KATHLEEN SULLIVAN. Born 1967.
TRANSCRIPT of OH 1512 A-B
This interview was recorded on November 13, 1998, and later donated to the Maria Rogers Oral History Program and the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum. The interviewer is LeRoy Moore. The interview transcript was prepared by Eva Mesmer and Cyns Nelson.
NOTE: The interviewer’s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets. The archiving of this interview was made possible by a grant from Colorado Humanities.
ABSTRACT: Kathleen Sullivan talks about being born into the nuclear age, being concerned about nuclear weapons at a very young age, and her earliest experience with Rocky Flats: a memorable day in 1985 when her great aunt, Ann Swift, drove her to the west gate. The interview explores Kathleen’s ongoing activism, her education outreach—especially with children and young people—and her past research. Topics include nuclear guardianship, nuclear time, and the concept of radioactive materials as a spiritual teacher.
[A].
[Tape begins in mid sentence.]
00:00 (… in my own living room. It is Friday the 13th of November in this year 1998, and I'm with Kathleen Sullivan—whom I've known for quite a few years—a Rocky Flats activist. So, welcome, Kathleen.
Thank you.
(Kathleen and I are going to be talking about her relationship to Rocky Flats and to nuclear issues. So, Kathleen, you were a student at the university, as I recall, when I first met you.)
Mm-hm.
(But, what year was that? And how did you get involved in this Rocky Flats stuff in the first place?)
Well, when I was 13 years old my mother and I went on a peace march, and that was my first sort of foray into activism.
(That was back in Ohio?)
That was back in Cleveland, Ohio. And my mother had always been concerned about nuclear weapons, so I can't really ever remember not knowing about nuclear weapons. I don't remember learning about them. They seem to have been in the background for my whole life. I was born in 1967, so I was born into the nuclear age.
(Mm-hm.)
But it wasn't until 1985, when I was a freshman at the University of Colorado in Boulder, that I first really began to interface with the nuclear issue on a personal level, as a young adult. And that happened by befriending my great aunt. My grandmother's sister, Ann Swift, retired to Boulder in 1972, and she was a longtime activist. She was a social organizer, she was a union organizer. She was an anti-nuclear activist. She ran a student group at the university called CU World Citizens, which had a model United Nations. She was a World Federalist. You name it, Ann was it. And she took me out to Rocky Flats that September, 1985, my first month in Boulder. I didn't know where we were going. We were driving along Highway 93, it was a beautiful sunny day, and the mountains were gorgeous. And she stopped in front of a industrial- looking complex, and she said, "Toots, that's Rocky Flats." And it just had this—
(She said what? What did she call you?)
Toots.
(Toots.)
I called her Tiddlywinks. [Laughs.]
(Okay.)
And she said, "Toots, I want you to have a look at that place, because that's Rocky Flats, and they make parts for nuclear bombs in this facility." And she said, "You won't be able to tell by the sign, but this is part of the nuclear weapons complex, and it is eight miles from where we live. And I want you to learn about it. I want you to do something about it."
And I didn't know what to say or do. I mean, I thought: nuclear bombs, eight miles from Boulder., Tthis scared me. And so when she explained to me further, the mission of Rocky Flats, she started talking about plutonium. And although I knew about nuclear weapons, it was that warm September day, in 1985, with the sun shining in the afternoon—a slight breeze blowing outside the west gate of Rocky Flats—was the first time that I ever heard the word plutonium. And I can safely say that learning about plutonium changed my life forever. And that was down to Anice [refers to Ann Swift].
I guess I was a sort of carefree freshman in college. Although I was keeping abreast of the issues, it wasn't until that spring that I got involved in anti-nuclear work with a particular focus on Rocky Flats. At that time I was working for the Colorado Freeze Voter, and we were very actively involved in the letter writing campaign to Governor [Roy] Romer, to stop a proposed test burn. Was that 1986?
(Test burn, that was—well, it continued until '87. I don't remember—probably it was already heating up in '86.)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, that was my first major action.
(Test burn, you mean the attempt to start up an incinerator at Rocky Flats?)
Yeah. To burn plutonium-contaminated waste.
(Right.)
And, as you will recall, the engineer that had developed the HEPA [High Efficiency Particulate Air] filter system came out and said, "This will not work for the type of job that you're wanting it to work for.” I.e., it will not filter out plutonium, fine particulate plutonium material. So, we at that time—
(That was Joe Goldfield.)
That was Joe Goldfield!
(Yes.)
Okay. Good ol’ Joe.
05:03 (He wrote that paper.)
Good ol’ Joe. So, at that time we had 5,000 letters go to Roy Romer. And several other organizations were, you know, kicking up a fuss about it. And they stopped—the test burn was postponed and to be abandoned, immediately. We didn't know that at the time, but it was abandoned.
So, that was my first big successful action with Rocky Flats. I got very involved in the Nuclear Freeze movement at that point, as a young college student. In 1988, after I had worked for a year with a small student group that I started at CU called the Rocky Flats Action Coalition, I met a fellow by the name of Paul Smoker, who used to be the director of IPRA, the International Peace and Research Association [International Peace Research Association]. Paul was the director, at that time, of the Richardson Institute for Peace Studies in Lancaster, England. And Paul and I became friends through the Rocky Flats Action Coalition. After working six months with him, he invited me back to England to do an independent research project at the Richardson Institute for Peace Studies, where I did a comparative analysis of Freeze movements in the U.K. and in the U.S. That was under Paul Smoker's tutelage—who has since died, unfortunately. He was a very wonderful peace and justice person.
After I came back, in 1988, there was a lot—
(Back from England?)
