The history of Rocky Flats is being written right now. Add yourself to the archive.

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We’ve got a great start on recording the stories of Rocky Flats. In partnership with the Boulder Public Library’s oral history project, the RFCWM has recorded about 90 interviews with people who have first-hand memories of Rocky Flats. The participants include people who:
  • Worked at Rocky Flats
  • Participated in demonstrations
  • Conducted research about RF’s effects
  • Held elected office
  • Worked for a government agency
  • Lived downstream or downwind of the plant
You can browse our oral history archive and listen online. To have your own memories added to the oral history archive, contact the museum at 720-287-1717.

Add to our archive.

The RFCWM archive and library holds thousands of artifacts donated by Rocky Flats workers, contractors, and activists. Donated items include:
  • Rocky Flats employee material (e.g. security passes, union cards, handbooks, training manuals, health monitoring forms, etc.)
  • Flyers and leaflets from Rocky Flats demonstrations
  • Photographs, home movies and videos
  • Newspapers, TV footage, and other media coverage
  • Cold War artwork
There's a Praeto principle involved in cleanup, where you get 90 percent of your benefit for 10 percent of your costs, and the remaining 10 percent will cost 90 percent of your money. ... The idea that you should force industry and/or government to clean up to a 100 percent is mistaken. ... I think that to govern is to choose ... it doesn't make sense to spend ... the billions of dollars to get a marginal increase in safety ... we live in a society with finite needs and finite resources.

Dick Lamm, Former governor of Colorado on the clean-up at Rocky Flats
I think that if the atomic bomb did nothing more, it scared the people to the point where they realized that either they must do something about preventing war or there is a chance that there might be a morning when we would not wake up.

Eleanor Roosevelt in a news conference, January 3, 1946 
I saw Rocky Flats as a good place to work and as an instrument that essentially kept the United States out of war for 50 years.  Even though maybe none of what [we] were making was used — just the fact that the items were there kept the United States in a strong position where [we] didn’t have to fight a war​.

John Beacham, Engineer and Manager at Rocky Flats