Pantex: The Bomb Plant in the Wheat Fields

Twenty miles northeast of Amarillo, on sixteen thousand acres of Panhandle farmland, sits the facility that assembled the majority of the United States nuclear arsenal. The Pantex Plant has been here, in one form or another, since nineteen forty-two. From the road it looks like a large industrial site surrounded by flat wheat fields and a perimeter fence. What happened inside has defined American nuclear weapons policy for more than seventy years.

The plant was built in the early years of the Second World War as a conventional ordnance facility for the Army Air Force, authorized in February nineteen forty-two and completed by November of that year. When the war ended in nineteen forty-five, the facility closed. In nineteen forty-nine, the War Assets Administration sold the property for one dollar to Texas Technological College, which planned to use it for agricultural research. The government retained the right of repossession.

It exercised that right in nineteen fifty-one. The Atomic Energy Commission reclaimed ten thousand acres, converted the plant to chemical explosives production, and began nuclear weapons assembly. By nineteen sixty-five Pantex was the sole facility in the United States handling weapons disassembly and modification. By nineteen seventy-five it was the nation's only site for warhead construction. In nineteen ninety-one, Pantex assembled its last nuclear weapon.

After the Cold War, its mission reversed. The plant that built the arsenal began dismantling it. Following arms reduction agreements with Russia concluded in nineteen ninety-two, Pantex began disassembling thousands of warheads per year. It remains the primary United States facility for maintaining the safety and reliability of the existing stockpile, inspecting, refurbishing, and where necessary taking apart weapons whose components age and degrade.

The Panhandle communities around Pantex have lived with this reality for eighty years. The plant is one of the largest employers in the region. The wheat grows right up to the fence line.