AC: How did the idea of doing a documentary about Pantex come
up?
GR: Just growing up around it, I’d always wanted to do something about Pantex, really. It’s a very eerie feeling to grow up with that sort of thing there. Of course, I didn’t consider it eerie growing up, I considered it sort of… comforting. It was sort of an easy way out, if and when the world ended. I grew up always thinking the world was about to end, and I think that’s a pretty common belief for everyone in Amarillo. And that’s a very good excuse, a
very powerful reasoning to not keep up with what’s going on out at Pantex anyway. I think most of the United States, and Amarillo, as far as the religious thinking, feels that the world is going to be over any time anyway,
so why worry? They’ve watched Nostradamus a few too many times, I think.
| October 20, 1995 austinchronicle.com
George Whittenburg Ratliff is not the kind of guy you would peg for one of the most talented filmmakers around these days. Tall and lanky, with an unruly shock of dirty-blond hair and large piercing blue eyes that seem to take in everything and everyone at once without alarming you, he’s soft-spoken and speaks almost shyly of the documentary film he’s made – The Plutonium Circus.
Set in the Texas Panhandle town of Amarillo, The Plutonium Circus focuses on the gargantuan Department of Energy Pantex plant, which looms over the sprawling North Texas Plains like some evil, radioactive monarch. Since the 1950s, Pantex has been the final assembly point for every nuclear weapon made in America. This is the place where the gadgets, gizmos, priming devices, and
plutonium cores arrived, by unmarked train, to be finessed into the country’s arsenal of democracy. Sort of like a General Motors plant headed not by Lee Iacocca, but by the military industrial devil himself.
Amarillo, a hometown I share in common with Ratliff, has always been behind the plant 110 percent. The Pantex plant (or death factory, according to a few observers) is now engaged in the business of dismantling our nuclear stockpile and storing the deadly plutonium on-site, despite the fact that the plant rests directly above the precious Ogallala Aquifer, which is the largest fresh water
aquifer in North America and the primary source of drinking water for the people of Amarillo and surrounding towns such as White Deer and Claude (site of the film Hud), as well as eight neighboring states, and the land and animals that supply 70 percent of the wheat, corn, and beef grown in the United States. The people of Amarillo have wholeheartedly embraced the plant with open
arms because employment and the local economy are the issues here (the plant is said to be responsible for a total of 11,000 jobs, a figure that includes all the local businesses that service the plant), not lymphoma statistics and the perpetual possibility of disaster. It’s a mindset that’s hard to swallow, but then, so are most Panhandle politics.
Literally a world unto itself, Amarillo exists on the periphery of anarchy…