When I was a kid we lived ten or twenty miles from the place that made bombs. We didn't call it a "plant." Back then, everybody called it the "arsenal." This newspeak I swear.

The arsenal blew up every couple years. You'd hear it in town. Sometimes it would break windows, knock the China off the shelf, that kind of thing. The switchboard would light up and desperate housewives would get busy signals calling the arsenal to find out if their husband was among those lost.

I think we toured it one time on a school field trip or something, hopefully while nothing was going on and they were on a maintenance cycle. It's a series of small buildings with extremely thick walls, and you could also see where some of the buildings just weren't there any more, except maybe a little corner about two feet high.