Residential quarters. So how do you keep workers from giving away secrets . In the usual ways. Security officials made workers signed security posts and had to renew them continuously. In richland, a wiretap phones, they read peoples mail and the cultivator ranks of informers, especially in the really super team ready recreation programs and in the school. The kgb took similar measures. Selection, security posts, surveillance, and they took it even farther. A lot to the people and for the first 10 years. They could not leave without permission. They could not leave this gilded page for the most part. But these measures were just the first circle of security, really. Ironically the men who were charged with building the First Nuclear weapons in the world were really concerned in the correspondence about schools, housing, recreational programs, health care. More so even sometimes than chemical processing plants and nuclear reactors. They wanted to make sure they kept these workers happy get the best way to keep them happy was to make sure they were prosperous and affluent and they lived a good life. And prosperity also ensured a good measure of additional control. Let me show you. This is the kinds of heres the russian version of the. I dont even need to translate it. Its exactly what the american one says. Here is richland again. It looks a lot like postwar suburb but it was built in 1943. I think the countrys first a strip mall comes from richland. So you can see, the militarization of the landscape. So much of the inspiration comes during this wartime model city, as richland was called. Richland was a strange place. People called it the gold coast, and the federal government, strange because the federal government owns all the property. The company, first dupont invention of the electric managed this for the federal government, and they hired an architect to design a series of standard houses that were reproduced, and they also designed the Shopping Centers and residential development. And then dupont built and ran the towns only hospital. The only hospital in the entire region that only residents could go to. They selected businesses through an application process and then gave them a monopoly on business and richland. So theres one grocery, one mans store, et cetera. They set prices and went out and had price checkers to make sure they were not overcharging. In the absence of any tax revenue, ge allocated federal funds for schools, parks, bus service, hospitals. Workers paid no local taxes. Got paid 30 more. A lot of locals said this is a weird place. This is socialism. This is fascism. This was 1950s. But the people who lived in richmond didnt mind at all. They loved it and what they really loved the most was the housing. They could rent for 35 a month a freestanding house that looked like a house that someone in management would live in and they got to live in themselves and that was really terrific. Heres a few pictures from richland. Shopping mall. Everybody says it was a really great place to grow up. Me so this is a house can once it was finished he would rent for about 35 a month. Nobody who didnt work at the plant. You had to be white. If youre a minorit minute and d sort of construction work or gentler work at the plant you cant live in the town. But you could live only across the road, across the river in a place called pascoe. This is what the pascoe get a looked like. You could rent this check for 100 a month. Heres another shot from the pascoe get a. Pascoe get a. As my mom said it was expensive to be poor. So across the inland west while all these towns built, dreams of agriculture prosperity, heres downtown pascoe. Richland really boomed with these federal funds. And this pride in the town inspired and a rational and somewhat insensitive love of the bomb. Richland still today, the High School Mascot is to called the richland bombers and they still have a Mushroom Cloud as their logo. Now, ozersk from the locals learned city called the chocolate is. They got special rations of chocolate and sausage, both of which were supposed to clean out radiation from the body. That and another beloved product in the soviet union, vodka. Chocolate was an unbelievable luxury in the postwar period in the soviet union. By the early 50s, residents had more than chocolate. They had really nice housing, private apartments. They had a city that had been built by leningrad, designed by leningrad architects. They have feeders, recreational centers, great schools. They got 50 more than anybody else, best of all in good start, hungry russia pitstops the breakin to the best shops for the elite in moscow. They could get, one woman said we had in the stores everything from crabs to caviar. It was like we already live like communism had already arrived. And stocked stores were an unbelievable luxury in russia at the time. Heres more shots. This is the housing. They had a yacht club. The schools, even the preschools have indoor swimming pool. It was really sort of unbelievable. But this is how most people and provincial russia, where this was, lived. In the nearby steel town, lines formed at 10 lines formed at 2 a. M. For bread and they would still be there 2 a. M. The next morning. People lived in basement dugouts and they was would disappear. The local settlements around ozersk had really to retain names like asbestos and asbestos 2. So for many people who arrived in these towns who had lived in hard places in the interior, left and in siberia arriving in these plutopia was akin to winning the golden ticket. More, a person had arrived in the material comfort and prosperity that they had never expected to achieve in their lifetime. I interviewed a fellow who remembered his childhood in a new mexico mining town of company tenements. And when dupont moved his family into exactly this house, a twobedroom, prefab plywood house, his mother cried tears of joy to she had