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provided for workers, particularly women, who aren’t tall enough to reach the arm portals. It’s difficult and cumbersome work, with no small amount of risk, as plutonium is highly combustible.
    There is no immediate alarm—the alarm has been disconnected to save space in the crowded production room. Production takes precedence over safety.
    The spark goes unnoticed.
    In sixteen years of operation, the plant has quietly doubled in size. More than three thousand employees work their daily shifts and then go home, where they can’t talk about where they work or what they do. Few people have clearances to enter more than one building. No one knows exactly what happens at Rocky Flats. Workers in one area don’t know what other workers do. The press doesn’t know. It’s all under the cloak of national security.
    The half-buried 771 complex—several buildings designed to manufacture plutonium—is at the heart of the plant, surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire. A bluff hides it from the road. Hundreds of glove boxes snake across a floor area that encompasses two buildings: Building 776 and Building 771. The production floor is like a big, shiny kitchen stretching the length of two football fields.
    The word
trigger
is almost euphemistic. In a nuclear warhead or hydrogen bomb, there are two steps: an initial fission explosion, called the “trigger,” followed by a secondary fusion explosion. Each stage releases nuclear energy, and the two stages happen so quickly that they appear to be simultaneous. The principal isotope, or form, of plutonium in these bombs is plutonium-239. The trigger is cradled in conventional explosives, which compress the plutonium inward, creating a high enough temperature and strong enough pressure to initiate an atomic chain reaction. Roughly the size of a softball or grapefruit, this initial bomb, smaller than the Nagasaki plutonium implosion bomb, triggers thermonuclear fusion between tritium and deuterium, the two forms of heavy hydrogen, and is capable of leveling a small city by itself. But the detonation that creates this fission explosion then triggers the far more powerful fusion explosion of a hydrogen bomb—a mushroom cloud, as in the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.
    The plutonium triggers created at Rocky Flats form the explosive fissionable core essential to every nuclear weapon in the United States’ arsenal. Yet each pit is an atomic bomb in its own right, of the same type as the Trinity and Nagasaki bombs.
    Precise manufacture of the trigger is crucial, as any flaw or variation could cause a nuclear warhead to malfunction. A perfect, “diamond-stamped” trigger is the goal, again and again, whatever the risk.
    On this day there are few workers due to the holiday. Only a skeleton crew is on hand.More than 7,640 pounds of plutonium—roughly enough for one thousand thermonuclear bombs—is held in the maze of glove boxes, pipes, tanks, and containers.
    Small fires are common. When a plutonium chip sparks, the worker douses it with sand or drops it into machining oil to snuff it out. Thereis no automatic sprinkler system or floor drainage. Water is used on plutonium only as a last resort because water can cause plutonium to go “critical”—that is, it can create a spontaneous nuclear chain reaction that can be lethal to anyone within close proximity.
    But no one sees this spark. The spark in the glove box grows into a flame.
    Four security guards, Stan, Bill, Joe, and Al, are driving to work. They don’t mind working on Sunday, even though it’s Mother’s Day. The shift is quiet and the pay is good. Like many Rocky Flats employees, they like to carpool. They know each other well. One of the best things about working at Rocky Flats is that it feels like family. Stan likes driving; he’s behind the wheel of his new Chevy Corvair. Joe, who tops three hundred pounds, rides shotgun. Bill and Al are both tall and have folded themselves into the backseat as best they