ABSTRACT
Howled through the verses of “Plutonian Ode,” a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1978 which begins this chapter is a cartography of the Cold War landscape of the United States of America.2 In the post-nuclear era, much of the atomic geography produced in the twentieth century is in danger of being forgotten. The clandestine network of nuclear laboratories and factories of the last century often remain unseen or even unimaginable, much like radiation itself. Outside of their immediate geographical nexuses, nuclear sites are often amnesic spaces, blind spots and black outs in the national collective memory. Ginsberg’s (1978) poem reminds us that nuclear industries were sited in and helped to build real communities; they did not exist in de-populated vacuums. The diverse ways in which these communities were (and are still being) affected by the Manhattan Project, the Cold War, and the nuclear industries that followed are still being discovered, uncovered, and debated.