never lived in a place with appliances and plumbing. She never lived in a place that was so new and so clean. Ralph said his father worried all the time. He worried that the plant would shut down and he would lose his job. He worried that the supply of plutonium would be gone and he would lose his job. He worried that someone would do something wrong, like he had misbehaved in high school and he would lose his job over that. Everybody knew if he lost her job at the plant you have one week to get out of town. Raos father understood that no or else with his less than High School Education and skills could support his family so well as and richland. So the real fear people felt was really the fear of losing their place in their own special garden of eden. The same thing in the soviet and. I mean, if you brawled too much or beat up your wife or got drunk on the job come you hauled before a Party Meeting and you were threatened with eviction. If your kid misbehaved in school, dressed like elvis presley, listen to the voice of america, that kid was sent off to boarding school, never to return home to his or her parents in a closed city. It was a major accident, at the soviet plan. It was a visible explosion, visible accident. Fallouts falling on the city and lots of people turned in the party card, quit their jobs and left. I found all this correspondence. Too much later they arrived back and say, oh, where we stupid. Please take us back. We cant live after, outside of the closed city. So even when the charm of these places was so great that even when they knew their health was on the line, they chose to go for this consumer plutopia. That they have built for themselves. So what im trying to say is it really took a small, a village or a small city to produce a few kilograms of plutonium necessary for a nuclear bomb. And both of these places, one, richland of the allamerican city award in 1961. Ozersk got the prize as the best socialist city. They didnt name it. Goes off the map but they said it was a suburb that won this prize. They were very desirable places to live. But the funny thing is, on these fronts amidst the comfort and abundance, engineers and scientists were quietly contaminating the surrounding landscape with millions, hundreds of millions of radioactive waste. Theres one thing you need to know about plutonium processing. Its the messiest stuff on the Assembly Line of Nuclear Production, of nuclear arms production. You need 100 tons of uranium, and you paid it to a series of chemical very toxic chemical baths to get it down to one kilogram of plutonium. You need about seven kilograms of plutonium for a bomb. So each of these places produced hundreds and thousands of gallons of nuclear waste. The high level waste, one dixie cup of it in this room, we would be dead and so would everybody across the street. This stuff is extremely toxic. Because the Nuclear Security officials controlled the territory around these places as will the towns where the people did, nobody learned about the spread of this contamination until after chernobyl basically. They also didnt learn about the Health Effects are the monitoring that they were secretly doing as these places were going on, as the dumping was going on. Is just a target. They were practicing. Here are some aerial shots. This is an aerial shot of thats the Columbia River right there and lots of waste is going into the Columbia River. They did monitor for radioactive waste. Just to see how much was where. But they did it secretly. These guys are within the zone and nobody can get in there, but if they were out on a rangers farm they were dressed as cowboys. A scientist would dress as cowboys and they would put this counter up to the thyroid of the sheep to measure the radioactive iodine content and they said this is just something that helps your sheep they would tell the locals. They wrote and classified document had their biggest fear was not of danger from exposure to radioactive waste, but danger from exposure to public hysteria. That was the real threat, and they sort of changed the language to make a really about people, but not a Public Health issue by Public Relations issue. They took it a step farther the ape and the plants and the city from being from the map. They took it off the map entirely. And richland also they had this annual safety exhibit where they had door prizes and bathing beauties and talk about the safety of the plant. Heres the soviet case. Theres a bunch of leaks around the plant and they took everything off the map and sort of clinched it. They also banned the words atoning, radiation, uranium from being spoken in the town. Workers basically had to guess that they were making bombs for the most part. They also very secretive in the soviet union also about the dumping. In 1949, they had run out of these big underground waste tanks that the use for the highest level waste. They just ran out of space to put the waste. 80 that to stop production or figure out what to do with the waste. What human psyche do with waste is buried in the ground or put in the river and let someone else deal with it. They had a little river, not as big as the Columbia River, and between 19491951 they dumped 3. 