The Secret of Rocky Flats:
The Never-Ending Story of a Cold War Plutonium Plant 

By Kari Lydersen

In These Times, Monday Jan 2, 2012  

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/12468/the_secret_of_rocky_flats_author_len_ackland_on_the_plutonium_plant/

A Rocky Flats plant worker holds a plutonium button in
1973.   (Photo via Wikipedia)

BOULDER, COLO.--When the Green Bay Packers score, fans
pound thunderously on the corrugated metal wall of the
patio at the Rocky Flats Lounge. Newcomers to the area
would likely never guess that in decades past, the
tavern between Denver and Boulder would be packed with
workers involved in a secretive, controversial and
dangerous industry...and that the expanse of wind-swept,
weedy, rubble-strewn land across the highway from the
tavern was where private contractors working for the
U.S. government constructed atomic bombs out of tons of
plutonium and other radioactive and toxic elements.

Weapons production halted at the Rocky Flats plant in
1992, and most of the buildings have been dissembled
and 80 percent of the area is officially designated a
wildlife refuge. But as journalist and University of
Colorado Professor Len Ackland told me recently, "the
Rocky Flats story is still going on."

Much of the 10-square-mile grounds are still so
contaminated that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
which runs the wildlife refuge, refuses to take
possession of it. Hundreds of former workers are still
suffering from cancer, beryllium poisoning and other
diseases likely caused by their work, and many workers
and their survivors are still battling to obtain
compensation from the government. In addition, the
plutonium bombs manufactured at Rocky Flats exist
within the thousands of nuclear weapons comprising
today's U.S. arsenal.

Ackland's 2002 book Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats
and the Nuclear West tells the harrowing and gripping
tale of Rocky Flats, those who worked there and those
who fought to have the facility shut down. It describes
how workers hired by Dow Chemical Corporation and then
Rockwell International, the private companies
contracted to run the facility, worked under intense
time pressure to churn out nuclear weapons
(euphemistically called "triggers" because they were
used to set off even more powerful hydrogen
bombs)...leading to rampant safety violations, accidents
and fires.

Exposure to radiation was a common occupational risk,
with many workers accumulating a "body burden" of
radiation by inhaling plutonium dust that would lodge
in their system and continue to emit radiation from
inside their bodies. The workers were originally
represented by the United Mine Workers of America
(UMW), until the union soured on the nuclear industry
because they saw nuclear power as competing with their
bread and butter--coal.

Then the United Steelworkers of America took over, and
activist union workers struggled to balance their
demands for safer conditions with the desire to defend
their mission and their jobs from the protests of
environmentalists and anti-war activists.

I spoke recently with Ackland about the labor legacy of
Rocky Flats, a story which continues to unfold two
decades after the last bombs were turned out.

You've described the official narrative where the Rocky
Flats workers are depicted as "Cold War Heroes" who
played a key role in "winning" the Cold War. It sounds
like this narrative is used to deflect criticism or
re-examination of the whole nuclear industry and the
harm done to workers. Do you see any current parallels
with workers in the defense industry today?

The difference is the Cold War is over and the war on
terror is a perpetual war, so it would be hard to make
the same connections. Maybe with workers building
drones. You certainly have it with the military. The
Cold War, since it was a global confrontation - since
it was "cold"...you didn't have the military playing the
same role. So the workers for the Cold War were the
ones who "fought" the war, who built the bombs that
provided "deterrence." It's interesting to think about
the workers themselves and their own thoughts and
feelings about it -- how did they perceive the fact
that they were building nuclear weapons of mass
destruction?

But they didn't look at it that way - they knew it was
happening but they created a whole language to deal
with it. Many of the workers don't like to talk about
Rocky Flats as a bomb factory - they like to talk about
it as building components. The most wonderful euphemism
was that Rocky Flats built nuclear "triggers." You get
this image of a pistol and you pull the trigger, when
what they built were successors to the Trinity test and
Nagasaki plutonium bombs and that "triggered" hydrogen
explosions (in H-bombs that became the standard in the
mid-1950s). When you look at the media coverage of
Rocky Flats, every time someone new came on the beat
they would inevitably use the term "nuclear triggers" -
I would call them and say, "You don't understand, this
is what Rocky Flats did..."

