Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West

Abstract

In 1939, Enrico Fermi observed that nuclear weapons could not be produced unless the entire United States was turned into a bomb factory. As the Manhattan Project took shape and the Cold War unfolded, that sprawling nuclear weapons factory was built and expanded, housed in dozens of sites across the United States. As the prima materia of the Cold War national security state, nuclear products and processes were handled with utmost secrecy and security by the federal agencies and corporate contractors under whose guidance weapons were produced, and information about the conditions of these factory sites was highly guarded. The Cold War's end has changed this state of affairs, and, as many journalists, activists, and scholars have recently been documenting, an enduring radioactive mess has been left to clean up, such that clean up is the appropriate term. In Making a Real Killing, Len Ackland adds a new chapter to the story, chronicling the Rocky Flats plant near Denver, Colorado, built in 1951 to produce plutonium warhead triggers for nuclear weapons. A former editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and current director for the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Ackland employs investigative journalism at its best: he presents an allencompassing overview of Rocky Flats, threading portraits of key players and impacted people into the complex institutional and technical stories of the plant.