2 million furies into this river. They didnt tell the people down the river and had no wells they were simple sort of pastoral people and they drank from the river. They face in it. They fish from it. They watered their livestock from and. When people went down river in 1951, scientists are taking measurements and then measured the bellies of children and they did so as a step back from a chilling because the children themselves have become dangerous with radiation. Because they had taken in so much. Now, the first people there basically to get sick were workers, and in the american case the official story is, and you will still hit as they get any official reports on hanford, there was nobody who died from radiation. But strangely enough i found two cases of one man with two autopsies. One guy, for instance, in 1952 fell out at work. He lay down on the couch and i. The wife call the local ge run hospital. The dr. Kim over and said this man died of a heart condition. She was suspicious. The fbi had been flying around 10. His coworkers came by and said you know he got ghost. So she was returning the body to the funeral to chicago. She drops the body off at the cook County Corner. And said what you think my husband either . The cook County Corner said the man died of radiation. Look, this is where the radiation within the armchair. Is writing the autopsy, and strange enough some important evidence in the body is missing. Deliver, kidneys gone. The liver, kidneys come. The second autopsy, the ge lawyers are on the plane to chicago within a week trying to get in that corner to attract his autopsy. They didnt manage to do it but they did manage to redacted any information from the legal case that ensued so that the wife got no compensation for this. And more important, and hardheaded clean record of having no radiation induced deaths. Now, in the soviet union, sick workers were also a big problem. Remember, this plant was built by starving, underfed, poorly housed prisoners. So from the first day of operation the soviets had accidents. In no time at all these plants were solid, dirty contaminated places to work. But lots of people working in them and their roles are also working with no rubber gloves, no rubber boots. In one case among the workers were sitting they were sitting on boxes containing radioactive waste. It was just a nightmare. Within a few years, by 1951, first christians come in very sick, losing their hair, vomiting. And after that there are these girls who show up. They were given a clean bill of health to get tired of us are walking around, creeping around, they lose their appetite. They complained about extreme pain in the joints and then they start to look suddenly so old. They have severe anemia, and they start to lose their hair. And the doctor in the back, the girls are here in the front and the doctor the doctors dont have records because of security as to how much a dose these girls got edward. They learn to detect from the blood, changes in the blood when a worker has been overexposed. They come up with a diagnosis. So far, only given an called chronic radiation syndrome. Longterm exposure to low doses of radiation. These girls eventually die from it in their late 20s after a few years of working out the plan. About 23 of the first workers at the plant eventually come up with this chronic radiation syndrome which is characterized by an early radiation aging, organ failure, severe joint pain, chronic fatigue, anime disorders and anemia. Sex workers were a big problem, of course, because both countries have Nuclear Production is perfectly safe. If you sick workers that belies that point. A rash of those is in these towns and also the extreme telling. And people working looking out for these kinds of things. So they solved this problem by dividing up territory and dividing up the working class. So when there was an accident, when there was some danger ground that need to be worked in, they need to build new reactors under smokestacks our work along the river, they sent in these temporary workers, prisoners from the camps nearby, workers from pastor, minority labor some pascoe and defensive end basically as jumpers to work in dangerous ground, unmonitored, for a couple of months, maybe a couple of years. Then these people would leave and they would leave with the isotopes they had injected and they would leave with any epidemiological traits. So it meant that the plutonium cities presented a picture of healthy, pink population. This was a mirage but an extremely useful mirage. The people in these towns, and it helped them. They were very loyal and patriotic, and that in a sense was purchased by the sense that they were select workers living in a really plumb down that were better than every other town around. They did better in sports, better in education. They did better in the housing. And this kind of superiority gave them a lot of confidence in their leaders. False confidence but confidence, indeed, it was. The fact that they lived in these towns with no indigent, no ugly. The average age was 26. No unemployed. No poverty at all. Meant that they felt like they were better than everybody else in the surrounding territories. And that their leaders were making the right decisions. Because look what a great place they gave us. They love to count up the average educational age, the number of appliances, everything that was better, they love to enumerate and talk about it. And they would say things like, you know, machines, appliances, cars are far more dangerous than production rather in many ways these peoples the people in richland drank milk that was shipped in from minnesota on purpose. The air quality and water was monitored. So was the food when it came into the greengrocer, was monitored to make sure it was clean. In the soviet union they did the same thing, and gynecologists even looked after fetuses and would abort them in case theres any kind of birth defect that came up. So the assertions that plutopia residents were healthier were indeed true, in part that they were younger and more affluent and have far but health care but also because as modern consumers they did not live off the radioactive landscape. Now, the contrast, the people who lived along the river who had no wells, who drank from the radioactive river, which they had no idea it was radioactive, as years went by people came up with the symptoms of chronic radiation syndrome. On top of that they had thyroid tumors, rashes of leukemia, infertility, heart diseases and uncommonly high numbers of birth defects. They had nothing to eat but living off the landscape. When you go around today, these are the kinds of numbers you get from the potatoes and mushrooms they are finding on the side of the road. I did a lot of interviews with people who lived, still in these villages and hit him nervously trying to avoid eating a meal. All made from homegrown veal and potatoes and tomatoes. I keep saying im not going to. They keep saying we cant talk much of the. Et al. Became very uncomfortable, to say the least. But these communities where they lived, have to live off this radioactive landscape. And its been devastating in terms of the Public Health. Most of the kids, i think seven, this one village i was visiting, 7 of the population is designated as healthy. 