Nuclear Suburbs: Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance

by Patrick Vitale

From submarines to the suburbs—the remaking of Pittsburgh during the Cold War During the early Cold War, research facilities became ubiquitous features of suburbs across the United States. Pittsburgh’s eastern and southern suburbs hosted a constellation of such facilities that became the world’s leading center for the development of nuclear reactors for naval vessels and power plants. The segregated communities that surrounded these laboratories housed one of the largest concentrations of nuclear engineers and scientists on earth. In Nuclear Suburbs , Patrick Vitale uncovers how the suburbs shaped the everyday lives of these technology workers.  Using oral histories, Vitale follows nuclear engineers and scientists throughout and beyond the Pittsburgh region to understand how the politics of technoscience and the Cold War were embedded in daily life. At the same time that research facilities moved to Pittsburgh’s suburbs, a coalition of business and political elites began an aggressive effort, called the Pittsburgh Renaissance, to renew the region. For Pittsburgh’s elite, laboratories and researchers became important symbols of the new Pittsburgh and its postindustrial economy. Nuclear Suburbs exposes how this coalition enrolled technology workers as allies in their remaking of the city. Offering lessons for the present day, Nuclear Suburbs shows how race, class, gender, and the production of urban and suburban space are fundamental to technoscientific networks, and explains how the “renewal” of industrial regions into centers of the tech economy is rooted in violence and injustice. 

298 pages, Paperback

Published February 23, 2021

Reviews

[Bill O'driscoll · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solidly researched if rather academically written account of how Pittsburgh's civic leaders of the 1950s and afterward attempted to remake the industrial hub as a modern techno center. Vitale goes beyond mere documentation to show how the city's eastern and southern suburbs benefited from this strategy at the expense of older, poorer, and Blacker city neighorhoods, and also analyzes how rhetoric and policy worked to reinforce the patriarchal nuclear (pun intended) family as well as the military-industrial complex that arose in that era. Interesting stuff about how one lab here was the center of nuclear-submarine R&D; in fact, lots of material I wasn't familiar with despite living in Pittsburgh the past 30 years. A bit repetitious at times, might have done just as well as a long article, but still quite interesting.