Back from England, in July of 1988. I continued working at Colorado Freeze Voter for another year, but at this time I also was getting more involved with the work of the Rocky Mountain Peace Center. I was becoming disillusioned with electoral politics, because Colorado Freeze Voter was a PAC, it was a Political Action Committee. So we were lobbying for representatives—voted-in individuals, elected individuals. And I was becoming disillusioned with what they were; how they were working around the issue of Rocky Flats. I didn't feel like they were doing enough for the magnitude of what was happening out at the plant site. So, my last major work with the Freeze movement was organizing a second encirclement of Rocky Flats, where we had about 5,000 people come out to the plant site.
That was in the summer of 1989, when the FBI raided the plant.
(Mm-hm.)
So, DOE and activists alike were alarmed, in June of 1989—
(June 6th, 1989.)
—to find that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had infiltrated the plant and raided different files of information to look at the illegal activities of, at that time, Rockwell International and Rocky Flats.
So that summer was ripe for a lot of activism out at the plant site, because people were then highly suspicious of what was happening. Because it was very peculiar to see a federal agency being raided by another federal agency.
Shortly after the encirclement I left Freeze Voter and I started working at the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. And that year, end of 1989 and beginning of 1990, David Wilson and I put together a slide presentation on Rocky Flats. We'd begun doing this work together at the Colorado Freeze Voter, but we really finished it working together for the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. And once we had completed the Rocky Flats slide show, which was actually an update of a slide presentation that Jan Pilcher [see also, oral histories with Jan Pilcher, OH 1375V and OH 1508V] put together probably five years previous to our second slide show, we toured it around to different schools in the Boulder-Denver metro area.
Now, that was fascinating work, because I was willing to give the Rocky Flats slide show presentation to anybody that was willing to listen. So in some cases I was working with elementary school students; and in other cases, I was working with university and graduate students. And it was the same presentation. I would pitch it differently for my audience, but it was almost the same exact presentation. And the fascinating thing was, especially in the elementary school classes that I visited, the children were very aware of Rocky Flats, and the teachers were extremely surprised at their level of awareness and their understanding of the issues.
(Wow.)
10:14 And the teachers would privately—I can remember five occasions, distinctly, where the teachers came up to me after the presentation to thank me for giving the presentation but then almost whispered me to me, "I had no idea that the children knew as much as they knew."
So this got me really interested in working with young people and teenagers around the issue of Rocky Flats. Because I thought: if these kids knew what was going on, when adults weren't taking the responsibility to speak with them straight—I just found this fascinating. Because on the one hand, my projection is that the adults were trying to protect the children from the harsh realities of the world. Meanwhile, without even being explained to directly or with any kind of care, these children already knew about the issues of nuclear technology, in particular nuclear weapons technology.
(Where did they get that knowledge?)
Well, I know some of the children that I worked with got that knowledge from their parents. I later worked with Manning Marable's children. Polly McLean, who was one of our board of directors—on the board of directors at the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center—her son Che knew about the issues. And I think that those kids that knew about it from their parents talked to other children about it.
I mean, just as a quick aside, it's very interesting because there's some recent research that would suggest that children get more from their peers than they do from their family members or their parents. And my feeling was that the children—I'm talking about elementary school kids—would talk amongst each other about problems having to do with social injustice, the possibility or fear of nuclear war, environmental degradation. These kids were talking about this kind of thing on the playground.
(Mm-hm.)
And the kids that had learned about it from their parents were sharing it with their peer group. And so, the kids that hadn't learned about it at home were learning about it on the playground. But the fascinating thing was, was that the teachers were sort of—didn't know about it. So that really got me fired up. I thought: Wow, these kids are really inspirational to work with. There's, like, no bones about it; they just want the facts, and they can handle it much better than the sort of kid-glove treatment that they often get from adults that are worried about making them upset or concerned about their future.
So, after that experience—or, perhaps, during that experience of beginning to work with children more around the slide presentation that David Wilson and I had developed together, I started working with a local artist, Julia Schwab. Julia is a painter who lives in Boulder, and she's also an art therapist. And we met and got together with a group of kids at Uni Hill [University Hill Elementary School, Boulder] called KFWP, or Kids for World Peace. This was just one six- month period that was absolutely fascinating. These kids were amazing.
Julia and I first got together by going to the Boulder spring fair? Is it the spring fair? It’s a fair that happens—Boulder Creek Fair! [Boulder Creek Festival]
(Mm-hm.)
Boulder Creek Fair. And we got a little stand together, and we sat at the Boulder Creek Fair for four days. And we provided children with art materials, and we told them that we wanted to present a scrapbook to Governor Roy Romer detailing children's ideas about what should be done at Rocky Flats. And, again, the kids knew what Rocky Flats was. They knew about Rocky Flats. Sometimes the parents in this booth would start to explain, "Well, Rocky Flats is—" and the kids would say: "Well we KNOW what Rocky Flats is." I mean, it was fascinating. And so we got several, I mean, I think close to 100 paintings from children and teenagers that were directed at Roy Romer. Because at that time we were looking at the possible shut down of Rocky Flats due to waste limitations.
(Now is this 1990, spring of '90?)
Yeah, this is 1990.
(Okay.)
14:52 Kids for World Peace was started without our help at Uni Hill, but when they found out about what we were doing, we started working together on this scrapbook project. Meanwhile, there was a group of kids from Boulder High that we were working with—not Boulder High, the one on 13th and Mapleton.
(Casey Junior High?)
Casey Junior High. And we had a great group of teenagers that we were working with, that got very excited about this book project. So we were building a scrapbook, and that was mainly derived from children and teenagers doing paintings at the Boulder Creek Fair. And then that whole idea of the scrapbook was taken on by the KFWP, the Kids for World Peace, at Uni Hill.
(Say the name of that again.)
K-F-W-P.
(K-F-W-P.)
Kids for World Peace.
(At Uni Hill.)
At Uni Hill.
(Okay.)
That was the brainchild of Che McLean.