45 of the kids have birth defects. This kid was enough to because hes got an immune disorder. And theres a warehouse of a collection, a strange kind of collection, of the fetuses that were aborted or died as they were born. Or stillborn. This is just, a lot of these photos are these are the kinds of kids that came up that were born. Geneticists are saying already in the 40s that the Third Generation of people exposed to radiation would have the most problems. And you can sort of see that in some of these pictures here. It was easy to discredit these poor farmers. The same thing is going on among downwind farmers in eastern washington. They would pop up and say we are sick, we dont feel well. Especial after chernobyl there was a theres a lot of radiation we learned about, or we think we have been sullied and our health has been undermined by the plant. And a scientist at the plant would say no. You are not sick from radiation. Thats impossible. You are sick if you drink too much. You are sick because you have radio phobia. But not from the plant. Who are you going to believe . The scientists or these uneducated farmers . Certainly the people who lived in plutopia for a long time had considered themselves smarter, more educated, more knowledgeable than their dumb farming neighbors. So its easy for them to dismiss the claims of their neighbors next door. And i think thats a really important point. Even after chernobyl blew the lid off these places and the record is damning. Even then the people who lived in these towns defended them. In richland they form a hand for them and they went out and actively opposed antinuclear activist in the 1980s defending their plant, defending their bomb. I thought that was so strange. These people who pride themselves on the education were continuing, insisting on remaining in ignorance about the territories around them. And about the severe contamination that absolute the territory they called home. That sullied the territory that they called him. When i first started this book i thought was going to write about the Nuclear Security state and i imagined, i was curious about these pioneers of security. The people who are willing to put the arms out for a pat down, send the kids through a full body scan are, put their urine on the stoop for a week every tester to with these these people . They were our pioneers. They are all willing to do that now. I wanted to know about that. I sort of imagine a monument to them, their kids with arms out for the pat down and the fathers are looking nervously on and the mother sort of proudly handing over the urine sample. But i realized in the course of writing this book that it was another kind of moment that i would rather memorialize and another set of heroes that i wanted to talk about, and that was these people live in these the contaminated environment, lived off this entire contaminated by the. Had families that were devastated by illness and the kind of illnesses that were hard to figure out yes, there are cancers that cancers can linger after problems of the circulation track of the digestive tract and the circulation system, after severe problems with immunity. After having sick kids, kids who just dont feel well. Living with chronic fatigue, living with chronic pain. These people organized in the late 1980s and 1990s and became the downwinders and groups in russia called the white mice. Insisted on knowing the record and the continued to insist to this day that living on the radioactive landscape is something no one should ever have to do, and shouldering the burden of our radio genetic legacy is something that should be limited to family and go no farther. So imagine another kind of monument of the people, some are being pushed along in wheelchairs and others are may be carrying an oxygen tank, and some are slowly and some our children, but they are people who sort of refused to give up in that way. I want to show you one last photo to leave you with. Im going to skip a bunch of others. This is a school play in ozersk. And in ozersk, out of 100,000 births, 900 kids are born with birth defects. Thats a really high rate. Around two or three. And so this is a special school. And i think this photo does a great job of illustrating how the people of the welfare states produce utopia, also produced people who become chronic welfare cases themselves. And did something to consider as we move forward into the nuclear renaissance. Thank you. [applause] do i take questions . Questions, comments . [inaudible] thats a great question, because it was difficult. There was an archive and the steel town i could work in as a story but couldnt get into the done. No matter how hard i tried, i had connections to sam nunn, to the Russian Ministry of atomic industry. There was no antiin the. Theres a bit of spy mania in the case and the two suspects are americans. So i had this, then, i rented this little, tiny head in a village outside of the city until it into. The hunt was very primitive. I had a well and the yield to carry buckets of water and i had a word burning stove. I would wait for the cell phone ring and that was from my contact inside the closed city injured call me and say, i got one for you. Some of for you to