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c-span2. >> kate brown writes about the two cities, richland in washington and ozersk in russia where plutonium was first produced. because the programs to produce the plutonium or highly secret, both communities were largely insulated from the outside world. the accidents and corruption that occurred in both places were unknown for decades. we learn about them now on booktv. >> thanks for coming tonight. this book is about to get. the first two cities in the world that made the telling of -- [inaudible] >> can you hear me? so this book is about the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium, and there is an american one and a soviet knockoff. the american one is called

richland your facility one was called ozersk, and what's so important about these places, i argue in this book "plutopia" that they changed our landscape in ways we get to fully digest. these plants help militarize or landscape and to sully them and turned opportunities into different kind of communities. i'll explain what i mean, but first i want to tell you about why i got into this project. i don't know who this tourist is but she's pretty stupid. i went in 2004 to the chernobyl zone and i wrote an article about it, and an editor contacted me and wanted me to write a whole book about the chernobyl if it, a pivotal moment in history. there were a lot of books about chernobyl and i looked into it and i realize that there were these two places in the world,

these two plutonium plants that spilled 10 times more radiation into the environment than the chernobyl zone. that was strange. chernobyl is a household word, but who's ever heard of hanford? so i thought maybe i would tell stories about these two places. as i stood looking into it i was considering why do we know much about it? of course chernobyl comes to mind because it was an accident. it occurred in the course of a couple of days as the cameras rolled the next couple of months. it was a camera ready defense. same with fukushima. these places, these plutonium sites weren't really many accidents. not a big ones. they were military sites so they were closed off but there were accidents and nobody knew about it. what i realized was that all the

spilled radiation occurred by design. either disasters by design. they were dumped as part of the operating order tons and tons of great active waste into the ground, into the local rivers and up the stacks into the air. and that he was a really chilling realization. these aren't small bombs. the tens of thousands of workers at a place. for four decades hundreds of thousands of people went to these places, saw what was happening, witnessed it and no one said anything. i thought, why was that? what made these people so complacent and silent, complicit? and the more i thought about it the more i realized that the answer to this was this word i

made up, plutopia. that both of these two plutonium plants sponsor special, exclusive, limited access cities just for the plant operators. they and only they could live in these towns. i created this group of workers, and this is a group of workers in the soviet union in 1950s, and if you understood anything about the soviet union in the 1950s it was a hungry place. these people -- that's what i came to realize is that these towns where the reasons why people remain silent. that basically they created towns where working-class plant operators were paid and lived like the middle class. and in so doing they started to associate and identify with their superiors, bosses, plant

managers, and others who ran these places. these plutopia were so attractive, and it's so nice to be in place that had chosen to live, that they sort of purchased these people in very special ways. i want to thank you tonight but first let me tell you a little bit about how they were built. as my son would say, ginormous, these plants. they take up the size of a half of the county. half a dozen reactors come buildings about the size of a cruciate. this is where the processed, a big plutonium in a series of chemical baths to get down to a little bit of plutonium. the american army corps broke ground on hanford plant in 1943 and kgb generals broke ground in 1946 on the soviet plant.

first they thought they're going to build for militarize labor and this is a picture of the first residential camp at hanford that house 60,000 construction workers who were there to build the plant. they called it camp hanford. it at all the charms of a minimum security prison. but also at all the social problems. single migrant workers fought and stole and raped and murdered, it was heavily guarded. this is a fiction -- a picture of the women's section. you could almost see -- the guards are there. you could see a woman carrying a package. they are there to keep the women say from the men who were running around trying to rape them. this is the kind of place it was. despite a very good pay, people hated camp hanford.

