Oklahoma's Ammo for Israel

Arming the Annihilators

Oklahoma quietly sold Israel $1.5 million in bombs and missiles in January—the month Gaza’s death toll (post-October 7) went up nearly 5,000, from 21,978 to 26,900. 

I say the sale happened quietly, because I’m assuming you never heard about it. And that’s not because you missed the press release or exposé. Local media: they seem to believe this kind of event is unnewsworthy. Legacy newspapers and networks; upstart investigative outlets; the public radio “you can count on”—nobody goes near it.

But Oklahoma is arming Israel’s genocidaires, whether anyone cares to cover the story or not. What’s more: we’re shipping them weapons at record levels. Compare two figures with me. The first is $868,095—the cost of all the weapons Oklahoma sent Israel over two decades, from 2003-2023. The second figure—more than double the first—is $1,846,836—the cost of all the weapons sent over three months, from January-March this year.¹ Right when Israel made Gaza, per the UN, “uninhabitable,” Oklahoma handed the tools of annihilation over to the annihilators.

You can get all this export data at USA Trade Online (UTO), the free site from the U.S. Census Bureau. UTO uses the Harmonized System (HS; this is the last acronym for now) to group trade items numerically. Short, two-digit numbers denote broad categories, and six-digit figures bring you into the weeds. An example: 36 is explosives, and 3603.60 is electric detonators. I mention this because Oklahoma actually sold electric detonators to Israel last December, to the tune of $1.4 million.

It’s the same deal with 93, which is arms and ammunition in the HS. The relevant category for us—the narrowest category for Oklahoma’s January exports—is 9306.90. What sucks is this one is still pretty vague. Guided missiles are under 9306.90. But 9306.90 might mean bombs, too, or grenades, or torpedoes, or mines, or parts for guided missiles or bombs, or generic munitions….

So we can only guess what was shipped, and wonder where in the state these guided missiles or bombs (or whatever) originated, where the point of sale was. Like: maybe a weapons company built and sold them. Plenty of those around. Oklahoma’s defense sector is one of the state’s largest, and many of the most notorious contractors—Boeing, Northrop Grumman, RTX (formerly Raytheon)—have in-state branches.

But much of their in-state presence seems centered on Tinker Air Force Base. There, through the Air Force Sustainment Center, technicians maintain bombers like the B-1 and B-52. This work is what draws in the defense firms. 

Last year, Boeing received $38.7 million to perform “engineering services” at Tinker, on both the B-1 and B-52. This month, Northrop Grumman won a modest $7 billion to sustain and enhance B-2 bombers, in part on the base. There’s another article to write about Oklahoma’s non-civilian aircraft exports, because Israel has taken in over $27 million of these since 2002. Right now, I think the point is we should turn away from Tinker and look elsewhere.

And really, there’s one obvious contender if you’re looking for a place in Oklahoma that: a) makes bombs and missiles; b) ships a shitload of weapons abroad.  It’s on 45,000 acres in Pittsburg County, and it’s called the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant (McAAP). McAlester is where, as the Los Angeles Times told it, “the military long ago decided to make most of its bombs”—concentrating its efforts “in just one place,” because building bombs is “dirty and highly dangerous.”

McAAP opened in 1943, and since then has more or less specialized in human suffering. “McAlester bombs have rained down on Germany, Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan,” as well as Iraq, the Christian Science Monitor reported. Imagine this rain: coming to claim millions, to bury brothers and aunts in rubble, to scatter “shredded human remains” over the pavement—rain falling through what was moments ago a hospital corridor, a pasture, a schoolyard—coming to crater rice fields, to raze villages to “violet ashes,” to level cities to moonscapes, to drive survivors, sleepless with trauma, into cellars and tents, trenches and caves. All chapters in McAAP’s history, still untold.

And still unfolding. Every week the plant is making munitions again, detonating and destroying old weapons again, in a cycle with no apparent end. A cycle with slight, it seems, regard for the neighbors.

For example: McAAP is “poisoning my people,” writes Jessica Lambert, an enrolled Choctaw citizen. No one talks about this. There are “no comprehensive outside studies” on the site’s health and environmental costs, she emphasizes, and “virtually no media or other coverage of the McAAP’s pollution and contamination in the Choctaw Nation.”

But there is evidence. Evidence the plant released “2.3 million pounds of Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) chemicals” in 2009. And that in 2020 it vented more lead—3,286 pounds—than any other site in the state, and 391 tons of particulate matter.² These are chemicals that cause cancer, that merge into your bloodstream and gather inside your bones, that settle in your lungs. Kidney function, reproductive systems, breathing are all impaired with enough exposure. It’s insidious. “Particulate matter pollution is deadly,” one environmentalist put it, “but you’re not going to see it written on anyone’s tombstone.”

McAAP’s lethal fumes are, at least in part, a byproduct of its work building bombs like the 500-pound MK82, and the 2,000-pound MK84. The U.S. has shipped both to Israel; Israel has proceeded to unload both on Gaza. “They have been burning right through them,” Wes Bryant, a weapons expert and retired Air Force official, observed. MK84s can destroy entire city blocks, and “have killed hundreds in densely populated areas.” 

But again: we don’t know yet where, when, and how Oklahoma’s weapons fell. Was it when death visited the children Dr. James Smith guided to the other side? The Gazans suffering, he recalled in January, “open chest wounds, open abdominal wounds, traumatic amputations, severe full-thickness burns to a substantial proportion of the body”? When death arrived for them, did it come bearing our Great Seal, screaming Labor Omnia Vincit?

1. $1,542,200 in bombs and ammunition, plus another $304,636 in weapons parts and accessories. Before January 2024, Oklahoma last sent Israel weapons right when the pandemic hit, in March 2020; the total sale was $333,419.

2.  237.96 tons of PM₁₀, plus 153.45 tons of PM_2.5. I used the EPA’s “Facility Mapping” tool, at the bottom of this page, to get the 2020 particulate matter and lead emissions data for McAAP.