Full Body Burden Read Free

secret bomb factory that will carry out the work that first began with the Manhattan Project, the covert military endeavor that developed the first atomic bomb during World War II.
    Until now, all nuclear bombs in the United States have been custom-built at the weapons research and design laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, with materials supplied from the plutonium production facility at the Hanford site in eastern Washington State and the uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. But with the heightening Cold War—a high state of military tension and political conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies that will continue for decades—the United States wants to mass-produce nuclear weapons. They need a roll-up-your-sleeves,get-down-to-business, high-production bomb factory. An assembly line.
    AEC officials choose a site on a high, windy plateau not far from the growing cities of Arvada, Boulder, and Denver—cities that can provide workers and housing. Landowners are forced to sell their land to the government, and construction on Project Apple begins immediately.
    A few months later, the
Denver Post
breaks the news of the new plant with the headline THERE IS GOOD NEWS TODAY: AEC TO BUILD $45 MILLION A-PLANT NEAR DENVER .Announcement of the plant catches everyone by surprise, including state and city officials, and the news breaks like a thunderbolt over the community. Though owned by the AEC, the plant will be operated by Dow Chemical, a private contractor that will be indemnified against any accident or mishap.The Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant will become the workhorse of an AEC complex of weapons facilities that eventually includes thirteen sites from Nevada to Kansas to South Carolina. Each AEC facility will be involved in its own particular aspect of the design, manufacture, testing, and maintenance of weapons for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
    Components and processes will be divided up around the country, but Rocky Flats will be one of two sites designed to produce the fissionable plutonium “pits” at the core of nuclear bombs. (After 1965 it will be the only site.) The whole system depends upon Rocky Flats.
    Construction of the plant is rushed.
    Few people know the deal is in the works.Not even the governor has an inkling.Colorado’s top elected officials are not informed that the plant will be built until after the decision is made and there’s no going back. But Denver welcomes the windfall. No one knows what the factory will produce. No one cares. It means jobs. It means housing.Contractors, the local power plant, and local businesses all look forward to the “juicy plum” to be known from now on as Rocky Flats.
    It’s the Cold War. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 may have ended one war, but they started another. The perceived Soviet threat is an ever-present shadow in American life. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 creates an impenetrable wall of secrecy around theU.S. nuclear establishment. All government decisions and activities related to the production of nuclear weapons will be completely hidden. Information about nuclear bombs, toxic and radioactive waste, environmental contamination, and known and unknown health risks to workers and local residents is all strictly classified.
    And no one asks questions.
    An editorial in the
Denver Post
predicts that Rocky Flats will be “a source of satisfaction to all residents who have an abiding faith in Colorado’s destiny and future greatness.”The newspaper reports that workers on the project will be safer than “downtown office workers who have to cross busy streets on their way to lunch.”
    The announcement is made simultaneously in Denver, Los Alamos, and Washington, D.C.The plant site in Jefferson County has been chosen for “operational values,” including the fact that the land is nothing but an old rocky cow pasture, “virtual waste land.”Officials from the AEC emphasize that no atom bombs or weapons will be