Excerpt from Counterpunch:
"Ralph Nader: We’re talking with Joshua Frank, author of the new devastating book titled Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America. Why is it untold?
Joshua Frank: The history of Hanford really hasn’t been told from a grassroots people perspective. There’s been a lot of books written from the top down that talk about the scientific and engineering feats that went into developing Hanford. But there hasn’t been a lot of text written about the aftermath–the poisoning of the planet, what it did to the Indigenous communities, what it did to the Japanese. And a perfect example is when you got to Hanford, you can visit Hanford, but you can only really go to the B Reactor, which was the first full-scale plutonium reactor in the world, which I did a tour of. And I’ll tell you, there’s no mention of what Hanford is today. There’s no mention of even what this facility did in producing plutonium that was used in a bomb that was dropped on Japan. The only thing that they talked about is American superiority, American patriotism, and it runs through the veins of most of the people who work out at Hanford. And I wanted to write something that countered that–that looked at the dark side of nuclear technology, that looked at the dark side of our weapons industry and the environmental devastation that it has caused."
Note: for a fictional story about Hanford see my Storytellers at the Columbia River, which does cover the poisoning of the land and water, the effects of the Manhattan Project on Indigenous tribes, the bombing of Nagasaki, and the expulsion of small farmers to take their land for the project. The people's perspective!
