Boomtown, U.S.A.

There is a small town in southeastern Oklahoma where people work in a vast factory unlike any other factory in the United States. The people of McAlester are so good at what they do, and have been doing it for so long, that they have 100% market share in the product they build. And they build an important product -- one that is central to America's security.

What these men and women build are bombs -- the bombs that drove Saddam Hussein's troops from Kuwait during the Gulf War, the bombs that have pounded Afghanistan. Many of the 850 people at the "ammunition plant," as the one-of-a-kind place is modestly called, are the second or third generation to do this work. For them, bombs are the family business.

To the degree that it's possible to generalize about hundreds of people doing a certain kind of job, America's bomb makers are clear-eyed and sensible about their work. Making bombs is too sweaty and too demanding to be romantic. It is too deadly to allow much daydreaming. It is too vivid to inspire heated philosophizing about foreign-policy goals or America's place in the world. And making bombs is, frankly, too serious to be possible without laughing. Aaron Kilburn is a production-line worker who has been at the plant for 24 years. He is the David Letterman of the bomb lines, always ready with a groaner. "That guy? He's new. His job is using a hammer to test for duds!" Ba-da-boom. "If you don't have a sense of humor, you're in trouble," says Kilburn. "Everything we've got out here will kill you, maim you. We're making bombs!"

It's one thing to see, on the television in your living room, the destruction that a single 2,000-pound bomb can do. It's another to stand in a room with an open-topped kettle filled with explosive about to be poured into 10 such bombs. It's something else entirely to come to work in a factory surrounded by dozens of live and soon-to-be-live 2,000-pound bombs, each 8 feet tall. If something were to go wrong, you wouldn't be able to run fast enough. You'd also never know what hit you.

The bombs come from McAlester Army Ammunition Plant (MCAAP), a vast, somewhat dilapidated facility six miles south of the town of McAlester. MCAAP is the source of nearly every nonnuclear bomb that the United States now uses. Although MCAAP is not a secret facility -- it shows up on road maps and has a public Web site -- it is a closed facility, run by the Army, its workers civilian employees of the Army. Earlier this year, Fast Company was given unprecedented access to the people who work at MCAAP and to the plant's production and storage areas.

The people who make America's bombs do so not only with a tireless steadiness, but also in utter anonymity. A sign on U.S. Highway 69 says simply, "Army Ammunition Plant." A billboard in McAlester salutes the town's prison rodeo and its Italian festival ("Home of cowboys and Italians") but makes no mention of the bomb factory that underpins its economy. No defense secretary has ever been to MCAAP; no president has come to have lunch in the break rooms and thank the men and women who make the tools that give a commander-in-chief his power. It's fine to have aircraft carriers and a vast, agile fleet of fighters and bombers. But an F-18, a B-52, even a B-2 is worthless without the products of McAlester in its belly or under its wings.

The production of bombs turns out to be an arresting mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary -- of disciplined, sometimes mundane work and unusual risk shouldered every day. The bombs are made in factories that have changed little since their construction in 1943, and a surprising amount of the labor is still done by hand. The people at MCAAP make products that must be perfect, but that they hope are never used. The emotions of bomb making are magnified during wartime, when the consequences of MCAAP's output are breaking news.

Terry Moore, like many of the people at the plant, has work outside MCAAP. For most, it's on a cattle ranch or a farm. Moore is pastor of Crowder Baptist Church. An ordained minister working at a bomb factory. "It sounds like a contradiction," Moore says. "But we need a strong defense. This helps maintain the peace. Jesus said to turn the other cheek -- knowing what you have in your arsenal to keep 'em at bay."