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Radiological testing on the now infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex: [1] > Pruitt-Igoe was not proof of a Cold War logic; it did not display the “inevitable”

by l3mure 3y ago

Radiological testing on the now infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex: [1] > Pruitt-Igoe was not proof of a Cold War logic; it did not display the “inevitable” failures of planned housing. It was an organized sabotage—and a clandestine site for radiological weapons experimentation. These studies were conducted on innocent and unconsenting civilians, who were mostly poor, mostly Black, and mostly women and children. > Residents in some areas of [St. Louis] noticed unusual activity in the days and nights throughout 1953 and into 1954,” Dr. Lisa Martino-Taylor writes in Behind the Fog, an examination of the United States’s Cold War-era radiological weapons programs. “Large puffs of a billowy powder were sprayed into the air by strangers in passing vehicles affixed with spray devices. The luminous powder lingered in the air behind the slow-moving vehicles.” [1] - https://proteanmag.com/2022/11/28/pruitt-igoe-a-black-community-under-the-atomic-cloud/ https://proteanmag.com/2022/11/28/pruitt-igoe-a-black-commun...

George83728 3y ago
But what's the connection between radioactive contamination and the failure of Pruitt-Igoe? Wikipedia doesn't seem to mention any contamination issues, but says that deteriorating building maintenance and social conditions (crime, poverty, segregation, etc) were to blame. Radiation didn't vandalize the elevators or mug residents in the hallways.
- l3mure 3y ago
  > Wikipedia doesn't seem to mention any contamination issues FTA: > St. Louis’ baby teeth were, indeed, packed with radioactive metals. The study found that children who grew up at the height of the Cold War in 1963 had 50 times as much Strontium-90 in their teeth as children born in 1950. I'm sure we'd know a lot more should we ever be deemed worthy to know. > What is left in St. Louis are unanswered questions, and unknowns that extend further still. The Army’s documentation alludes to “certain special tests,” still unidentified. “Thus,” Martino-Taylor writes, “an unidentified set of additional covert test in St. Louis was conducted by the Army Chemical Corps, SRI, and Ralph Parsons Company that rose to a classification level higher than ‘Secret.’” > Ralph Parsons Company—now Parsons Corporation—is a defense, intelligence, security, and infrastructural engineering firm headquartered in Centreville, Virginia, down the street from the Central Intelligence Agency. > A lot of data from these studies has gone missing; discarded by the Army and other entities. Nothing you need to worry about. At one point in her research, Dr. Martino-Taylor traveled to California to put in a copy order for boxes of Philip Leighton’s papers. She had hoped to find that his files contained more information on the St. Louis experiments. Instead, Stanford University pulled the collection the very next day. As of 2022, the materials remain in the possession of Stanford’s general counsel, closed to the public. --- > Radiation didn't vandalize the elevators or mug residents in the hallways. Never mind that illegally, secretly, and non-consensually irradiating the residents is a wildly worse crime in itself, the social conditions you point out are part and parcel of the same mindset responsible for all it.
  - George83728 3y ago
    It's not about which kinds of the crimes are greater; it's about which kinds of crimes have a more proximate impact on the success or failure of a community. Obviously the secret irradiation of people is a worse crime than vandalizing all the public spaces of a building, but if that irradiation goes unnoticed by the community at that time, then it will have much less effect on property values / etc than petty vandalism.

by l3mure 3y ago

George83728 3y ago

But what's the connection between radioactive contamination and the failure of Pruitt-Igoe? Wikipedia doesn't seem to mention any contamination issues, but says that deteriorating building maintenance and social conditions (crime, poverty, segregation, etc) were to blame. Radiation didn't vandalize the elevators or mug residents in the hallways.

l3mure 3y ago
> Wikipedia doesn't seem to mention any contamination issues FTA: > St. Louis’ baby teeth were, indeed, packed with radioactive metals. The study found that children who grew up at the height of the Cold War in 1963 had 50 times as much Strontium-90 in their teeth as children born in 1950. I'm sure we'd know a lot more should we ever be deemed worthy to know. > What is left in St. Louis are unanswered questions, and unknowns that extend further still. The Army’s documentation alludes to “certain special tests,” still unidentified. “Thus,” Martino-Taylor writes, “an unidentified set of additional covert test in St. Louis was conducted by the Army Chemical Corps, SRI, and Ralph Parsons Company that rose to a classification level higher than ‘Secret.’” > Ralph Parsons Company—now Parsons Corporation—is a defense, intelligence, security, and infrastructural engineering firm headquartered in Centreville, Virginia, down the street from the Central Intelligence Agency. > A lot of data from these studies has gone missing; discarded by the Army and other entities. Nothing you need to worry about. At one point in her research, Dr. Martino-Taylor traveled to California to put in a copy order for boxes of Philip Leighton’s papers. She had hoped to find that his files contained more information on the St. Louis experiments. Instead, Stanford University pulled the collection the very next day. As of 2022, the materials remain in the possession of Stanford’s general counsel, closed to the public. --- > Radiation didn't vandalize the elevators or mug residents in the hallways. Never mind that illegally, secretly, and non-consensually irradiating the residents is a wildly worse crime in itself, the social conditions you point out are part and parcel of the same mindset responsible for all it.
- George83728 3y ago
  It's not about which kinds of the crimes are greater; it's about which kinds of crimes have a more proximate impact on the success or failure of a community. Obviously the secret irradiation of people is a worse crime than vandalizing all the public spaces of a building, but if that irradiation goes unnoticed by the community at that time, then it will have much less effect on property values / etc than petty vandalism.