(Che McLean, right.)
Absolutely brilliant young person. Then we got together with this wonderful group at Casey. And the upshot of this whole project, which Julia and I called “Envision Peace,” which was about us working with children and using the visual arts to explore ideas and feelings about people's fears of nuclear war.
So, Envision Peace got together. And with the help of the great kids from Casey Junior High, we put together this beautiful scrapbook. And we decided to present it to Governor Roy Romer at Capitol Hill. And the presentation of the scrapbook was taken up by KFWP. I'll never forget it, because Che McLean dressed—
(You took it to Denver, to the state capitol?)
We took it to Denver, to the state capitol, with KFWP.
(Yeah.)
So we had elementary school students, junior high students. We had a big, beautiful scrapbook that was about, sort of, maybe two-and-a-half feet by one foot in dimension, with all of the children's paintings laminated. It was gorgeous. And several of the paintings were letters to Governor Romer: “Dear Governor Romer,” and, “Birds and bees, not Rocky Flats please,” and other things that were just precious. And it was presented to Governor Romer by Kids for World Peace. And at that point Che McLean was dressed in a little bear suit. And he had written a rap. And his brother—whose name escapes me—came with a drum machine. And they presented this rap about Rocky Flats. You know, one of the lines was: "Rocky Flats [pause] is the key of destruction [pause] of you and me." [Snapping fingers.] You know, it just sort of went on—this beautiful little rap. I think Che was like, eight years old at the time.
[Laugh from LeRoy.]
And we presented this beautiful scrapbook to Governor Roy Romer, who received it in absentia. And you know who received it on his behalf?
(Who?)
Tim—
(Tim Holeman?)
Tim Holeman. [see also, interview with Tim Holeman, OH 1164V]
(His aide.)
His aide—
(On Rocky Flats, at that time.)
His aide at that time, Tim Holeman.
(Yeah.)
And I believe Tim was nearly moved to tears. Tim was a very sensitive and nice guy.
(Yeah, that's true.)
And we left that scrapbook with Romer for, I think, a month. And although we never got a written reply from the governor, which surprised me immensely, the kids felt that it was a very worthwhile action. And we still have the scrapbook to this day. I think it's in a loft in Julia's house.
(Oh, I should ask her, I would like to look at it.)
So, that was 1990. I carried on doing work for the Rocky Mountain Peace Center, which involved public outreach and education and Rocky Flats issues. I also worked with this wonderful man called LeRoy Moore, on non-violence education, if you recall. [Laughs.]
(Yes.)
And LeRoy and I also did non-violence civil disobedience training together, in 1990 and 1989, I believe.
In 1991—in January 1991— I moved to Lancaster to begin my much-protracted graduate study. And my research has been about nuclear culture and nuclear ideology with a great emphasis on Rocky Flats.
19:47 (Before you talk about that, which I want to hear about, let's back up just a little bit. And I wonder what you remember—because I remember that you were part of the group that did door- to-door work in the town of Broomfield, talking to people about what they knew about Rocky Flats, what they felt about Rocky Flats. Kind of did a neighborhood survey. In conjunction with that we had a series of public education meetings.)
Mm-hm.
(Do you remember all of that?)
Yeah, I do. I do. Yeah, I do. And I was—I was well trained for that because of probably two years canvassing for the Colorado Freeze Voter on Rocky Flats issues as well. Going door to door and also cold calling on the telephone: that's when you call somebody, when you don't know whether they're going to be sympathetic to your cause or not.
(Right.)
The Broomfield work that we did through the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, I remember particularly well, because it was a time when people had a heightened awareness about Rocky Flats. It's ebbed and flowed, as you know very well.
(Yes.)
But at this time people were very, very concerned about Rocky Flats because of the combination of the test burn controversy, which was supposedly outlawed, or the governor stepped in and said, "No, we can't do this." Then we had the 5-0-2-1 waste limit. [?].
(Oh, the waste limit on—)
TRU waste at Rocky Flats.
(—on transuranic waste and a lawsuit brought by Sierra Club that forced them to include the residues in the quantity.)
Right.
(And it put them right at the limit. They were very, very close to the limit, and if they continued to—they had no place to take the waste, and if they continued to produce waste they would have to shut down.)
Mm-hm, mm-hm. So, there was already talk about them having to shut down. And THEN the public and—the concerned public and asleep public, for lack of a better phrase, together were shocked about the raid of Rocky Flats by the FBI. I mean, that was a very shocking experience for the surrounding public.
(It certainly was.)
So, it was after that that we did this work in Broomfield, in 1990. And I remember it well, because people—there were two reactions that people had: They were either very, very interested to speak with you and wanted to sign the piece of paper, wanted to get more information, or they were vehemently against you being, even standing, on their doorstep. We always canvassed during the daytime. And I was never physically threatened, although on several occasions I felt, you know, you'd have to pick up your pride again a bit after you would get slammed in the face—the door slammed in your face.
But, with hindsight, I can understand all of that. Because a lot of these people living in the Broomfield area, their livelihood depended on Rocky Flats. And the feelings of fear that the place would be shut down, or that somebody would be insinuated in illegal activity from one federal agency to another. There seemed to be a heightened sensitivity around Rocky Flats' issues and also somewhat of a paranoid feeling amongst workers and the sympathetic public for Rocky Flats' continued production of nuclear weapons.
That was a very fascinating experience. And it reminded me of an experience that I would later have about the sort of Percivalarcival [?] questioning, “What aileth thee?” Walking from door to door and just asking people simple questions about Rocky Flats, one could easily see, immediately, what that person's feelings were, for or against nuclear weapons, in terms of their body posture, how you were accepted or rejected from the doorstep. It was fascinating, if not a bit intimidating.
(Mm-hm.)
