Cover

PENGUIN BOOKS

GODS OF METAL

Eric Schlosser is the author of Fast Food Nation, Reefer Madness, and Command and Control, as well as the co-author of a children’s book, Chew on This. Two of his plays, Americans and We the People, have been produced in London. He was an executive producer of the films Fast Food Nation and There Will Be Blood. He was a co-producer of the documentary Food Inc., an executive producer of Food Chains and Harra Ranch.

Gods of Metal

The Y-12 National Security Complex sits amid a narrow valley, surrounded by wooded hills, in the city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Y-12 and Oak Ridge were built secretly, within about two years, as part of the Manhattan Project, America’s crash programme to create an atomic bomb, and their existence wasn’t publicly acknowledged until the end of the Second World War. By then, the secret city had a population of 75,000. Few of its residents had been allowed to know what was being done at the military site, which included one of the largest buildings in the world. Y-12 processed the uranium used in Little Boy, the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Seven decades later, Y-12 is still the only industrial complex in the United States devoted to the fabrication and storage of weapons-grade uranium. Every nuclear warhead and bomb in the American arsenal contains uranium from Y-12.

Strict security measures have been adopted at the site to prevent the theft of its special nuclear materials. Y-12 has some five hundred security officers authorized to use lethal force within its Protected Area, five BearCat armoured vehicles, Gatling guns that can fire up to fifty rounds per second and shoot down aircraft, video cameras, motion detectors, four perimeter fences, and rows of dragon’s teeth – low, pyramid-shaped blocks of concrete that can rip the axles off approaching vehicles and bring them to a dead stop. The management of Y-12 calls the place ‘the Fort Knox of Uranium’.

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility was built, at a cost of more than half a billion dollars, to safeguard Y-12’s uranium. Situated at the north end of the Protected Area, the storage facility is an imposing white structure, longer than a football field, with guard towers at all four corners. If the tops of the towers were crenellated, the building would look like an immense, windowless White Castle. Some 900,000 pounds of weapons-grade uranium are stored inside it. Little Boy – a crude and highly inefficient atomic bomb, designed in the early 1940s with slide rules – contained about 140 pounds of weapons-grade uranium, and almost 99 per cent of it harmlessly blew apart as the bomb detonated. And, when that happened, two-thirds of the buildings in the city were destroyed and perhaps 80,000 civilians were killed. The amount of weapons-grade uranium needed to build a terrorist bomb with a similar explosive force could fit inside a small gym bag.