Under the Cap of Invisibility: The Pantex Nuclear Weapons Plant and the Texas Panhandle

Pantex was built during World War II near the town of Amarillo, Texas. The site was converted early in the Cold War to assemble nuclear weapons and produce high explosives. For nearly fifty years Pantex has been the sole assembly and disassembly plant for nuclear weapons in the United States. Today, most of the activities of the plant consist of the manufacture of high explosive components and the dismantlement or life extension of weapons, including retrofitting aging warheads in the United States’s arsenal.

Unlike the much more famous nuclear-weapons-production sites at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Rocky Flats, the Pantex plant has drawn little attention, hidden under a metaphoric “cap of invisibility.” Lucie Genay now lifts that invisibility cap to give the world its first in-depth look at Pantex and the people who have spent their lives as neighbors and employees of this secretive industry. The book investigates how Pantex has impacted local identity by molding elements of the past into the guaranty of its future and its concealment. It further examines the multiple facets of Pantexism—the reasons for embracing nuclear-weapons production as a solution to economic woes, the resulting dependence on this industry, and the unconditional support for the facility—through the voices of native and adoptive Panhandlers.

Lucie Genay is an associate professor of US civilization in the English and American Studies Department at the University of Limoges, France. She is also the author of Land of Nuclear Enchantment: A New Mexican History of the Nuclear Weapons Industry (UNM Press).