TV REVIEWS : ‘Bomb Factory’ Shows U.S. Cover-Up

The notion that the U.S. government suspended democracy in the name of combatting anti-democratic communist forces during the Cold War is more than an idea. It has a face, and its name is Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant.

There’s little important information in Al Austin’s “Frontline” report, “Secrets of a Bomb Factory” that didn’t appear in Barry Siegel’s two-part August story in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. (The show airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24.) Austin echoes Siegel in detailing how a federal grand jury, appointed in 1990 to investigate charges of criminal wrongdoing at Rocky Flats, is now itself under investigation for illegally going public with evidence and charges it uncovered. Both reports depict a group of hard-working citizens, thinking that they were about the government’s business, doing far too good of a job for the taste of the Department of Energy, Rocky Flats’ federal boss.

Austin’s story, however, brings the power of images to bear on what may prove to be one of the federal government’s most scandalous chapters.

Piecing together documents as well as investigative journalist Bryan Abas’ report for the Denver-based paper Westword, Austin lays out an ugly picture of a weapons plant supervised by the Energy Department but operated by contracting firm Rockwell International under a cloak of secrecy ironically recalling super-secret Soviet practices. After decades of reported dumping, spraying and leaking of radioactive waste, no individual or group was made accountable because the nuclear weapons “culture” would simply not permit it.