Defense Workers Pressured to Defy Virus and Keep Making Weapons

The Pentagon is confronting some defense workers with a wrenching choice: go to the factory floor to keep building destroyers, fighter aircraft and missiles and risk infecting each other and their communities with the novel coronavirus, or stay home and be faulted for delaying much-touted national security priorities.

The Defense Department and some of the major companies serving it have dug in, continuing work on missile-guided destroyers and the newest fighter aircraft, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, even after workers tested positive for Covid-19 at General Dynamics Corp.'s Bath Iron Works in Maine and Lockheed Martin Corp.‘s Fort ...