And the obfuscation of that violence by state and corporate narratives that speak the language of national security or regulatory safety or environmental remediation. In just that one state lies a story of the slow and persistent violence that occurs all along the nuclear fuel cycle. A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado reminds me that I did not need to travel so far from home to tell this global story. I followed Fat Man to try and tell a story from the shadows that could break apart our conceits of us and them, to reveal the ways that geopolitical divisions turn us away from common (albeit unequal) suffering, to find ways to build solidarities from sufferings that were invisible to statist narratives of war and victory. There, impoverished Congolese communities continue to inhale radioactive dust while their long legacy of nuclear suffering finds neither reparation nor remembrance. Of all the nodes along Fat Man’s journey, this is both the most precariously contained as well as the least commemorated site. But the story of Fat Man really begins in the uranium mines in Shinkolobwe in the district of Katanga under the brutal colonial regime of Belgian Congo. The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum offers perhaps the fullest and most polished story of the dangers of nuclear weapons use and a plea for future peace, although that site too makes short shrift of Japan’s own war crimes and the long-term intergenerational effects of radioactive exposure. Outside its gates, downwinder communities cry for recognition of their wasted bodies and habitats. Further along the chain is the Trinity Site where the bomb was tested before being dropped in Nagasaki, and which offers to the public, twice during the year, an opportunity to pay homage to the legacy of Robert Oppenheimer and his ingenious crew. The B-Reactor at Hanford is now part of the Manhattan Project National Historic Park project where its commemoration tells a story of American triumph and scientific prowess, while in its shadow lies the wasted lives of displaced indigenous groups and irradiated nuclear workers, downwinders, and wildlife. The shadow stories that set Krupar and Kanouse on their journey through Colorado sent me on a journey away from Washington, to follow Fat Man over its global production chain, trying to take stock of who, what, and how we remember that one single bomb at its various nodes of production, testing, and use. That plutonium also fed Fat Man, the nuclear bomb that exploded in Nagasaki, killing between 40,000 to 75,000 people instantly and many more over weeks, months, years to come. nuclear weapons program during the Cold War. Hanford was the primary site for the production of plutonium to feed the U.S. Some two decades ago, fate conspired to bring me to live in eastern Washington state, 50 miles downwind from Hanford. Those shadows puncture hubris and call for accountability. The nuclear production cycle is at every point haunted by its toxic shadows. A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado does not follow a straight line, nor does it permit one to contain the uncontainable.
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