Hanford is now the most contaminated Cold War weapons-production facility.
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Another manager in New Jersey cold-called a movie-production company when she heard it would be filming in the area.
The site -- about half the size of Rhode Island, in an area centered roughly 75 miles east of Yakima -- continued to buzz during the Cold War, with more plutonium production as well as the construction of several nuclear reactors.
Apparently everyone from the New York Daily News to TV stations in Portland, Oregon has forgotten that nuclear weapons production from WWII and early in the Cold War has nothing to do with a nuclear power plant today.
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Although overall production has fallen slightly since the peak of the cold war, the number of companies involved has grown.
Almost a century later, America's continuing domination of cotton production led the Soviet Union, its implacable enemy in the cold war, to look for self-sufficiency in this vital crop.
To start with, its annual production is kind of a gamble, wholly dependent on exceptionally cold climatic conditions, particularly at night, and during a precise time of the winter so that the grapes freeze while still on the vine.
Today, production lines that can build such trucks are one by one going cold as military spending dries up.
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The bat-winged B-2, for instance, saw its production goal slashed from 132 planes to a mere 21 when the Cold War ended, amidst widespread complaints about its billion-dollar price-tag.
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During the Cold War, Hanford was a buzzing hive of activity, eventually becoming the main source of plutonium production for the nation's nuclear weapons program.
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