So, I guess my early activism involved a lot of phone banking, a lot of door-to-door canvassing. And it wasn't until after I did that—a lot of mailings—it wasn't until after I did that for a couple of years that I started getting into the education side myself.
(The research side?)
The research, but first the education outreach.
(Oh, I see, of course. Like the slide show?)
The slide show, house parties, elementary schools, graduate seminars. And that was really exciting. That's when the work became very, very exciting for me.
24:59 (So, you left here in ninety—)
One.
(One. What month?)
January.
(January, '91, okay. Brand new year. And you went to Lancaster, England.)
I went to Lancaster University, in England, and I began my research. My research was first centered around this idea of caring for nuclear materials. In 1988 I met Joanna Macy for the first time, on a deep ecology workshop in the Bethlehem Center, in—
(In Colorado.)
Colorado. Organized by Priscilla Inkpen. [see also, oral history with Priscilla Inkpen, OH 1239] And I just—I had never, ever met somebody before that was talking about what we could do positively with radioactive materials. I think those of us directly—, connected so directly to Rocky Flats, were just worrying about how to stem the flood. You know, we were just piling the sand bags up against the incoming water—wall of water—and we never got to that point. I never got to that point where the water was steady enough to look at it and think, “Now, what will we do?” So, meeting Joanna Macy in 1988 was a very important shift for me. Where I started looking at: Well, if this is such a problem, we can't only say, "Bad, bad!. You mustn't burn it, you mustn't bury it.” But we had to say: "Well, what COULD we do with this material?"
And that became my next kind of mode of query. I became fascinated by different approaches to radioactive materials that would presuppose human responsibility. And this is when I started looking at my whole posturing of “outside the fence” and pointing at the bad guys at Rocky Flats. And I thought, hmmm, I use electricity; my tax dollars have been used to pay for building nuclear bombs. This is the kind of country or supposed freedom that I'm living in. So, I have a responsibility for these weapons and materials as well.
So, I wanted to do something about that with my graduate research, and that was the main thrust of my research for the first few years. I got slightly waylaid by becoming more interested in being trained as a deep ecology facilitator, which I did for about two years. And then, with three colleagues—Jane Reed, Peter Evans, and Chris Johnstone—set up the Institute for Deep Ecology in London, in 1993. And we were traveling all around the U.K. giving residential experiential workshops based on the despair and empowerment work that Joanna Macy developed in the ‘70s and early ‘80s.
So, during that time I also became very involved in nuclear issues on the other side of the Atlantic. I started learning about Sellafield, the big nuclear weapons complex in Cumbria, not far from where I was living. I serendipitously was located in Lancaster, two miles from a nuclear power station. I just kept finding the nuclear issue wherever I went. And so, I became involved on a local level—was involved with the Women's Peace Camp at Sellafield and also involved in bringing the issue of nuclear guardianship to the U.K.
(What is nuclear guardianship?)
Okay. Nuclear guardianship is an idea that was formulated by Joanna Macy and some of her colleagues, including the wonderful feminist author, Susan Griffin. A group of people got together in Berkeley, California, in the late ‘80s, and Joanna held this thing that she called the Chernobyl Time Lab. They’d had a study group going about nuclear issues, and Joanna invited people into the Chernobyl Time Lab, where they went forward in time, around the Chernobyl- affected areas, and looked at the different ways people were dealing with or taking responsibility for the poison fire, as Joanna Macy likes to call it—radioactive materials, the poison fire. And the vision came that we would look after radioactive materials. We would develop a code of practice that took responsible care for radioactive materials, that recognized the—almost an agency of future generations. It's very easy to think about who's affected in the present, but with these materials, obviously, their incredible longevity brings us into immediate connection—an intimate connection—with future generations and future beings of all sorts.
30:20 So, the nuclear guardianship project appeared to me to be the first sort of movement or idea or project that dealt with the idea of responsibility throughout time. Time became a very, very important issue for looking at nuclear responsibility and how we look after these materials that honors our connection to future generations.
(Well, you have to explain that a little more. What do you mean, “responsibility through time”?)
Okay. Well, I mean, people that know about nuclear materials—one of the most astounding aspects or characteristics of nuclear materials, certainly for me, has been how they change our perception of time. When you are looking at a material like plutonium, which has a half life of 24,000 years, it means roughly that that material will remain carcinogenic, cancer-causing, mutogenic, for up to 250,000 years. So, in other words, after 24,000 years, half of the alpha- emitting radiation from that plutonium will have decayed, but then you still have another half of—
(The original amount?)
—the original amount to deal with. And it sort of dies off incrementally. I mean, there's a—
(Every 24,000 years, half of it decays.)
Half of the half that's left. So, if you roughly figure that out mathematically, we're talking about a quarter-of-a-million years that plutonium 239—, weapons-grade plutonium—, remains toxic, radioactive, cancer-causing, mutogenic. It is an alpha emitting radiation, which means basically—what? You don't want me to go into that?
(Go.)
It's an alpha emitting radiation which means, basically, that you can stop it coming into your body by as much as a handkerchief or a piece of paper in front of your nose or your mouth, but it can be breathed into the body. It can also get into the body through an open wound, or it can obviously be ingested by eating plutonium-contaminated food. So there are many pathways into the body.
But that was the astounding thing for me, to think: 24,000 years, that's just the half life; 250,000 years. There is no system of language, government, there is no work of art; there is nothing human made that we have any frame of reference for that will be comparable to plutonium. So, when you're looking at the extended lifetime of plutonium, it's more like a glacial time. It's more like a time that is akin to the movement of rocks into mountains, the development of oceans. It's more of an earth—, of a geological— time.
Joanna Macy calls this deep time. I think Stephen J. Gould has also used that phrase of deep time. Different social theorists and sociologists refer to this immense period of time, as I have mentioned earlier, glacial time, because again, there is no human institution or human artifact that can be referenced on this time scale. And yet, plutonium and other radioactive materials of this ilk and with similarly long half lives are human-made materials.
