On the Home Front - University of Nebraska Press

On the Home Front

The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site, Third Edition

By Michele Stenehjem Gerber

Introduction to the New Bison Books Edition by John M. Findlay

With a new epilogue by the author

paperback
2007. 424 pp.
978-0-8032-5995-9

$19.95 ^t

On the Home Front is the only comprehensive history of the Hanford Nuclear Site, America’s most productive and wasteful plutonium manufacturing facility. Located in southeastern Washington State, the Hanford Site produced the plutonium used in the atomic bombs that ended World War II. This book was made possible by the declassification in the 1980s of tens of thousands of government documents relating to the construction, operation, and maintenance of the site. The third edition contains a new introduction by John M. Findlay and a new epilogue by the author.

Michele Stenehjem Gerber works in the Public Information Office of Fluor Hanford, Inc. She has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Declassification and has served on the Hanford Reach National Monument Federal Advisory Committee and consulted for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

John M. Findlay is a professor of history at the University of Washington and the coeditor of Parallel Destinies: Canadians, Americans and the Western Border and The Atomic West.

“On the Home Front [is] a work of history dispassionately told, thoroughly footnoted, the literary equivalent of a nuclear explosion.”—Michael E. Long, National Geographic

“On the Home Front should be read by everyone concerned with public policy and the environmental issues that dominate this postmodern world.” —William L. Lang, Western Historical Quarterly

“[Gerber’s] skill in reconstructing the story of Hanford's environmental ravages has given us a book that can both alarm and instruct.” —Journal of American History

“A welcome contribution to the growing historiography of the Cold War. . . The questions raised by Gerber about the role of experts and of secrecy in a democracy will hopefully attract the serious attention they so earnestly deserve.”—American Historical Review

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