  The long-held notion that the highest-energy cosmic rays are of distant
extragalactic origin is challenged by observations that events above $\sim
10^{20}$ eV do not exhibit the expected high-energy cutoff from photopion
production off the cosmic microwave background. We suggest that these
unexpected ultra-high-energy events are due to iron nuclei accelerated from
young strongly magnetized neutron stars through relativistic MHD winds. We find
that neutron stars whose initial spin periods are shorter than $\sim 4
(B_S/10^{13}{\rm G})^{1/2}$ ms, where $B_S$ is the surface magnetic field, can
accelerate iron cosmic rays to greater than $\sim 10^{20}$ eV. These ions can
pass through the remnant of the supernova explosion that produced the neutron
star without suffering significant spallation reactions. For plausible models
of the Galactic magnetic field, the trajectories of the iron ions curve
sufficiently to be consistent with the observed arrival directions of the
highest energy events.
