“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell, “1984”
For nearly four decades, until 1989, the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Denver built the successors to the plutonium bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, Japan, 60 years ago on August 9, 1945.
During its bomb-production years, the plant threatened the Denver area itself – not with a nuclear explosion but with radioactive contamination.
On Mother’s Day in May 1969, a raging fire in a massive plutonium-production building at Rocky Flats came close to spewing dangerous radioactive particles over metropolitan Denver and eastern Colorado.
If the fire “had been a little bigger, it is questionable whether it could have been contained,” a top government official testified to Congress the following year. If it had gone out of control, he said, “hundreds of square miles” could have been contaminated.
Now, that same bomb-manufacturing building, called Building 776-777, is being demolished as part of the final stage in the $7 billion, multiyear cleanup that has already dismantled hundreds of structures and hauled them away as nuclear waste. Under federal government plans, most of the 10-square- mile Rocky Flats site will soon be “normalized” as a national wildlife refuge and presented as just another piece of open space along Colorado’s Front Range.
The makeover of this mesa top, 16 miles northwest of Denver, from a place that produced the most destructive weapons on Earth to a relatively benign, if still partly contaminated, plot of land has been an impressive feat to watch. But the physical cleanup of Rocky Flats is being accompanied by the obfuscation of its most important tangible legacy: the powerful plutonium bombs manufactured at the plant that form the cores of the 10,300 weapons in the current U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Moreover, the cleanup model being employed by the U.S. Department of Energy, which runs nuclear bomb production, discourages the public from addressing a deep, unresolved controversy about Rocky Flats and our nation’s nuclear weapons enterprise. Namely, do nuclear weapons ensure U.S. national security or pose an unacceptable risk to humanity? During the Cold War, this controversy triggered many angry demonstrations and inflammatory rhetoric at Rocky Flats and elsewhere, including accusations that nuclear workers were “war criminals” and anti-nuclear activists were “communists.”
While the most extreme rhetoric has now subsided, this dispute has penetrated the present by means of a dominant narrative, or story line, about the past. This story line – which I call the “Cold War Heroes” narrative – has been promoted intensely at Rocky Flats, perhaps because it is the first major nuclear weapons plant in the nation to be fully dismantled. The DOE is touting this as a model for future cleanups, while ignoring the lingering tensions.
“Everybody involved in Rocky Flats blames somebody for something,” observes Dorothy Ciarlo, a psychologist who has been gathering oral histories about the bomb factory. Some of that blame stems from old animosities about the plant’s deadly products. More comes from mistrust of the DOE and its contractors. Still more comes from aggrieved families and individuals seeking compensation from the government for occupational diseases.
In interviewing dozens of Rocky Flats employees over the years, I’ve found that even when they criticize the DOE and its contractors for poor waste practices or dangerous working conditions, they usually don’t question their work or the need for nuclear weapons. Most want to believe that they are, indeed, Cold War heroes.
The celebratory narrative influencing them, promoted by DOE officials and politicians alike, portrays plant employees as having “won” the Cold War by building weapons that defended the nation against the Soviet Union. Whatever historians conclude about the roots of the Soviet demise, the irrefutable fact is that nuclear weapons constituted and continue to constitute a terminal risk to humanity – a fate nearly met during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Replacing the Cold War Heroes narrative is essential if we are to acknowledge that we made ourselves an endangered species. The blame must be shared. Then we can work together to rid the world of these apocalyptic weapons.
Former Rocky Flats employees must admit to manufacturing weapons of mass destruction – not “devices” or “units” or “triggers” – as they euphemistically label them. And activists, neighbors, journalists and others must admit that as citizens of a democracy we bear responsibility for the fact that U.S. “national security” rested, and still rests, on nuclear weapons of mass destruction. When the plant produced weapons, employees at the plant operated under that national security policy. They weren’t morally deficient. They were the public’s surrogates.
The challenge in reversing the narrative is particularly daunting with regard to workers and others who don’t question the righteousness of U.S. nuclear weapons. These weapons hold a powerful symbolism, accompanied by denial, for many Americans. That has become clear to me during numerous talks I’ve presented in recent years. And it is exemplified by the battle 10 years ago when a Smithsonian Museum exhibit about the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was eviscerated to remove references to the 210,000 Japanese killed immediately by the two atomic bombs.
The original Smithsonian exhibit sought to provide a deeper perspective on the official, widely accepted American government interpretation, that the atomic bomb quickly ended the war and saved lives – American lives. What has since become labeled “collateral damage” – the deaths of civilians – is ignored in this official story line. Psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton analyzes it this way: “By thus rendering the weapon a preserver rather than a destroyer of life, celebratory emotions have been sustained to this moment.”
At Rocky Flats, such emotions have been sustained with Cold War Heroes talk.
One hopeful step toward confronting this narrative has been taken by a diverse group of plant workers, DOE and Kaiser-Hill employees, activists, community members, academics and others who have been working for the past few years to build a Rocky Flats Cold War museum. These volunteers agree that artifacts should be displayed and that different versions of the past should be openly debated.
Unfortunately, the DOE has sought to undermine the museum here while supporting more celebratory ones such as the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque. In April, the DOE’s new Office of Legacy Management reported to Congress that “With six existing museums/ centers, it is not evident that additional museum space [is] needed to adequately commemorate the Cold War.” Among other things, this statement ignores the fact that the U.S. National Park Service added Rocky Flats to the National Register of Historic places in 1998 for “making a significant contribution to the broad patterns of U.S. history.”
A Rocky Flats Cold War Museum could help the community achieve a shared narrative – perhaps an “unacceptable risk” narrative – to replace the dead- end Cold War Heroes story line. Museum or not, a new narrative would make Rocky Flats a real model for healing the nuclear weapons malady: a cleanup of its mess without a coverup of its past.
Len Ackland is an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of “Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West”
