But drive past the former bean field on Missouri 150 enough times and the thought occurs: Kansas City produces parts for every nuclear weapon now in our arsenal. The country is making more nuclear bombs, has been building them virtually non-stop for 65 years, hasn’t used one against an enemy since 1945, and a significant new arms reduction treaty went into effect just this month.

Nine thousand warheads, about a quarter capable of being triggered tomorrow, is a lot of product sitting around.

Any is too many, critics said. “Modernization” is a joke, just more of the world-threatening, same-old, same-old madness.

Others counter that the world cannot “disinvent” the bomb. What the country needs, they said, is to scrap the big nukes in the stockpile — hardly a deterrent — for smaller, tactical ones that potential enemies think we would actually use.

The $85 billion upgrade of our bomb-making infrastructure in Kansas City with Honeywell and at other locations is occurring 50 years after President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of the military-industrial complex and its “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”