Climate Change is like a slow motion nuclear bomb. Both destroy the world, but one is instantaneous while the other is slow, insidious, and under the radar of everyday human perception.

While having nukes on the brain, I made a couple nice discoveries surfing the net this morning. I ran across a good environmental blog by freelance journalist Rob Edwards. In a post this past week entitled ‘The slow motion disasters caused by making US and Soviet nuclear bombs‘, Edwards reviews a new book by Kate Brown entitled Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. Edward’s short review includes some of the shocking and bizarre nuclear experiments conducted by the U.S. The book looks to be a fascinating must-read. Kate Brown’s goal of the book was summed up a few years ago when she was researching and writing it:

…Brown hopes to shatter ideological assumptions cultivated during the Cold War by exploring remarkable similarities between the American and Soviet plutonium cities.

Top secret, highly restricted and socially engineered, these government-run communities developed on parallel paths into model cities. Each received awards for planning, community development and education. At the height of Cold War tension, some politicians feared Richland was too “socialisitic”, while some Soviet officials called Cheliabinsk-40 too “materialisitic” and “bourgeois.” Both suffer a deadly legacy of radioactive contamination.

“I will argue that in creating the means to destroy each other, the two cities came to resemble one another,” Brown said…

From the blurb of the book…

I’ll have to do a book review of Plutopia as well. Getting back to my recent obsession with nukes, I also ran across a website called My Nuclear Life which is run by a college student studying environmental health. Her site is a sort of depository for all things nuclear. Here are a few of the interesting images from her vast collection:

‘Da Bomb’ Hair Style…

Good, wholesome family outing…

‘Till radioactive contamination and death do us part…

Rear view mirrors are helpful in eliminating ‘nuclear’ blind spots…

Nesting Doll (Matryoshka) from Chernobyl…

Fukushima art by Ben Hein…

And from my own collection, Dr. Manhattan laying waste to a tank…

But who is really keeping track of this deadly technology? Apparently, they are not doing such a good job…