Making a Real Killing by Len Ackland, University of New Mexico, 拢29.95,
ISBN 0826318770
THE people of Europe know that they owe an enormous debt to the brave fire
fighters of Chernobyl, who sacrificed their lives to prevent a disaster from
becoming a catastrophe. But the citizens of Denver are unaware that on 11 May
1969 they became indebted to the firefighters and guards putting out a fire in
Building 776 of a local factory. Not just any old factory: this was Rocky Flats,
which made the plutonium cores for almost all the nuclear warheads made in the
US from 1951 to 1989. Building 776 housed 3473 kilograms of plutonium when the
fire broke out. If the roof had ruptured deadly plutonium oxide would have
spewed out over suburban Denver.
Making a Real Killing tells the story of this near-miss and another in 1957,
as well as the thousands of smaller 鈥渞outine鈥� fires that plagued Rocky Flats. It
also explains why a succession of companies managed it to produce weapons first,
and safety for workers and environment second鈥攁nd how the public was kept
ignorant of the true cost of making nuclear weapons.
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It鈥檚 an exhaustive history, and to produce it, Len Ackland, who teaches
journalism at the University of Colorado, has read thousands of documents and
interviewed people from plant janitors to top officials.
He takes us right from the start, when local politicians jockeyed to get
Washington to locate the plant鈥攁nd the jobs it would bring鈥攊n
Colorado, to the bitter end, when a new generation tried their best to get
Washington to clean up the closed plant and relocate thousands of tonnes of
nuclear waste.
The good news is that Ackland explains why everyone from cabinet secretaries
to maintenance workers lied or kept silent to protect this terribly flawed
operation. The bad news is the relentless pace of the book.