How did the fact that private contractors with a profit
motive were running things at Rocky Flats affect
conditions for workers and the safety situation? Would
things have been a little better if the government was
operating the plant directly?

It's hard to say, you'd have to find a comparison, a
facility where the government was actually running the
operation. There was a difference between Dow and
Rockwell (which replaced Dow). The conditions were
better under Rockwell than they were under Dow, but
they were still bad. Because of the national security
aspect it was all secret - secrecy breeds
unaccountability.

You didn't have OSHA (the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration) going in there. On the
environmental level, you had the EPA with some
jurisdiction, but they didn't have jurisdiction over
nuclear weapons for a long time. There were huge
fights: are the materials toxins or radioactive?
Radioactive materials were controlled under the Atomic
Energy Act. There were all kinds of jurisdictional
issues.

Do you think the government has learned from Rocky
Flats and improved its practices in nuclear facilities
like Los Alamos today?

They've improved some. Even at Rocky Flats itself, you
see file photos (of the plant's later years) where
workers in the beryllium section have full respirators.
There have been improvements -- that's one of the
reasons you have unions. At Rocky Flats you had the
Steelworkers union, though one of the problems was they
were behind the fences of secrecy.

You had the unions and the workers pushing for better
working conditions and benefits just like you would
have in the civilian sector, but because of the
national security fence, a lot of the fights took place
internally and quietly instead of getting public
support. You had strikes at the plant--maybe over
transportation issues, truck drivers on strike, and
there would be a few small items in local papers but by
and large the workers supported--at least publicly--the
nuclear weapons enterprise and nuclear power.

Do you think unions--the UMWA or the Steelworkers or
organized labor more generally--should have done more to
fight for better safety conditions?

They dealt with it at the congressional level - they
testified in the late 1950s and 1960s about concerns
over radiation. But they were part of the family, part
of the national security family. Unions looked at it as
kind of an internal fight. (Typically in labor
struggles) unions often get support from outside groups
- but outside groups in the case of Rocky Flats and
other nuclear production facilities were very often the
environmentalists or anti-war activists who were
regarded by the workers as the enemy. And many of the
anti-war activists looked at the workers as the enemy.

The divisions are not easy to make when you look at the
history of a plant like this. You have the backdrop
that there was never a debate in this country about
nuclear weapons until the "freeze" campaign in the
1980s. There were opponents--scientists, the Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists--there were some organizations and
individual issues, but (until the 1980s) there was
never a real debate over should the U.S. be building up
these arsenals of thousands of nuclear weapons capable
of destroying the earth.

Also in the 1950s, a lot of the initial Rocky Flats
workers came out of coal mines and for them Rocky Flats
was just the cleanest thing they'd ever seen. There was
enough knowledge and enough precautions taken...the
factory was really pretty clean, it was high-paying, it
was a good job. There was a community of workers, in
part built around the secrecy - they were a secret
club, even within the plant the plutonium workers who
couldn't even use the word "plutonium" for the first
few years (were like another secret club)...I remember an
activist referring to the workers as war criminals -
and she really meant it.

The workers for their part looked at themselves as
defending the country. The government - the highest
authority in the country - said this is what we need,
and they felt like they were loyal workers. They didn't
like to think about what they were building - that's
why they called them "devices," and many still don't
like to refer to them as bombs. To this day in dealing
with (plans for a) Rocky Flats Cold War museum, there
are some workers who say, "Yeah we need to have
exhibits that show the protests as well as the
production," and some workers who don't want any
questions asked publicly about what was done. They
fully believe they were in the right, they were doing
the country's work, and no one should question it.

How did workers' attitudes shift and evolve over the
years since the plant closed?

Once production halted, the mission became cleanup, and
workers for the first time really began talking about
health issues. (During production) there was a lot of
denial anything was wrong at the plant because they
didn't want to bring attention that might cost them
their jobs. After that there was a big change in that I
found workers much more willing to talk about health
and compensation.

