Boomtown, U.S.A.

Most of the igloos are served by dirt roads and don't have electricity. Every magazine has restrictions of the quantity of bombs each can hold, in order to prevent chain-reaction explosions. To a person standing inside one of these igloos, those limits seem purely intellectual. The air is cool and smells musty. Two-thousand-pound bombs lie on their sides, two bombs to a metal rack, stacked four racks high, 36 rows deep. In a room about the size of a McDonald's, there are 313 bombs, each weighing a ton. In 1985, a car hit a truck carrying such bombs on Interstate 40, north of McAlester. The truck carried no fuses or detonators, but in the fire after the accident, three of the bombs partially exploded and burned. The crater they left in I-40 was 40 feet wide and 25 feet deep.

Bomb Squad (III)

Don Johnson, who works in storage, started at MCAAP in 1985. "Since 9-11, we've hired some new people. A guy was driving a forklift, and he accidentally knocked over a stack of bombs. I mean, he jumped off that forklift and took off running. I called after him, 'Hey, man! Where are you going? Come back here! You heard the bombs hit the ground, didn't you? If you heard 'em hit, you're gonna be fine. Come on back!' "

Last June, a man working in the finishing room for 2,000-pound bombs was crushed when a bomb fell on him. It was the first fatality at MCAAP in 30 years. In the aftermath of the accident, equipment in the finishing room -- where finished bombs are taken from their carts and turned from vertical to horizontal -- was automated. The new equipment has safety mechanisms that make it almost impossible to have a repeat of the June accident.

And yet, the new equipment simply sets the bombs -- each weighing almost what a Honda Civic does -- on a long metal table, where they are rolled along by hand, like so many logs, through the finishing process. The table has no ledges. The work rules just say that before anyone moves a bomb, there is supposed to be a person on each end, to maintain control.

America's bomb-making facility is surprisingly antiquated. As an example, even though parts of the process have been updated, computers are largely irrelevant. And the physical facility itself is beat-up in ways that go beyond the cosmetic. The concrete surfaces of loading docks where ammunition is loaded and unloaded are reduced to gravel in some places. Bathrooms in production buildings are filthy, not because of any lack of care by the employees, but because they're old.

"The buildings are rough," says Billy Don Cloud. "My ranch hands have better bathroom facilities than we do at the plant."

Many of the buildings appear not to have been painted in decades. Indeed, on the glassed-in bulletin boards of one break room in daily use, there are faded news clippings featuring a boxing match between Charley Fusari and Tony Pellone and a U.S. Open in which Lew Worsham beat Sam Snead. Both events happened in 1947. Says one employee: "In peacetime, they don't have the money to fix the plant. In wartime, they're not thinking about the bathrooms or the paint."

The plant's condition is partly a result of the way it is run: MCAAP is, in essence, a business. The base commanders -- who typically rotate through on two-year stints -- must run the entire facility from the revenue they generate. "Labor, fire protection, security: It all comes out of the revenue stream," says the current commander, Colonel Jyuji Hewitt. "If I choose to paint the bathrooms -- well, it's a zero-sum game. What do we give up to do that?"

So far, the war on terrorism hasn't had a dramatic effect on MCAAP's operations. The military services keep stockpiles of weapons; MCAAP's thousands of magazines -- most of which are full -- represent additional supply. The plant, of course, was built for World War II, a multifront, multiyear global war. Right now, it runs at a fraction of its full capacity -- one shift, four days a week, in only some of the factory buildings. MCAAP will soon add a second shift to replenish the munitions used in Afghanistan.

During World War II, the plant had almost four times the number of workers it does now. Indeed, given what MCAAP is in the business of making, its capacity is truly sobering. Says Dennis Tarron, MCAAP's chief of production planning: "I've seen old work orders from Vietnam where the Navy requested 1.25 million MK-82s [500-pound bombs]. We used to get orders for a half-million routinely."

During the height of the Vietnam War, MCAAP ran three shifts, around the clock, six days a week. "We produced 6,000 finished bombs in a 24-hour period," says Tarron. During the 1980s, says Tarron, that single day's Vietnam-era production "would have been a good load for a year."