Okay, footnote: There was a tiny bit of plutonium found in Ghana, in Africa, years ago that different scientists argue was the result of a fission reaction that happened deep, deep in the earth. But I'm talking about the monumental amount of plutonium that has been made by governments in our world for the purpose of producing nuclear bombs. Okay, so that's just my little footnote there.
So, this type of plutonium is a human-made product. And I would argue—and many, many people are arguing—that because we have made this product, and you cannot make it go away, it's changing our previously held notions of time.
35:19 (So, how do you take care of it? You mentioned that phrase, you used that phrase "how do you take care of it?")
Well, you take care of it very carefully. I mean, right now a lot, as you know, a lot of the plans— many, many different nations, in the U.S., in the U.K., certainly in France, other western European nations, Germany with Gorleben—the people are looking towards burying radioactive materials. There's various arguments for various different host materials that would encase radioactive materials for a certain number of time—, certain number of years—, or what have you. But that's the present modus operandi for nuclear nations in our world today.
Now, if you take into consideration that this material lasts and remains dangerous for long beyond any previously conceived human-held notion of time, then there's no way that we can assure its safekeeping through earth burial. So, the nuclear guardianship approach to the responsi—
(What do you mean there's no way we can assure? Say that again.)
By burying radioactive materials, there's no way that we can assure the safeguarding of those materials throughout time. So, if we are recognizing that these materials—like, again, with plutonium, 24,000- year half life—will remain dangerous for that period of time, there's no way that we can say that by burying it that's going to keep that material encased and sealed from the environment by burying it.
There's other people that are also arguing that, hey, burying it is not sealing it from our environment, it's sticking it IN our environment. You know, the salt dome that was dug out at the WIPP [Waste Isolation Pilot Plant] facility in Carlsbad, New Mexico, is part of our environment. Just because it's nearly 2,000 feet below the earth's surface does not mean that it's not part of our environment. There’s aquifers that move through there, brine reservoirs that move in and out. We have an inter-related environment, and just as we are part of the earth and the earth is part of us, you can't expect to be able to bury a dangerous and toxic material and for it not to eke out into our water systems, air systems, earth systems. So that in a very, very crude sense, it seems to me that a more efficient way of burying radioactive materials—if that's the way we're going to go—would be just to eat it, you know. Because that's what you would be doing eventually, anyway. You would be eating it. Because it would be in our air, in our earth, in our water. And I don't mean to sound anthropocentric, here, because—
(And you could bury yourself, I guess.)
Yeah, you could bury yourself and then you could eke out—I mean, it's an endless problem. But what I'm saying—when I say “our earth,” “our air,” and “our water,” I don't mean to be just having a human-centered feeling, because obviously this impacts all living species.
So, getting back to your question of what do we do with it: burying it is certainly not a responsible way forward because of all the problems that I just mentioned. The nuclear guardianship approach to the responsible care of radioactive materials entails a more dynamic relationship to these materials. So, for instance, you could isolate materials from the environment in a monitored, retrievable configuration for a 50-year period. A 50-year period is something I can envision. I hope, being only 31 years old, that I will be given the gift of living 50 more years. Fifty years is something I can envision in my head. It's also something that we could safely say, I—you know, there are engineers alive today that could make a containment vessel that would seal materials from the environment for a 50-year period. I think we could pretty much guarantee that.
The importance of it being monitored and retrievable is that if it's—in monitoring this material, we can see if there's any problems. And if there's a problem, we can go in and fix it. The fact that these materials are retrievable means: If there's ever a technique that's developed wherein plutonium could be nullified, or its half life could be cut in half, or something could be done with it, then we could take that material out and treat it in a proper way.
40:07 As soon as you put plutonium-contaminated waste into WIPP or, you know, Ward Valley, or Sierra Blanca, that material is in the ground, and that invisible poison could be eking out into other ecosystems, into water systems, and then just travel way beyond the site of containment.
(Sometime in this quarter of a million years that you refer to.)
Yes.
(Okay.)
I mean, I would argue that it's a guarantee that that would will happen. Of course, you have people in the EPA saying that WIPP will remain safe for 10,000 years. That strikes me as very funny, seeing as how many, many archaeologists in the U.K.—indeed all over the world—have still not cracked the mystery surrounding Stonehenge, which is a baby at 5,000 years. So, this whole issue of time, I think, with nuclear materials is very fascinating.
And if I could just stay with this for a minute. What is so fascinating about time and nuclear materials? Well, first of all, it's a contradictory temporality. So you have, on the one hand, as we've been talking about plutonium, which has this huge glacial time; it's just enormous, you can't even imagine it. You have to look at a mountain and think when that mountain was a pebble to think about the half life of plutonium; how long it took that mountain to grow into what it is, that majestic, beautiful piece of rock sitting in front of you that's maybe 5,000 feet.
But the other thing about nuclear time is that it also introduces a minuteness of time that is unparalleled before the nuclear—dawn of the nuclear age. So on the one hand you have hugely long glacial time, but on the other hand you have acute nanosecond time. So, for instance, when Hiroshima was destroyed on August 6, 1945, there are people, Hibakusha, survivors of Hiroshima, who recount the story and have said, "At first I thought it was nothing to do with the war. At first I thought it was the end of the world." Because nobody had any frame of reference for: In one second everything is fine, people are walking to work in the city of Hiroshima at sometime past eight in the morning, and in the next SECOND [snaps fingers] the entire epicenter of the whole city is in ruins. And people who were close to that ground zero were incinerated, became shadows on the side of buildings. Now, there was never anything else, no natural force, no other experience on earth that anybody could have referenced that equaled that immediate destructive power of a nuclear bomb.