But it's still pretty hard for someone who's spent a
career producing something to turn around and say "I
really shouldn't have been doing that." Former workers
still feel pretty strongly about what they did and why
they did it.

In retrospect, should the anti-war and environmental
activists have been much more sensitive to workers'
point of view?

In the mid-1970s there were a couple women talking to
the workers - from the American Friends Service
Committee - about job issues, about turning swords into
ploughshares. But that effort was undermined by
(Pentagon Papers hero and anti-war activist) Daniel
Ellsberg and the very public demonstrations that said
this factory should not exist and nuclear weapons were
terrible. It was hard to bridge that...

There's certainly more compassion from the anti-war
folks in this area toward the workers since it shut
down. The workers have gained more allies from the
Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center - there's a lot
more support particularly for health issues.

In terms of the jobs argument and the workers' fear of
losing their jobs if environmental concerns were
raised, do you see any parallels to the Keystone XL
pipeline or other current issues?

The Keystone jobs issue is so blown out of proportion -
the range of jobs they talk about is unbelievable. In
any case it's really important for environmental groups
to be more inclusive and more sensitive to working
people's issues and vice versa. It's very hard, we live
in a society where the income inequality between the
rich and everybody else is so large, and because this
is such a money-driven society, a small group of people
with big financial resources can drive wedges between
people who should be allied but get conned into
believing their interests lie with the rich rather than
the people they've been pitted against.

Your book describes the role media played. Reporters
were very slow to take a hard look at Rocky Flats, but
when they eventually did start asking hard questions,
that was part of what led to changing public attitudes
and the eventual shutdown. Given all the changes and
layoffs in media today, in a situation similar to Rocky
Flats would we be missing that watchdog role?

Well, the Rocky Flats story isn't over--there are still
workers trying to get compensation under the
compensation law of 2000, and being refused
compensation because they can't prove their cancers
were caused by radiation exposure. Because of the way
medical science and epidemiology works, whenever a
workers compensation claim was made for cancer they
(the government and contractors) always claimed it was
smoking-induced.

The problem with cancer is that it's very hard to pin
down the cause. The one set of workers clearly injured
and sometimes killed (by their work) were the workers
exposed to beryllium. Well, over 100 have already died,
and there are many more cases of chronic beryllium
disease, it's fatal and there's no cure. Laura Frank
was doing a great job covering the plight of the
workers at Rocky Flats for the Rocky Mountain News.

Then the Rocky shut down, and now really no one is
covering it on a regular basis. So (the lack of
watchdog journalism has) already happened ...Even when
there were more newspapers around there was pretty
sparse coverage. I did an article for a law journal
describing the three periods of media coverage. First
it was "Ask no questions," from the beginning of the
plant in 1951 to the 1969 fire. During that period
journalists were all part of the same mindset - this is
the Cold War, Rocky Flats is national security, we
can't pursue stories about that.

After the 1969 fire, because of clouds of smoke seen
from the Boulder turnpike and other places, there began
a new period of asking a few questions about what was
going on at the plant. The end of that period were
whistleblowers in the 1980s... and then the third period
started with the FBI raid in 1989. After that Rocky
Flats was fair game. (Overall) the media didn't do a
great job in terms of covering the issues involved
there, which raises questions about how the media cover
national security issues, period.

Do you think the Obama administration right now,
specifically the U.S. Department of Labor, has a
responsibility to make it a priority to resolve
compensation claims for Rocky Flats workers and revisit
some of the cases where workers were denied
compensation?

Yes, definitely...We know about one out of five people
are going to die of cancer just in the general public -
that's used as one of the excuses for not compensating
workers.

But my feeling is these people had tough jobs, they
deserve compensation - you don't have to call them Cold
War Heroes to say, "Look, these people did these jobs
in a situation where the government and contractors
were deceiving them about the health risks." The
toxicity of beryllium was known even in the 1940s and
1950s - but you see photos of workers on the beryllium
section eating sub sandwiches without any protection.
It was outrageous what was done. The workers for humane
reasons deserve compensation - anyone who worked there
should get that compensation.

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