Naked City

The good news is: The federal government is dangling 1,000 well-paying jobs in front of Panhandle residents. The bad news is: It may lead to thermonuclear war.

At a four-hour public hearing last Thursday at Amarillo College, a live studio audience of some 200, most sporting "Pantex Yes" lapel stickers, turned out to hear and respond to what amounted to a U.S. Dept. of Energy infomercial for its proposed Modern Pit Facility -- fedspeak for a nuclear-bomb factory. Amarillo's Pantex, the former final assembly plant for America's nuclear warheads, is one of five DOE sites under consideration.

To hear project manager Jerry Freedman tell it, the pit facility, which would manufacture up to 500 plutonium cores annually, is safer than abstinence, more environmentally friendly than a Sierra Club potluck dinner, and ... did we mention the jobs? The local economic developers did, along with the Chamber of Commerce, the Pantex unions, the pols, the banker, the newspaper publisher, the school superintendent, the realtor association, the car dealer, the baker, the candlestick maker. They all certainly did.

Though a score of the loyal opposition turned out, most wearing their own Day-Glo stickers ("Modern Pit Facility = WMD Proliferation Risks"), their testimony was muzzled until well after the local news crews turned off the klieg lights. And so the debate pretty much stopped where it started: Pantex Yes, rather than the more urgent consideration, Pantex Why?

Details, barring Armageddon, to follow next week.