What does it mean to reckon with a contaminated world? In Unmaking the
Bomb, Shannon Cram considers the complex social politics of this
question and the regulatory infrastructures designed to answer it.
Blending history, ethnography, and memoir, she investigates remediation
efforts at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a former weapons complex in
Washington State. Home to the majority of the nation's high-level
nuclear waste and its largest environmental cleanup, Hanford is tasked
with managing toxic materials that will long outlast the United States
and its institutional capacities. Cram examines the embodied
uncertainties and structural impossibilities integral to that endeavor.
In particular, this lyrical book engages in a kind of narrative
contamination, toggling back and forth between cleanup's administrative
frames and the stories that overspill them. It spends time with the
statistical people that inhabit cleanup's metrics and models and the
nonstatistical people that live with their effects. And, in the process,
it explores the uneven social relations that make toxicity a normative
condition.