interview. I will put him in a cab and drive out to you and i would say great. We would meet in a third neutral location, an elder persons entering but because the person who owned the little hut didnt want to be associate with this nefarious into think of nuclear witnesses. And so i go to this very neutral location and also like a spy novel, and is sometimes the children sometime should say this one is so nervous, i told her you were estonian. That was to take care of my accent. Others would just look at me, say who are you anyway . And i was a im an american historian and theyre just turn around and go. But there were a few people, about two dozen told me Amazing Stories about what could happen. They mostly told me these stories because they were afraid about because the headset signed these security owes for 50 years but they were mad because they were sick or the grandkids were sick or something have happened, pivotal, and they wanted their star to be known. My story is biased that way. Spend what good a time was this . 2006. [inaudible] spinning even in richland, a lot of people wouldnt talk to me. Strangely enough. [inaudible] yes. They were worried about job city for years, like if they stopped producing platoon in 1964 in the limp along in the 70s, but then the best job security in the world is the halflife of plutonium which is 24,000 years. So the superfund site, 100 billion has been spent in the cleanup so far and its only going to get higher right now. [inaudible] the tanks are leaking. Its a terrible mess. [inaudible] monteverde them, right . We will have to look after these sites for on an individual basis . Its the same complement the people saying radiation, you can get a certain amount of it and theres tolerance and permissible levels. They have a language that makes it justified. Literally, yes. [inaudible] the russian people who were riding begging to who were riding taking to combat back, where they allow . No. There seems to be a great similarity in the approach, and the structural approach to the american scientists and military people, their counterparts in the soviet union. I wonder, was there any effort to compare notes . Was there kind of like an exchange of plans, or was it completely independent . They used to say, dug a hole down to the earth youd end up in richland. Thats i think of them, as to places revolving on an axis around each other. Really an espionage. The americans were flying planes over and photographing and testing the air. You can read from radioactive isotopes caught in filters on planes come you can read it quite easily of those radioactive isotopes. They have a signature of each plant they come from or a bomb that is below the. They did come to a great deal about what the russians were producing and how. The russians also had spies in the tiny. Of course, the entire Manhattan Project was infiltrated with spies. Stall in the about the american town before truman. They were very much in conversation of one another. And whenever the americans do Something Like produce a bomb, the soviet to produce a bumper when the soviets produced a bomb, the americans had to produce the hydrogen bomb. So on and so on. The escalation is very direct. I was referring to the city planning. The whole approach of creating this upperclass relative to yes. The soviets copied the americans. They had people inside los alamos and they said what isnt like . What are the security arrangements . How are People Living . Stalins second in command got all that information, he asked more questions and then he went to ozersk and said i wanted just like los alamos. It was very much an american knockoff. Dated and walled off with people walking. And thats how los alamos was during the war. Im shocked that residents were not enraged by what happened to them. Imagine bearing children with those terrible results. One woman, her father was a safety engineer for this plan. Everybody likes to talk about how, if this is how they explain their cancers and medical problems is there was a fogging truck because they dedicated a lot out in the planes. To solve a mosquito problem there have fogging trucks, military jeeps fogging the done. The kids loved to run behind. They probably got a little high off of it. Her father never let her run behind those fogging trucks. Thats dangers. So many years later when he is dying a very characteristic thyroid cancer, his wife is already died of thyroid cancer, and radioactive iodine goes into the thyroid almost directly. Bullets they mimic biological functions and minerals that the body needs biologically to try. So plutonium goes right to the bone marrow because the body soaks it up just like it does calcium. Radioactive iodine mimics iodine, so thyroid then once they are there, safely embedded in your organs they start to generate power, energy, and this energy creates mutant cells that can become other mutant cells that can become tumors and cancers. Anyway, her father is in the hospital and he sang there was nothing wrong with my plants. You know, against all evidence to the contrary he refuses to believe that the plant was the reason why he has thyroid cancer, by his wife died of thyroid cancer, why two out of three of his kids died and why his daughter is very ill. [inaudible] right, yeah. And i think that was part of it for a lot of people who live there, that they felt like their neighbors, their farming neighbors were accusing them of making them sick and creating these problems and benefiting from it. You guys are paid so well. So it was a very hard pill to swallow, to accept that these towns have done that. When you are in russia, did you bring in your own supplies . No. I would usually just go for the day or if i stayed longer, my contact was a human rights lawyer who is helping these people who was a real hero in this story. She would show up and in the trunk of a cab she would have several pounds of marinated