The Nuclear Landscape as a Garden 25
into the local topography and orienting it toward the sea, 32 Shevchenko’s
city planners took the best that local nature had to offer and then started
amending its deficits: in a generously funded project, botanists of the Kazakh
Academy of Sciences invested years of research to identify plants that could
withstand the harsh climate and the saline soils of the peninsula. 33 The first
saplings, as well as fertile soil, arrived by plane; 34 thought only a few years
later, the city already boasted 60 000 trees, 2 million bushes, and 15 ha of
lawn and flower beds, according to the meticulous counts of the creators
of “new natures” – enough, in their eyes, to decorate it with the epithet
of a “garden city.” 35 The trope of harmonious nature-technology symbiosis permeated the rhetoric employed to describe the achievement: with the
start-up of the BN-350 reactor, “Mangyshlak’s atomic heart had started
beating,” and from the desalination plant, “a man-made river” poured into
the desert and made it bloom. 36 Not only had the self-proclaimed conquerors of Mangyshlak “cured” nature of its “diseases,” as Kapitsa had put it 37 –
they had also “perform[ed] plastic surgery on nature’s face” and thereby
achieved, as they saw it, an esthetical goal. 38
The garden city, however, did not yet satisfy the atomshchikis’ ambitions. As
a next step, they hoped to transform part of the desert into arable land for the
cultivation of various crops. At the time, nuclear-powered agro-industrial
complexes occupied the minds of technologists all over the world. 39 US engineers of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Bureau of Reclamation’s
Office of Saline Waters were particularly bold in their plans, envisioning
agricultural clusters relying on NPPs delivering 2 GW of electricity while
also producing a billion gallons of fresh water per day – allegedly enough for
irrigating crops to feed no less than 6 million people. Production of fertilizers on-site was also considered. 40 After the Six-Day War in the Near East
in 1967, the US Senate even considered subsidizing three such complexes in
Egypt, Israel, and the Gaza strip 41 – “literally, to make the desert bloom –
and thereby create a major new possibility for a settlement of the Israeli-Arab
conflict,” as Alvin Weinberg, the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
put it. 42 Nothing came of these visions, neither abroad nor domestically in the
United States. 43
The project that Soviet agronomists proposed for Mangyshlak was somewhat less grandiose in its initial stage, but, in return, also considered more
realistic. As early as 1965, experts of Leningrad-based Lengiprovodkhoz figured
that the “improved” nature of Mangyshlak should not only be able to quench
the thirst of its inhabitants – soon to number in the hundreds of thousands –
but also to feed them. Conjuring up the image of a Soviet “irrigated Eden,” 44
they anticipated that the region could reach food self-sufficiency, at least for
potatoes and vegetables, within a time span of 20 years, if irrigated areas
were expanded to a minimum of 150 000 ha. 45 Although the State Planning
Committee (Gosplan) gave a very skeptical review of these plans, the agronomists steadfastly defended the viability of their project, and the local Sredmash
authorities embraced it wholeheartedly. 46 In 1973, Iurii A. Koreisho, the
into the local topography and orienting it toward the sea, 32 Shevchenko’s
city planners took the best that local nature had to offer and then started
amending its deficits: in a generously funded project, botanists of the Kazakh
Academy of Sciences invested years of research to identify plants that could
withstand the harsh climate and the saline soils of the peninsula. 33 The first
saplings, as well as fertile soil, arrived by plane; 34 thought only a few years
later, the city already boasted 60 000 trees, 2 million bushes, and 15 ha of
lawn and flower beds, according to the meticulous counts of the creators
of “new natures” – enough, in their eyes, to decorate it with the epithet
of a “garden city.” 35 The trope of harmonious nature-technology symbiosis permeated the rhetoric employed to describe the achievement: with the
start-up of the BN-350 reactor, “Mangyshlak’s atomic heart had started
beating,” and from the desalination plant, “a man-made river” poured into
the desert and made it bloom. 36 Not only had the self-proclaimed conquerors of Mangyshlak “cured” nature of its “diseases,” as Kapitsa had put it 37 –
they had also “perform[ed] plastic surgery on nature’s face” and thereby
achieved, as they saw it, an esthetical goal. 38
The garden city, however, did not yet satisfy the atomshchikis’ ambitions. As
a next step, they hoped to transform part of the desert into arable land for the
cultivation of various crops. At the time, nuclear-powered agro-industrial
complexes occupied the minds of technologists all over the world. 39 US engineers of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Bureau of Reclamation’s
Office of Saline Waters were particularly bold in their plans, envisioning
agricultural clusters relying on NPPs delivering 2 GW of electricity while
also producing a billion gallons of fresh water per day – allegedly enough for
irrigating crops to feed no less than 6 million people. Production of fertilizers on-site was also considered. 40 After the Six-Day War in the Near East
in 1967, the US Senate even considered subsidizing three such complexes in
Egypt, Israel, and the Gaza strip 41 – “literally, to make the desert bloom –
and thereby create a major new possibility for a settlement of the Israeli-Arab
conflict,” as Alvin Weinberg, the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
put it. 42 Nothing came of these visions, neither abroad nor domestically in the
United States. 43
The project that Soviet agronomists proposed for Mangyshlak was somewhat less grandiose in its initial stage, but, in return, also considered more
realistic. As early as 1965, experts of Leningrad-based Lengiprovodkhoz figured
that the “improved” nature of Mangyshlak should not only be able to quench
the thirst of its inhabitants – soon to number in the hundreds of thousands –
but also to feed them. Conjuring up the image of a Soviet “irrigated Eden,” 44
they anticipated that the region could reach food self-sufficiency, at least for
potatoes and vegetables, within a time span of 20 years, if irrigated areas
were expanded to a minimum of 150 000 ha. 45 Although the State Planning
Committee (Gosplan) gave a very skeptical review of these plans, the agronomists steadfastly defended the viability of their project, and the local Sredmash
authorities embraced it wholeheartedly. 46 In 1973, Iurii A. Koreisho, the