I had a conversation yesterday that was strange only in that it represented a bit of an unlikely coincidence. It was also awkward, and left me puzzling - for much more time than the conversation itself actually took - over how I should have responded in the moment. But that’s definitely not the strange part.
No, what was strange was that the man speaking to me managed to land, however clumsily, on the topic that’s been occupying most of my free CPU cycles lately. It went like this (I’m paraphrasing):
Man: “You work in technology? That’s great. I never could figure out computers.”
Me: “Mm.”
Man: “I had a teacher - I went to Catholic school, and this one monk, he worked on building one of the first computers.”
Me: “That’s pretty cool.”
Man: “Another monk that taught there, he used to work on the Manhattan project. Ultimately, seeing what came out of it, that’s part of what turned him toward monastic life. Which is a shame, because the bomb saved so many lives.”
Me: <record scratch>
What this man didn’t know is that the bomb - in this case, Fat Man, which decimated Nagasaki - and I are distant cousins. Estranged cousins, the kind with magnetically repulsive political views, who circle each other cagily on social media. But lately I’ve been doing some horrified Facebook-stalking, reading into the nuclear history of the United States and Russia, and the advances - and disasters - spawned by my destructive genealogy.
My grandfather was a radiation safety officer at the Hanford Site. If you’re unfamiliar with Hanford, start at the best-known nuclear incidents in history - radioactive releases at Three Mile Island; the Chernobyl disaster - and follow them backward through civilian nuclear power plants to the plutonium production reactors that inspired their design, and there you’ll find it. Sited in eastern Washington state on a desolate bend in the Columbia river, Hanford produced the plutonium at the heart of the first atomic bomb, detonated at the Trinity test site in New Mexico. It was the bread basket of the Manhattan Project and the Cold War, producing around 63 tons - 126,000 pounds - of plutonium, used in the majority of the US’ 60,000 nuclear weapons. The design of Hanford’s B-reactor, its first, also inspired the designs of the first Russian plutonium production reactors, the predecessors to Soviet civilian nuclear power plants, bringing Chernobyl into the family fold.
What started my dive into nuclear history, I can’t say for sure. It could have been a news article, or a photo of urban decay from inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone that kicked off a Wikipedia binge. What accelerated it, without a doubt, was the release of Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl. In it, Higginbotham juxtaposes two threads - the same story, from two elevations. One is a minute-by-minute account of the disaster itself and the moments surrounding it: the mundanity of the day leading up to it; the actions of individual operators in the fateful moment; the desperate scramble of a haggard remediation commission. The second is a much wider view, incorporating nuclear history back to the first Russian reactors and even to - you guessed it - Hanford, as well as the cracks Chernobyl made in the foundations of the Soviet Union’s future.
Higginbotham’s story is dense with facts, but never dry. The narrative trucks along at the pace of inevitability, and along the way Higginbotham tightens the screws of tension with rich detail, much of it gleaned from interviews with key actors and their relatives. By the time Leonid Toptunov hits the scram button in Control Room 4, we are invested in his life and the lives of his comrades, and Higginbotham delivers on their (often tragic) stories with sympathy. While I wouldn’t say the book ever rises to the level of harshness, exhibiting instead a more resigned attitude that suggests that Chernobyl’s outcomes were the only possibility in a state as dysfunctional as the USSR, the narrative shows us little to excuse the designers of Chernobyl’s RBMK reactors. If there are villains in this story, they are the closest we come; even the dying reactor itself is almost a victim.
Coincidentally paired with Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl was the release of Manual For Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future by Kate Brown, at whom I’m currently pretty angry for having already researched and written all the things I’d only just decided I wanted to do. (I’m kidding, Ms. Brown, I’m just jealous.)
This is the part where, if I were a responsible reviewer, I’d have read Brown’s book and be ready to talk about it in contrast to Higginbotham’s. In reality, my magpie brain landed on something a little further back in Brown’s bibliography: Plutopia, a history of plutonium production and the communities it built. Plutopia captured my interest because it tells the story of Hanford, and the planned community of Richland that housed its engineers and managers, and would later go on to house my grandfather and his family. In parallel, it also tells the story of Ozersk, another community born of plutonium production on the other side of the world in Russia. The classic image of American 1950’s suburbia owes a surprising amount to the Department of Energy’s war efforts, it turns out.
I’m still reading Plutopia and hope to discuss it in more detail once I’ve finished it, and the long list of other nuclear history-related Amazon purchases I just racked up. In the meantime, I’m still thinking about what I should have said to that man who claimed the bomb saved lives: that it was killing Americans long before it killed anyone in Nagasaki? That its legacy is still killing people in half a dozen countries? That it’s a surprising, macabre linchpin in American and Russian history?
He was probably just looking for someone to agree with him, and then I went and made it weird.