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.