The decade-long battle over Karen Silkwood’s legacy — waged, on the one hand, by progressives who mythologized her as a courageous whistleblower and, on the other, by a corporation that vilified and sexualized her as an irresponsible traitor — offers valuable lessons for today. As we face an era where the levers of government power will be wielded by a president who has run on a platform rife with misogyny and vengeance, Silkwood’s story underscores a critical point: focusing on a whistleblower’s character distracts from the content of their claims.
Though little remembered today outside of Oklahoma, Silkwood’s employer, Kerr-McGee, epitomized the US energy establishment. Ranked 129 on the Fortune 500 in 1975, with more than a billion dollars in assets invested in oil, uranium, potash, helium, asphalt, and coal, the company was a household name across the American Southwest, where hundreds of gas stations bore the company’s trademark blue and red “K-M.”
Silkwood spent her shifts working with plutonium pellets in a laboratory glove box, a sealed container with glove access points, at a plant thirty miles north of KM’s Oklahoma City headquarters. She ground and polished the pellets before they were assembled into fuel rods and welded shut. She believed that these welds were faulty and that their required quality-control checks had been doctored — a claim later confirmed by government inquiries after her death.
Her own multiple plutonium...
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