the occurrences in their communities of chronic illnesses, high rates of birth defects, infertility and cancers to the plutonium plants. The court battles, political campaigns and renewed nuclear lobbying that followed generated even more confusion and uncertainty about the nuclear past – an uncertainty that paves the way for a dawning “nuclear renaissance.”
Reaching beyond local context
“I will argue that in creating the means to destroy each other, the two cities came to resemble one another,” Brown said.
“Rather than seeing the story of Hanford as another example of American exceptionalism our unique ability to pull of such an amazing feat that reveals something essential about our character Kate Brown is interested, as many historians are now, in comparing similar developments and processes across time and space,” said Jeff Sanders, assistant professor of history.
“In the case of Hanford and Cheliabinsk-40, she is able to draw many unexpected and maybe counterintuitive parallels or similarities between two enemies,” he said. “Her work then encourages students and historians to reach beyond only the local or national context to see the development of these two secret landscapes as well as their products as much more linked than we first might have imagined.”
Guggenheim Fellowship to write book
In April, Brown received a 2009-10 Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her book. She has interviewed dozens of residents and plant operators in both cities and has accessed U.S. federal government and Communist Party personal archives. After making one more research trip to the Urals in Russia last summer, she plans to complete the book by the end of the fellowship year.
In April, Brown received a 2009-10 Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her book. She has interviewed dozens of residents and plant operators in both cities and has accessed U.S. federal government and Communist Party personal archives. After making one more research trip to the Urals in Russia last summer, she plans to complete the book by the end of the fellowship year.
“This is the first monograph to narrate in tandem the plutonium disasters in the U.S. and USSR,” she said. “After this book, I hope it will no longer make sense to tell the two histories separately. I will show how plutonium was a collaborative, transnational project that bound together the lives of working people across the Cold War divide.”
Also compared Kazakhstan and Montana
Brown studies and teaches Russian and eastern European history, focusing on ethnicity and nationalism. Her article, “Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana are Nearly the Same Place,” appeared in the February 2001 issue of American Historical Review.
Brown studies and teaches Russian and eastern European history, focusing on ethnicity and nationalism. Her article, “Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana are Nearly the Same Place,” appeared in the February 2001 issue of American Historical Review.
Her book, “A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland,” won the American Historical Association’s prestigious George Louis Beer Prize, given for outstanding historical writing on any phase of European international history since 1895. Previously the book won the Heldt Prize awarded by the American Women for Slavic Studies.
In addition to the Guggenheim, Brown is recipient of fellowships from numerous institutions, including the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Social Science Research Center.
Since its establishment in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $273 million in fellowships to nearly 16,700 individuals, including scores of Nobel, Pulitzer and other prizewinners.
Greater Columbia Plateau Initiative
Brown’s presentations are part of the fall Columbia Plateau Seminar Speaker Series, which is part of the Greater Columbia Plateau Initiative. The history department is sponsoring the multidisciplinary initiative to explore and promote work on two fundamental issues in the history of the Columbia Plateau: the nature of human interactions and the relationship between humans and the environment.
The initiative includes a two-year seminar, a two-year speaker series and establishment of a multi-tiered digital archive.
“Among the many profound transformation on the plateau during the 20th century including the introduction of industrial agriculture, major irrigation and hydropower projects, and major demographic changes the events at Hanford during World War II stand out as a particularly rich area for study,” said Sanders, who is teaching the seminar this fall.
“But despite the importance of Hanford, few of us know much about the place,” he said. “This is in part because from the beginning it was veiled in secrecy. Kate’s work asks us to think in very new ways about this history of secrecy and the transnational history of this industry, its employees and its ramifications.
“My hope is that Kate’s comparative framework will help us to see our local and nearby landscapes as ever more important to study and consider as part of a shared world in which we live,” he said.