So, you've got this acute temporality on the one hand, in that a nuclear blast can destroy, in a nanosecond, things that human beings have built over time. Buildings, natural structures that have built over time—forests, mountains, rivers—all of these things that have had their own time, either human-related or ecologically-related, destroyed in a second. And at the same time, you have the beginning of a longevity of time that, again, there is no reference for in human experience.
So, when Hiroshima was destroyed in seconds—that destroyed also a particular notion of time that we had previous to that explosion. And, again, the radioactive materials that contaminated that area, and continue to contaminate and be present in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other places, represent a longevity of time that, again, has no human reference point. So, nuclear time is simultaneously acute and hugely glacial, immense, deep. So, you have acute time and deep time happening simultaneously.
And this began to fascinate me, because it became pretty apparent that all previously conceived notions of time don't work anymore. Now that we have—in the nuclear age, we have to engage in a different notion of time. A time which includes this simultaneous and contradictory temporality that nuclear materials bring us. The intensely acute and the immensely long.
45:24 (One of the phrases that I've heard you use, and I don't think you used it today, but I know that I've heard you say that nuclear materials are a great teacher.)
Mm-hm.
(And you seem to be exemplifying that in what you're saying. But, is that the phrase you used? Nuclear materials are a great teacher?)
I mean, I even get a tiny bit more dododgy than that. And I say that they're a wonderful SPIRITUAL teacher. [Chuckles.] I think—
(Why do you say that?)
Well, for several reasons. I think that the—it's very, very fascinating to me that the nuclear—I mean, I'm talking, I was just referring to Hiroshima—obviously, the nuclear, nuclear technology was developed as war-making technology. So, we had this technology that was developed to make weapons as a show of strength. And the whole idea of nuclear deterrence was that one guy had to have more bombs that could blow up the world more times than the other guy in order to be the most powerful. So, we were looking at using weapons of mass destruction as a threat, which was this veiled show of strength, and using it as a very much power-over tactic. So, the former Soviet Union and the U.S. government were up and down on who was the best or, as the defense intellectuals like to say, who was the hardest. Who was the most, perhaps hyperbolically, masculine of the two countries.
[Chuckle from LeRoy.]
So you had this huge show of strength, which was based on the old, old smelly formula of “power over” as the way to gain power and authority in a given society. Well, it's funny because the nuclear, as a spiritual teacher, is like the wonderful coyote in Native American spirituality, who is the trickster. I mean, I say Native American spirituality—in one of the Native nations, and I believe it was a Native nation in the Southwest, the trickster always symbolized the great teacher. Because the trickster would come in and play a trick to show you what was happening. So, it was almost like a reversal; the teacher was always teaching through reversal.
Well, the nuclear as a spiritual teacher teaches through reversal too, because while nuclear nations attempted to show strength by developing and threatening to use nuclear weapons, the reversal of the teaching was happening: by the nuclear, as a contaminant, really proving our mutual vulnerability.
Now, what I mean by that is that while the U.S. and the former Soviet Union were building bombs, they were contaminating their people. In Kazakhstan there was atmospheric nuclear testing. In Nevada there was atmospheric nuclear testing. In the building of bombs on both sides of that ideological divide, there were workers who had died, who are continuing to die. There are people living downwind of facilities who are dying, continuing to die, because of their exposure to radioactive materials.
So, the nuclear trickster comes in, and the governments are saying: “We're using these weapons of mass destruction—we're building them to keep you safe, to keep democracy safe.” Or to keep communism as a sort of growing, ideological or governmental project. Whatever their line was. When in actual fact the nuclear materials were already killing U.S. and Russian citizens. So, what the nuclear—ONE of the profound teachings that the nuclear gives us is not—it's a reversal of the power-over mentality, of the power-over paradigm that we still operate with today. Because the nuclear teaches us that more than asserting power over, we are all mutually vulnerable. We are all mutually vulnerable in our environment. No matter what country you are from, no matter if you consider yourself a communist or a capitalist, no matter if you are Native American living on a reservation in a destitute situation in the U.S. society or if you are a fat cat on Wall Street—you cannot resist a gamma ray.
50:14 Radiation teaches us about our mutual vulnerability, which to me signifies a change in the power dynamic, in the power structure as we move into a different time. As we move away from power-over mentality and move more towards a society that is based on social and ecological justice and recognizes power within each and every individual, within ecosystems, within tributaries and different cultural groups.
That's about a whole shift in dynamics of our society. It moves beyond the nuclear issue itself and talks about new ways of relating between people and between the environment. Because when we work on issues of mutual vulnerability, it's already a more egalitarian society, a more nonviolent society or feminist society. Whereas, the whole—
(So there’s a sort of a democracy of vulnerability?)
It's EXACTLY a democracy of vulnerability, yeah. Even those that don't vote get to get it. [Laughs.] So that's one thing about the nuclear being a spiritual teacher. It also teaches us about mindfulness like no other human-made artifact or anything. I mean, if we agree that the way forward for the responsible care of radioactive materials is above-ground monitored retrievable storage, for 50-year periods, then we have to be mindful of that material. We have to be VIGITANTLY mindful. We have to be able to sustain the gaze for hundreds and thousands of years.
(So, generation after generation after generation has to be mindful.)
Generation after—
[Abrupt end to audiotape; continues on side B with a small gap in recording.]
52:06 [End of tape A.]
[B].
[Audio begins in mid- sentence]
00:00 … grandchildren. But, by looking at issues of radioactive contamination and the integrity that we want to hold of natural systems, ecosystems, for future generations, then all of a sudden we are interfacing with responsibility beyond a time frame that we can envision. And that's powerful. You know, that allows us to move into a different dynamic, again, in our present-day relationships, but also quite profoundly in the way that we would like to leave the world for future generations. So that those unborn people and beings—trees and flowers and butterflies and prairie dogs and giraffes and lions and bears and deer, and everything—come into your consciousness. They are part of who we are today: those future beings. And the kind of world, the kind of safe, uncontaminated world that we want to leave for them. That's amazing. Don't you think?
