Woodstock, NY, is a tiny town with an outsize global brand. As the town’s largest employer approaches its 80th anniversary of war profiteering, we pause for a vignette of a history that somewhat belies the peace-and-love associations.
June 28, 1973: Hippies, tourists and assorted pilgrims graced the Village Green. And the front page of the Ulster County Townsman led with a photo of the President of Woodstock’s largest employer, Rotron, proudly receiving a Special Award from Rockwell International, maker of the Minuteman nuclear missile.
“Year after year,” the award said, “the Rotron fan has performed on the Minuteman missile program without a single instance of failure.”
Next to a model of a Minuteman, the award displayed a replica of the pirate and slaver Sir Francis Drake’s ship, likening Rotron’s contribution towards keeping a Soviet attack at bay to Drake’s turning back the Spanish Armada in 1588.
The early 1970s were a boom time for this mainstay of Woodstock’s economy. The Vietnam War and the Cold War were raging — Rotron’s Woodstock plant was providing “components critical to the success of nearly every U.S. military missile program,” as the company’s promotional material proudly stated. “Minuteman, Poseidon, and Spartan all carry the Rotron logo within their shells. Custom-designed Rotron fans are also contained in the Cruise missile and in the Trident [submarine-launched ballistic nuclear missile].”
Six months before Rotron received its Minuteman award, its Made-In-Woodstock fans had been busy over Vietnam in the “Christmas Bombings”, the largest heavy bombardments by the US since World War II, with heavy civilian casualties. Woodstock’s production lines were turning out components for B-52 bombers, B-58s, nuclear-armed F-102 and F-106 fighter aircraft, nuclear submarines, and tanks.
From its earliest days the company concentrated on the military market. In the early 1950s a local paper reported: “The Korean emergency [a euphemism at the time for the Korean War] ... keeps Rotron’s business going at full tilt.” And another local newspaper shouted: “Woodstock Company Expands For War Work.”
Meanwhile (although this only became known in the 1980s) TCE and other highly toxic byproducts of Rotron’s weapons production were poisoning the groundwater and wells of neighborhood homes and creating the town’s only Superfund site. To this day the poisons remain on site, although supposedly contained, and neighbors can’t grow their own vegetables. Two satellite Rotron plants in nearby towns, Olive and Saugerties, also left legacies of toxic spills. A reminder that war is bad for the environment in all of its phases.
The Afghanistan and Iraq Wars provided another bonanza for Rotron, now owned by Ametek Inc. And business is surely booming just now for the plant whose production is 80% military.
In 2020 the factory completed another in a series of expansions for more war work, with the aid of $600,000 of New York State taxpayer money. (Throughout the Covid closures of that year, the factory remained open as an “essential business”.)
More recently, the widespread horror at the atrocities in Gaza has focused more attention on companies like Rotron that supply the tools of genocide and apartheid. While information is scarce, we know that Rotron has supplied the Israeli Defense Ministry directly as well as selling to Israeli war manufacturers like IAI and Merkava, and has continued to do so since 2023 – and Made-In-Woodstock parts are in all the F-35s and F-15s delivering the genocide.
We don’t mean to imply that Woodstock, or Rotron, or Ametek Inc, are unusually evil – on the contrary, we see here a microcosm of the military-industrial complex, whose tentacles reach into every congressional district. What if the great skills and the hard work of this company’s employees had been devoted 100% to peaceful, green, job-creating, infrastructure-strengthening technologies rather than machines of destruction and death? What if the community could help them make that happen?