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of what was going on.
    Other workers had similar sentiments. Dr. Robert Rothe, a nuclear physicist who performed approximately 1,700 nuclear experiments—many of them extremely dangerous—at a laboratory at Rocky Flats, felt “somewhat divorced from the actual nuclear weapon itself. In fact, I have hardly ever even seen any of the components for a nuclear weapon.”
    As far as Stan Skinger was concerned, the world had lost its innocence when the first atomic bomb was dropped. He had been three years old when that happened. But he remembered. He remembered his parents talking about it. You couldn’t go back after something like that. It was a done deal. In a rational world, there would be no need for nuclear weapons. But human nature didn’t allow people to be rational, he felt. At least not all at the same time.
    He gave it some thought and decided to go back to Rocky Flats after all. There he met a kindred spirit, a guard named Bill Dennison, and they became fast friends.
    Bill Dennison is a big, soft-spoken man, fifteen years older than Stan. He, too, keeps his war experiences to himself, although his are from a different war. After ninth grade he dropped out of school, left home, and spent his teens working on ranches in Colorado and Wyoming. At seventeen he joined the Army and was sent to Korea, where he served as a machine-gunner in an infantry company until, as he later described it, a mortar shell “blew him all over the field.” He was surprised to find himself still breathing. Of the 120 men in his unit, he was one of only 36 who survived. He and his buddies were trapped for three days without water before they crawled far enough to find a stream. They drank and got sick.A few days later they reached a point upstream and realized the water was filled with rotting bodies.
    Bill’s health was never the same.
    When Bill returned to the states in 1951, he needed a job. His olderbrother worked at Los Alamos, the laboratory in New Mexico that developed the first nuclear bomb. Los Alamos was a tight-knit, closed community—a company town, really—surrounded by a stunning landscape. Bill liked it. His brother told him to check out Rocky Flats. The pay was good and the work steady.
    It turned out that Bill was old enough to fight for his country but too young to work for Rocky Flats. He had to wait a few months until he turned twenty-one and the government completed his background check. Finally, in August 1952, Bill became Rocky Flats employee number 972 and started work as a guard. It wasn’t long before he was offered a promotion to chemical operator—a worker on the production line in the hot zone—and the raise that went along with it. He took the job.
    Bill knew the basics of radiation: you couldn’t feel it, you couldn’t see it, you couldn’t smell it, you couldn’t taste it. You wouldn’t know if you were exposed. But with enough exposure, you got sick. Too much exposure and you died. Like most employees, though, he wasn’t too worried. There was a lot of talk about safety. Given what he’d been through already, it seemed a relatively small risk.
    But Bill didn’t last long as a chem op. He was surprised to discover that he didn’t have the nerve to work the glove-box line, holding plutonium semi-spheres the size of small half-grapefruits in his lead-lined gloves. Lingering health problems made it hard for him to stand for long hours, and it was a very tense business. Sometimes things went wrong.
    Bill asked to be reassigned to guard duty.
    He understands better than most the problems Rocky Flats has had with off-site contamination. “I work out there,” he tells people, “but I wouldn’t live out there.”
    On this May day, the four men turn onto Indiana Street and reach the east entrance of the plant. Normally there’s a line of cars at the gate at shift change, but because of the holiday, it’s a short-shift day with minimum staffing. Bill glances up at the guard towers, where invisible