An accident occurred last year as a decades-old nuclear warhead was being dismantled at the government's Pantex facility, 17 miles northeast of Amarillo in the Panhandle of Texas (the country's only factory for assembling and disassembling nuclear weapons).
The weapon was a W-56 warhead, with a yield of 1,200 kilotons, 100 times the destructive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The warheads were first put in service in 1965 on Minuteman missiles and don't have the safety features of more recent models that protect against detonation. The accident, in which an unsafe amount of pressure was applied to the warhead, could have caused it to explode.
When a mechanism that is part of the disassembly equipment fails to prevent application of too much pressure, Energy Department regulations require that a new or different device be used, the summary states. However, "due to expediency/convenience," the same device was used the next day in a second attempt to disassemble the warhead
An anonymous letter, purportedly sent by Pantex employees, warning that long hours and efforts to increase output were causing dangerous conditions in the plant. Most production technicians work five 10-hour days, plus weekends," the letter states. "Our safety analysts get pounded on a daily basis to support the production schedule and are expected at times to work around-the-clock, And this is BEFORE we take the insane step of trying to complete work on 50 percent more units this fiscal year." (Saving money to spend in Iraq.)
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