pork. She would be bringing to these muslims and she said dont worry, i got some clean meat in the car we can all now. Because i would be sitting there all day long any golf food which was a very rude thing to do, but especially in russia. They would have a table laden for the on the american guest who was not eating anything. [inaudible] i wasnt saying im not going to eat your food because its too radiated to the one to india to feed every day under kids funny and i think it is funny. The boy in that photo, theres a boy behind it, is 13, and he had the vocabulary of about 60 words. [inaudible] what kind of what . I thought our get a lot of angry people from the scientific establishment, but so far and is science journals is been positively reviewed. And they say that i am sort of partisan but credible. I worked with a retired professor who is a physicist, and also has a degree in engineering who happened to growth in richland and was very much a defender of richland when we met. I said, will you help me with these documents . He was only too happy to do it. He was very generous with his time. And then after, by the time we started collaborating after some years he was drastically a conspiracy theorist. He was so angry about what had happened, you know, what his town had been through. In general, the reception has been pretty good, so far. Its only been out about six months. [inaudible] i think fukushima is really, yeah, the book is already being translated into japanese. And all that water that is rushing underneath the fukushima plant and putting the reactive isotopes and putting in the ocean, its in the ocean, a big body of water, it would be defused. You can stand in the ocean and not getting. But what happens is that the fish swimming, and this is identical on the river and the 1940s, fish swimming in red active water with a concentration of 3 , fish soak it up at greater concentration so the fish will have 40 greater activity in the body. So what happens is because radioactive isotopes is a perfect biological mimic, it quickly goes up the food chain towards humans. So we might be eating fish, 10 years, established for ever, and the fish might have obit of radiation in it and we keep doing that and we keep imbibing this with the other toxins we take in from the stuff that is dumped on the lawns and honor apples. That works with the radiation. What my fear is, no, whats already happened but yet again in 30 years is that we get to a new norm of what it means to be human, biologically. Higher rates of cancer. We are in a cancer epidemic but we dont really talk or recognize a. Childhood cancer used to be a medical rarity. Now you see ads on the bus, kids are bald advertising chemotherapy. We have a new norm in terms of what we expect biologically from our bodies. And i think that will continue to decline with autoimmune disorders, strange and powerful allergies, people with digestive problems, circulation system problems, et cetera. And higher rates of cancer. Could use big obit about the landscape, and can you talk a little more about what bad means, what that will look like . Lets start with the strip mall. As is every american suburb. So that you can get a lot of people out of town really fast. The National Defense education act, so in richmond they have Excellent Schools that focus on s. T. E. M. , on science and technology, and they also taught russian, right . It goes on and on really about how the landscape gets militarized. In the new kinds of crops that are grown, in the new kinds of ways they are grown. Ddt is a surplus from world war ii, and that was spread liberally on crops. So were fertilizers also surplus from the war with. As the cancer rate went up, another wartime surplus was mustard gas, and thats the first chemotherapy medicine that was effective in curing cappsers. Cancers. It gets a little eerie when you think about it. And then one more point is that this sort of segregated landscape where you have a community of all white people who are trusted and certified and you have a community of other people who come in and do the dirty work and are more migrant and moving, you think of the blighted inner city and the allwhite suburb. The allwhite suburb is highly subsidized by loans, you know . The government underwriting loans. If youre africanamerican, you cant get a loan, because you cant live in that allwhite suburb by definition. And that, those kinds of divisions in the landscape too, i think, are a product of the militarization and the great postwar changes. Is it that, or is it just the opposite . How so . As you said before, richmond became like a southern town in respects. There was a transplanting of jim crow and racial segregation that may not have existed in that part of the country beforehand. So is it, you know, a militarization of civilian life, or is it, you know, either because of expediency or just plain and simple, like, racial bias . Is it just a reflection of the hierarchy of society at that particular time . I mean, you know, youve had racial inequality all over the country, but the military historically has had a lot of southern right, yes. You know, leaders. I think richland is more like downtown baltimore and [inaudible] right . Its the difference between a blighted, older area that is no longer, you know, you cant even get a loan there anymore and the brand new suburb where everybody wants to live who can. And that sort of kind of segregation far more than, you know, the southern sort of segregation which is neighborhood by neighborhood and institution by institution, that kind of spatial segregation occurred in the postwar period and all over the country. Not just in the south. You had a question back there. Whats your next project . Well, im writing, im writing a book about a guy who was american, russianamerican, and he was in on this Manhattan Project security from the ground up. But before that, he had