(You're very articulate about it. Yes, I think that. I love sitting here and listening to you talk about it.)
Oh, good.
[Laughter.]
(I do.)
Am I entertaining you?
(I do. You're very passionate and articulate about it; it’s wonderful.)
Do I get to say—
(You're a good evangelist.)
Oh, stop it! I hate when you say that! I try not to be an evangelist anymore!
[Much laughter from LeRoy.]
No, no, no, no, no.
(Well, let's see.)
Could I say one more thing about spiritual teacher?
(You certainly can, yeah.)
Okay. I want to say one other thing about plutonium, or I should say “radioactive materials,” as a spiritual teacher. Part of the problem with these materials is that they're invisible and they're imperceptible.
(Yeah.)
So, you know, you can sit outside Rocky Flats and it doesn't really seem like anything's going on out there. There's not a fire. You can't smell anything funny. You could even walk into, for instance, Building 371 if you could like, you know, get through the corridors, if there weren't so much TRU waste just hanging out. But you wouldn't be able to smell anything or see anything from any of these barrels. So, it's a whole problem of invisibility and imperceptibility, which really calls us into a new relationship with trust. And oftentimes this—and I guess in a spiritual or religious context this could be called faith. What some people might call blind faith. So, in the taking responsibility for radioactive materials there is a sort of jumping into the void of an engaged ambivalence of developing a new relationship with trust wherein you are—[pause] Wait, I lost it. I lost it.
(A new relationship with trust.)
It's a new relationship with trust. It has to be a radical relationship with trust that enables a person or—I'll talk about myself—enables ME to believe, continue to believe, in the toxicity and dangerousness of these materials. Okay, for instance: If I breathed in a particle of plutonium 10 years ago, standing outside the gates at Rocky Flats, it might not show up in my body for another 10 years. Now, maybe I would be—
(You mean as something causing harm in your body?)
Yeah, it may not show up as a physical manifestation in my body for 10 years. So, maybe—you know, even though I've been involved in the nuclear issue for so long—maybe one day I think, “Well, Ggod, you know, it doesn't really seem to be that dangerous.” I can't see anything happening in myself. I'm losing a grasp of that radical trust which is to believe in something that we cannot see, touch, feel, taste.
I mean, in this way the nuclear has knocked God off as the ultimate reference. Before, you know, perhaps God was the most ultimate referent in the whole world. Without God the world wouldn't have been made. Perhaps without a faith in God, you know, human life wouldn't lead to its end in heaven or whatever a particular religious belief would have you believe.
05:15 But this idea of the nuclear so pervasive that suddenly we have THIS as the ultimate referent that has knocked God off kilter. This is what I mean by this sort of radical faith. It's a kind of faith in the nuclear.
Now, that is something that we need to believe in order to pass this information onto future generations. This is the link that I want to make. Because it's through communication with the future, with young people—like I was talking about earlier, the KFWP. When they grow up, and they're still knowing about the dangers of Rocky Flats, then they're going to tell their children. We have to use the oral tradition. We have to rely on passing information from generation to generation so that these materials can be looked after and taken care of in a responsible manner.
But just briefly to return to this WEIRD idea of the nuclear as the ultimate referent—I'm borrowing heavily from Jacques Derrida, a literary theorist, here, when I say this. Because if—in order for life to continue, we need to take responsible care of radioactive materials. If everybody packed up and left the 120 operating nuclear power plants that we have in the U.S. and we had 120 Chernobyls around North America; if, for some terrible reason, nuclear bombs started flying back and forth between Israel and Iraq or the United States, and we suddenly had all of this contamination happening everywhere, well we could pretty much be certain that life would not be carrying on as we had previously known it. So the nuclear contained, or the nuclear taken— the nuclear and a human relationship of responsible care, assures a continued life, a continued life of integrity, ecological integrity in our world. But the nuclear SPENT equals total destruction.
(The nuclear—what was your word there?)
Spent. So, bombs going off, nuclear power stations blowing up. So, it's actually the fact that this idea of the nuclear contained—I mean, I almost want to go into a sense of worship here, but I think I'm getting a little bit too far off the point, and it might be too convoluted for just this one interview.
[Laughter from LeRoy.]
But, it's like we have to pray and be mindful of this material: remember it to each passing generation, so that they can remember it to each passing generation. And in that way we honor our mutual vulnerability. And we also honor our intimate relationship with future generations through our growing and shifting perception of time, thanks to the advent of the nuclear age.
(So, there’s a legacy to which we belong and we let go of it only at our own peril.)
Yeah. Precisely.
(Yeah. What else would you like to say before you end the interview? Are there other things on your mind?)
My so-called mind? [Laughs.]
(Your mind.)
Okay. That's what Anice always used to say, “so-called mind.”
(Is that what she said?)
Yeah. “What's on your so-called mind?” She also used to say, “If you aren't confused today, you just aren't thinking clearly.”
[Laughter from both.]
(Yeah.)
Well, I guess I would just like to end by saying that—it's funny, because I just finished my Ph.D. thesis on nuclear culture and nuclear ideology. And I had a friend say to me, the other day, "Gosh, that must have been really difficult: looking at all those issues for so many years, and reading about things, and having to write about nuclear accidents and the health effects of radiation. And you've been an activist for a long time too. And I just don't know how you do it."
And I said to her, "Well, I love plutonium." And she thought I was making a joke. And she said, "Oh, yeah, okay, you love plutonium."
