Making a Real
Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West, by Len
Ackland, The University of New Mexico press. Hardback: $34.95. 308
pages.
Most people know that the Cold
War spawned a number of nuclear bomb manufacturing facilities in
the spacious American West – places like Hanford in eastern
Washington state and Rocky Flats just outside Denver, Colo. Some
people know that these facilities now have pollution problems that
are costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year to clean
up. But few people really know the life history of these federal
plants – how they were conceived, how they grew, matured and
died.
One person who does is Len Ackland, a
former Chicago Tribune reporter and former editor of the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists. In Making A Real Killing: Rocky Flats and
the Nuclear West, Ackland gives us a comprehensive and contextual
look at one of the most interesting facilities, Rocky Flats, where
workers handled deadly plutonium to make the hockey puck-sized
cores that detonate our nation’s arsenal of nuclear
weapons.
The view Ackland shows us is nothing
short of scary. Rocky Flats was built and operated before we knew
how to handle nuclear and toxic waste, and the managers who ran it
were under intense pressure to produce bomb cores at break-neck
speed to keep up with the Russians. One of the most chilling
episodes was the 1969 fire at Rocky Flats, which nearly caused a
Chernobyl-scale disaster on the Front Range. Ackland documents
dozens of equally dangerous situations and events which the public
never knew about. The veil of secrecy surrounding Rocky Flats was
real and, as Ackland powerfully concludes, it was only torn apart
when the Cold War itself came apart.
But
Ackland’s book is far from sensational. Instead, through careful
research and dozens of interviews with plant workers, neighbors,
nuclear protesters and federal officials, he tells us a story that
makes sense of a period of fearful madness.
Paul Larmer is senior editor at HCN and edits Writers on
the Range.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Lifting the veil of secrecy.
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