fought in the russian civil war on the side of the monarchists and the wide guards. He was an old tsarist, pretty antisemitic, very much anticommunist. So he gets into Manhattan Project security, and hes the guy whos hounding robert oppenheimer, and all of oppenheimers students because they were all from Eastern European stock, and he was sure they were going to sell the bomb or give the bomb to the soviets. So he goes with the American Army to europe with the liberation, and he was zooming around trying to find russia german scientists. And he billets with these nazis, nazis who were, you know, using prisoners as human subjects to test their theories on new drugs and supercolds, all that, and he likes these guys a lot. He didnt like oppenheimer, but he likes the nazi scientists because theyre antisemitic, theyre nationalists, theyre imperialists, and he gets them paper clipped to the United States, and they start working in american labs and companies throughout the country. Theres 1500 of these guys. And then also a lot of nazi intelligence guys come in, because they knew the soviet union as they were fighting them. And what you find in the postwar period which is what i came on when i was writing this book is this strange uptick in testing on human subjects. In the United States in the postwar period after nuremberg. The americans are certainly testing on not tuskegee 33 gees, a couple hundred here, a couple hundred there, but tens of thousands of willing volunteering and involunteering subjects. A lot of them are soldiers, churn in wards children in wards, orphanages, people in asylums. And, of course, minorities. And i think this guy is one of those soldiers who brings the cold war warriors who brings the old hay threated of the crumbling hatreds of the crumbling european empires and refreshes them in america to make the global american empire. So thats my new book. Its another happy topic. [laughter] well, this was great. Thank you. [applause] wed love to give you every time we have a wonderful author in, we always give you an ivy mug, a plug for the book shop. And this is made in, hopefully, better soil than richland. This was made, i think, in west virginia. So lets hope for the best. Test it out, come back in 20 years, let us know how it worked out. [laughter] i thank you. Im hoping that youll be here to sign. For those of you who havent purchased the book yet, consider purchasing it from us, and thank you again for coming. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] is there a Nonfiction Author or book youd like to see featured on booktv . Send us an email at booktv cspan. Org or tweet us at twitter. Com booktv. A little bit, and it also tells you about his father who was a prominent Freedom Fighter who spent many, many years in jail, a cousin of rogers told me when i was in calcutta interviewing her in 2011, she said jail was like a house to him. So im going to start with that. Ever since he was born, roger was likened to his father. He was as handsome as his father with the same strikingly chiseled jawline that gave both men a distinguished air, a sense they belong today a secret world of privilege that went beyond wealth, intellect or bloodline. In a society where skin color was a defining force, both roger and his father were fairskinned, a clear advantage that afforded them a natural superiority. Both were known for their generosity of spirit and obliging way that over the course of their lives would win them steadfast friends and loyal followers. But beneath the surface the similarities ended. Unlike his son, he came of age in an occupied country, seemingly fated by his birth in 1908 to live in deference to an imperial power. As a disseven cant of one of indias old toest bloodlines, he was also, ironically, one of the chosen ones. He would be tapped and trained to perform like a faux englishman, all in the service of indias emperor, her majesty, the king. While he would receive a proper british education like the other members of his family, he rejected intellectual servitude. On the morning of thursday, november the 5th, 1964, his eldest son 15yearold roger dressed himself, carefully draping his best white doti over his body. Growing up in a close family of four children, two girls and two boys the youngest after the family moved to new dell hi in the 50s, he was accustomed to shouldering responsibility. He and his older sister were always looking after their younger siblings. His parents were a twooccupation couple long before it was envogue. His Old Revolutionary ties to the leaders of a newlyfree india helped him rise. After indias independence, he was dispatched to start the daily edition of the hindu star standard. He was a frequent visitor to the official residence of the president of india, and it was well known that the countrys first Prime Minister called him by his first name. So trusted was gupta by government minister, that they would often seek his counsel on how to deal with the press. Born as a british subject, through hard work and sacrifice he became an insider in modern india. Roger steeled himself and walked into the anteroom of his uncles calcutta home to say farewell. Shrouded with heaps of roses, marigold and faint jasmine, his father laid in a coffin. As was customary, the body was dress inside a loosefitting shirt and a white doti. When hed arrived at the hospital the previous day, he was told that his father was dead. But as he stood at the entrance to his fathers room, he saw a plastic bag still attached bubbling with air for his fathers last gasp. For a moment, he thought the doctors had made a mistake. At 56, ashwani was dead of kidney failure. In the month leading up to his fathers death, young roger spent a lot of time with his father, accompanying him on long walks and listening to stories of his time in the freedom movement. He learned his father had been intentionally exposed to tb in prison which