09:49 And I said, "No, I do. I love plutonium." And she thought that I was being a bit sick. And so I explained to her that because of plutonium my life has been enriched immeasurably. I mean, we can look at all of the negative things that plutonium gives us: mutagenic effects and, you know, the sort of crazy half life of a toxic-causing material, and it being the raw material for nuclear bombs that can destroy hundreds of thousands of lives within seconds. All of that is terribly, terribly bad.
But there is a part of plutonium that I want to reclaim, and say, "I love you." Because that substance—and as I said at the beginning of the interview—, it was 1985 when I first learned about it, and learning about it changed my life forever. And that awareness of plutonium has brought more beautiful people into my life than I could ever imagine. I think that it's fair to say my life would be somewhat boring without plutonium.
It's also brought a shift in my own perception about the world. About power dynamics, about the RADICAL inter-relatedness of all life in what I like to call mutual vulnerability. And the amazing love that people can extend to one another in a—what seems to be a world gone mad. And this idea of love, which I would just like to briefly mention, which is that kind of love that can extend beyond our own lifetimes. To feel like I can love a future being that is not even born of somebody that's born. Not even a possible genetic match between some future being in the next generation. That we can extend our love beyond this limited body, in this limited space that we occupy, to me is so powerful. And it has enhanced what it means for me to be alive. And I'm very, very grateful. [pause] And it gave me you as my friend. [Laughs.]
(Let me get you to say something about one other item, and that is: You started out very early in this interview talking about your great aunt, Ann Swift, and I happen to know that when Ann Swift died—when did she die?)
June—sorry. April 22, 1995. Earth Day, April 22, 1995.
(April 22, 1995.)
Yeah.
(Where are her ashes?)
Oh, well. Ann, as you know, was the founder member of the Boulder Hemlock Society. She said, when she wanted to go, she wanted to go. So anybody that knew Ann knew that in the end she would take her life when it was her time to go. She was 88 when she died. She died with great peace and dignity with her daughter by her side.
And one of her requests to me was that—and we knew this; anybody that knew Ann knew she was going to die, when she wanted to die. And she was also very instrumental in all this green space you see around Boulder County. Boulder County Open Space was, in part, a dream child of Ann Swift. And she was one of the first people to gather around that issue. And she was on the first committee that started buying up green belt around Boulder County. So, her first request was that her ashes be sprinkled over the beloved green belt that she was so instrumental in assuring for people that now live here in Boulder County.
And the second place that she wanted her ashes to be sprinkled were at Rocky Flats. And so, on Nagasaki Day, in 1995, I went to Rocky Flats with my dear friend, Marguerite Kahrl, and we trespassed into the buffer zone. And I had at that time made a sandstone sort of plaque for Ann with her name and her dates of birth and death. And we brought her ashes out to the buffer zone, and we dug a hole, and we sprinkled some of her ashes there and we placed the stone. And then we sprinkled the rest on the wind on the southwest side of the plant site. And that's where she wanted to be.
(Okay. I think it's good to have that, since you talked about her.)
And do you want to hear quickly about her arrest?
14:59 (About her what? Her arrest? Oh, yeah, yeah. Let me turn this tape over here. [referring to a back-up tape] Let me get this last little bit, too. This is also about Ann Swift?)
Yeah, this is Ann Swift. It was a very, I think it was Daniel Berrigan that was talking that day. Do you remember?
(I remember that he was here. And what year was that? That was probably—)
It was 1990?
(On Hiroshima Day.)
Yeah, 1990, Hiroshima Day. In fact, it was Hiroshima Day, and we had all decided that we would do civil disobedience on Nagasaki Day. That was the way that it was going to go. There was going to be an arrest on Nagasaki Day, but we decided that we would have a rally on Hiroshima Day.
Well, Ann was always one to buck convention. And so, I was at a Young Christian's rally on the south side of the plant site at another little venue that we used for rallies through the years. And there was a Christian youth organization that wanted a presentation. So, at the time I was working for the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. And so, I gave them a presentation on Rocky Flats. My plan was to meet Ann at the west gate and to hear the great Daniel Berrigan speak.
And so I did my duty with the Christian Youth, and then raced over to the west gate, and saw Ann's car parked in a No Parking zone right across from the west gate of the plant site. And I thought, “Oh good, well, she's here.” And I got out and got to the west gate, and I was besieged by about 10 people who all, in various tenors and audibility, said to me: "Ann's been arrested! Ann's been arrested!" And apparently she waited for Daniel Berrigan to begin speaking, and she very carefully placed her raincoat underneath the fence, and then scooted herself right underneath the fence, and—
(Walked in.)
—walked into the plant site. And they did arrest her, which I thought was astounding. And so, when I got there I called one of the guards over, and I said, "Look, you have got my 80-odd, 82- year-old aunt back there, and you treat her very well or else." And I said, "And please could you give me her keys, because her car is parked in a No Parking zone."
Anyway, they did not take too kindly to Ann and her friend, Ann Deschanel. They liked to consider themselves “Grandmothers for Peace.” They were both octogenarians. And they put them in the Denver Women's Federal Prison for the night. And I was up half the night with worry, but finally the prison warden, after about my 10th call said, "Sweetheart, do not worry, she is entertaining the entire ward. Nobody has ever been happier than the day that your great aunt came in to entertain us all."
[Big laugh from LeRoy.]
I went to pick her up the next morning and she emerged triumphantly. She had her little baggie that said "Prisoner's Belongings" and a mug shot, I think, that they took out at the plant site. And she was just absolutely over the moon. And she decided from that day on that she would work on anti-prison development. And she also was very, very hot about working for the rights for prostitutes, because these were her mates that she was in the cell with that night.
(Well, well.)
She loved it.
[Laughter from both.]
(That's good.)
Yeah.
(That's wonderful. Well, Kathleen, it's two minutes after 3:00.)
Okay.
(Thank you very much, that was a wonderful interview.)
19:06 [End of tape B. End of Interview.]