at the peak of construction in 1944, hundreds of workers walked off the job every day. there's a lot of talk about the labor crisis during his bid. and get enough workers it says in the documents. i looked into it. there were plenty of workers. 100,000 african-americans were all signed up for the draft couldn't go to the army because they weren't going to fight. hundreds of thousands of mexican-americans in agricultural 888 cans rolling around the agricultural interior of the great plains ready to work. african-americans and mexican-americans were considered by to plot and the army corps not to be trustworthy enough to make top secret plutonium plant. so they didn't hire them. the naacp finally pressured them to hire a minimum quota of 10% african-americans here in the army corps and dupont brought jim crow to the pacific northwest and they set up

separate quarters for african-americans and for white workers and then they kept the mexicans in this little separate down. they watched the workers closely, construction workers. here's an amazing shot of an african-american woman getting put into a paddy wagon. no one was here again. she said something that was suspect or did something that suspect or maybe she had a suspicious past like joined the union of something like that. so these are very controlled, very special watched places. rather than hire minority workers they in fact built a prison camp next to the construction site which is run by prison industries inc. and they had white prisoners working at the plant building it rather than hire any more minorities to solve this labor per crisis. the soviets built in the middle of the country, sort of the

kansas come between these two cities they built a similar town in 1946. they didn't have -- 1946 the soviets really had no business building an atomic weapon. they were devastated by the war. 25 million people were homeless. 35,000 industries have been demolished in the bombing raids. they had no steel and very short on labor. so what they did is decided to build with most available labor they had, the prisoners. they turned the whole job over to the gulags construction company. these are prisoners of war, german pows and there's also soviet pows. when they came back, security officials considered that they had been traitors and they put them into these camps and

basically read and present them in the soviet union. so here's a shot of the soviet laborers, prisoners building a state-of-the-art nuclear reactor with the tools of the egyptian pharaohs. and it's clear from the records that they called their camp, camp construction, that there was no model of prisonlike control and order. there were not enough guards so the prisoners regarded themselves. the prison warlords took over and they sort world with this terrifying violence. one civilian manager and engineer was found after went missing for a couple of months, he was found walled up in a cement foundation of the reactor pit. prisoners thought and drank and still and gambled and raped and murdered.

there was no break year housing. prisoners lived in tents and underground dugouts. civilian workers, here's a shot of it, made their own shack housing out of found materials. and they closed by 1949, built this camp. the question is who's going to work in these plutonium plants? at first they thought both american leaders and soviet leaders thought they would put soldiers in there and they would live in garrisons and it would make plutonium. but after they watched these construction camps and they saw how single migrant male workers brawled and took off an uncontrollable ways they realized that was impossible, that they could not have workers are going to be as volatile as the product they were about to make. so what should we do? who should be the people who work in these plants? and strangely enough the answer

to finding workers in the first atomic plant was the nuclear family. i can't find many references to the nuclear family before this point. so to secure trusted workers for these plants, leaders in both countries build state-funded limited access cities for civilian plant workers who would live rooted in nuclear families in these atomic cities. here's some pictures of what they looked like. this is richland in eastern washington. this is some of the housing. you can see off in the distance there is yet more housing. here's some up close shots. this film is getting the award for the best christmas decorations. this guy is getting a shot because he is the best snow grow. you can see the car -- collar.

he is a man of the cloth. it is a soviet down. downtown park. and soviet family. to secure these new cities, america and soviet security agents put up a pretty intricate system. they for selected applicants for their political and ethnic reliability. and richland, that meant a reflected mostly for whiteness. even have trouble hiring jews at this plant and they rejected african-americans, mexican-americans, anyone with a left-leaning past. the soviet union enterprise leaders surrounded the town with double row of barbed wire fence and gated and guarded it, taking them from los alamos. in a selected for political and ethnic reliability.

those are mostly -- so people who are russian or ukrainian nationality. there's a lot of locals around. they didn't. here's classic workers. it's a dupont brochure and it's pretty amazing photo. they didn't have enough male workers and added a lot of women and put them in the most dangerous jobs in the chemical processing plant. here's a soviet, more contemporary photos of soviet city which is so close and walled off. i couldn't ever entered. and here are the soviet workers. here's an aerial shot that the cia took in the 1960s. francis bowers was just flying over ozersk when he was down in his u2 plane in 1962. this was one of the shots he was trying to get. this walled off complex that was