ultimately cost him the use of one lung. The ragged two foot long scar came from his skin being split open over and over again during one particularly brutal interrogation. Yet in spite of it all, the father he knew was kind and obliging to everyone. He would later recall he never spoke ill of anybody, and i would have thought he would have had a lot of resentment built into him, but it wasnt true. This attitude was true of most of my fathers generation. They were quite extraordinary in terms of Simple Living and high thinking and not thinking ill of other people. This morning in front of roj ets i uncles house, a crowd gathers like pilgrims on a sorrowful journey. Door to door launderers and their donkeys watched as a coffin was placed into a glass [inaudible] in front of the red brick house with the green shutters. In tribute, the men nudged their donkeys away from the mourners and solemnly cleared a path for the procession. At 9 a. M. , the hearse departed. As the throng approached the top of the street, he could make out a small shrine to the hindu god of destruction. After a stop at the offices of his fathers employers, the newspaper group, he led the crowd to white town. On the other side of town, ashwani guptas former jailer raced to catch one final glimpse of the man. He ran to a crematorium, then south to the funeral parlor to no avail. On his last guess, he found the right destination. Clenching a fist full of flowers, he elbowed through a crowd of hundreds of friends, family and admiring strangers and made his way along the row of bodies to be cremated. At last, after pushing his way in, the former prison guard made it to the coffin. Guptas teenage son was just completing the final death rite n. The silence that followed, he was able to place what was left of his bunch of lotus flowers on the feet of his fallen friend. He then rolled the stretcher into the orange flames of calcuttas electric crematorium. Overcome with grief, he muttered a prayer to his dead friend. Pray not grain of hatred remains mingled among your ashes. I tried to atone from my sin. If he hadnt been awashed in sadness, he might have heard another voice, the tender voice of the mans son quietly beseeching a higher power, who will show me the way in the world . And, you know, this is an incredible amount of rich detail. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. Kay Bailey Hutchison is next on booktv. From the 13th an annual National Book festival in washington, d. C. , former senator hutchison presents her book, unflinching courage. This is about 40 minutes. [applause] well, thank you so much. And thank you for coming out early to start getting the flavor of this wonderful treasure that the library of Congress Puts on for our country and especially our children and our book lovers. So i am so happy, this is my third presentation. As carlos mentioned, i have written two books about american women trailblazers. And i think alexis de tocqueville started out talking about the women of america in his famous trip here in the 1700s. He said when it gets down to the end this is a paraphrase when it gets down to the end, i would say the most important attribute of this great country is the superiority of their women. And he talked about [applause] that they had strong opinions and that men listened to them. So i thought that was a great beginning. Knowing that those earliest women showed a spark that was different, that a showed an independence and a resilience. So my first two books were about the american women who broke barriers in the different fields. And i was able to do the first women who made the start at getting into a field whether it was journalism or athletics or aviation or politics or education. And then i was able to interview the women who were still breaking barriers in the same field. So as an example, in american heroines, my first book, i wrote about Margaret Chase smith as the earliest trailblazer in running for the senate on her own and winning, and then i was able to interview madeleine albright, Condoleezza Rice and Sandra Day Oconnor who were still breaking barriers in the field of statesmanship and politics. So then after my first two books with my wonderful publisher, harpercollins, they said, well, you know, would you like to write another book . And then i came in to the great state that i represent, texas. And the role of women in history generally has been less on the market than the great men who have settled our nation as well as our state of texas. And so i thought im going to do something on basically 19th century texas women. And it was for a couple of reasons. Number one, of course, you know i love my state. Number two, though, there is Something Special about texas, and i believe that spirit of texas was created in the 19th century. And there has been a lot of talk, i know, about texas. And as i came into the National Scene in the senate, i would see people roll their eyes when we talked about how great texas was or how big we were or how important we were. And so i got used to that as well. And so i thought, you know, there is Something Different about us. Some people like it, some people really dont. But there is a spark. There is a spirit. And i wanted to continue my insistence that women be included in history by writing about this texas spirit because our history is different. Were the only nation that fought for our independence and became a nation. We fought for our independence from mexico. We were part of mexico in the early 1800s. And that revolution and the women who were there during the revolution really showed a resilience. But there was something else. With the revolution and then later the trail drives and the ranching and the settling of far west texas, harsh land, harsh conditions, there was a spirit of really not only resilience, but a positive attitude, a happin a
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