Another DOE Nuclear Bomb Factory Exposed: “Kansas City: Inside America’s Nuclear Weapons Capital, As It Builds the Newest American Bomb”

His hands did the work. Maurice Copeland was a tool and die supervisor at the Kansas City Plant for the last twelve of his thirty-two years there, and for most of that time he passed chemicals he did not know were poison across a workbench to men he supervised.

He was a Black Vietnam veteran when Bendix Corporation hired him in 1968, one among thousands of Black returning soldiers Bendix brought in as the Cold War pushed weapons assembly to wartime pace.

The plant at 1500 East Bannister Road sat at the edge of Troost Avenue, the apartheid line that has divided this city since before he was born. What Copeland and the men he supervised handled with their bare hands, included benzene, beryllium, trichloroethylene, polychlorinated biphenyls, asbestos, mercury, lead, and depleted uranium. Group 1 carcinogens.