Salt of Patriots

In a rural Ohio uranium processing plant during the optimistic, buttoned-up 1950s, employees pledge to keep their work secret - even from their own families - as Cold War fervor wanes in the face of what they’re doing and at what cost. But these guys are no whistleblowers. Happy being the highest-paid chemical operators in the state, they dream of a better life for their children, along with their friends and co-workers, and proceed with optimism and fear, full of yearning emblematic of families in the 1950s and the rising middle class. These “Cold Warriors” work dependable jobs in the face of atomic risk, emboldened by pride leavened with fear.

This story of family, of expectations and disappointments, pledges and pain, love and dreams and desire, remembers a place, an industry, and most of all an innocent trust in superiors, and in the world, which no longer exists.