Alamogordo Bombing Range, New Mexico, 5:30 A.M., July 16, 1945.
A U.S. team, headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, working in Los Alamos, developed and detonated a 21-kiloton plutonium bomb nicknamed Gadget atop a hundred-foot-tower. The code name for the test was “Trinity.” It was the first atomic explosion. The blast dredged up and irradiated hundreds of tons of soil, sending a mushroom cloud up more than 70,000 feet.
People living downwind from the blast asked about the bright light that they had seen early in the morning of that day. They were told that an ammunition dump had exploded. People living in the area didn’t learn the truth about the blast until years later.
The Trinity Test of the first Atom bomb
Within hours odd, black ash blanketed the nearby countryside. Fallout covered all of their land and was detected as far east as New York State. The Trinity Downwinders website that I referenced was established by New Mexico citizens seeking retribution for the Trinity test.
Trinity Fallout
According to research on Trinity fallout reported on their site, all of New Mexico was affected by the fallout from this first atomic bomb. Sebastien Philippe, Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, and co-researchers have mapped the fallout areas for the first time and reported their results. As you can see in Figure 2, within days, the Trinity fallout reached most of the states in the U.S. Please note that all of New Mexico was blanketed with radionuclides.
No one was warned about the bomb. We know now that 1940 census data show nearly half a million people in New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico lived within 150 miles of ground zero.
In this post, I will explore the harrowing legacy of atomic bomb survivors and how nuclear club governments did little to warn citizens living downwind from ground zero, as well how thousands of military personnel and staff who worked in close proximity to bombing sites, were put in harms way and suffered for the rest of their lives.
Oppenheimer, the Movie
Last week, Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer made its premiere. It’s a biopic about the triumphs and tragedies of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the bomb itself, and the people living in Los Alamos involved in the secret government program that made the world unsafe.
The film, reflective as it is of the bomb and the secrets surrounding the nuclear age, could also be used to reflect on the people harmed by atomic fallout and contaminants released by underground nuclear tests on the ground and surrounding water, plants, animals, and people.
Millions of citizens in the United States, Australia (the result of British bomb tests), the Soviet Union, and the Pacific (the development of US, UK, and France bomb testing) suffered, unknowingly, from nuclear bomb detonations. They, and nearly everyone else, were left in the dark and lied to by these governments.
Downwinders
The movie highlights the scientific achievement of making an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer and his collaborators at Los Alamos carried out this achievement. But, there was little to no concern about those who would come in contact with the fallout from these nuclear explosions. The fallout from the 216 bombs dropped from 1945 – 1962 covers nearly all of the United States (please refer to Sebastien Philippe’s tweet). People became sick and suffered severe anxiety, paranoia, and depression. Thousands died of cancer. Military and civilian personnel at these locations participated in all U.S. atom bomb tests since the Trinity test 1945. These people were told that the radiation from the bombs would not have much of an effect on them, especially after a few weeks. This line of deceit was the same whether you lived in St. George, Utah, Chelyabinsk, Russia, Maralinga, Australia, in the Marshall Islands.
Nuclear bombs release hundreds of radionuclides, which are unstable chemical elements that release radiation as it breaks down and becomes more stable. Since 1945, there have been 520 atmospheric nuclear explosions (including 8 underwater) with a total yield of 545 megatons. One megaton is equivalent to 1 million tons of TNT. In WW2, the total blast power was 3 megatons.
We need to be aware of the effect of nuclear tests had on people (downwinders) who live downwind, as well as military and civil personnel who participated directly in bomb tests.
But as important as what I’ve said here, I must mention another aspect of the atomic age explosion. Albert Einstein, who co-wrote the letter with Hungarian-American physicist Leo Szilard to President Roosevelt, warned him that the Nazis might be developing nuclear weapons and that the U.S. should begin to work to build our weapons. Right after the explosions of the bombs dropped on Japan, Einstein said,
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
Albert Einstein: Source: Robert R. Holt, Meeting Einstein’s challenge: New Thinking about nuclear weapons, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 3, 2015. For more information, please go over to Our Way of Thinking Has Not Changed.
Atom Bomb Testing and Its Effects on Downwind Communities
The nuclear club has grown from one country (USA) in 1945 to eight as of 2023, including the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea (see Table 1). Although more than a hundred nations have signed the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, none of the nuclear club members have signed the Treaty. These tests affected real people, many of whom still suffer from the effects of atomic radiation, including their descendants.
| Country | Total | Atmospheric | Underground |
| USA | 1032 | 215 | 813 |
| USSR/Russia | 715 | 219 | 496 |
| France | 210 | 50 | 160 |
| Britain | 44 | 21 | 23 |
| China | 45 | 25 | 22 |
| India | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| Pakistan | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| North Korea | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| Total | 2052 | 528 | 1526 |
Atmospheric Testing
As reported in Table 1, there have been 528 atmospheric nuclear bomb tests. Fallout downwind from bombs tested in the atmosphere contained radionuclides (ionized radiation) and gases transported thousands of miles from the testing sites by wind. A radionuclide is a radioactive form of an element. About twelve radionuclides are produced during a nuclear explosion, including iodine-131 (associated with a risk for thyroid cancer) and cobalt-60 (emits gamma radiation).
Most people living in the US during these years were exposed to varying radiation levels, as shown in the Philippe Tweet below. The governments in the nuclear club released very little information warning people of the potential effects of nuclear fallout. This was especially true during testing done in the 1950s. Radiation most increased the risk of leukemia among survivors, followed by stomach, lung, liver, and breast cancer. There was little impact on rectum, prostate, and kidney cancers. The fallout of radiation moved through the food chain, causing a host of cancerous diseases.
Underground Testing
In Area 10 of Yucca Flat at the Nevada National Security Site, (formerly called the Nevada Testing Site) a shallow (636 feet) underground nuclear test was conducted on July 6, 1962, to investigate the use of nuclear weapons for mining, cratering, and other civilian purposes such as open-pit mines, railroad and highway cuts, and dams. The program was called Project Plowshare. Plumes of radioactive fallout from this test contaminated more people in the US than any other nuclear test carried out by the US military. Radionuclides carried to the east over Nebraska, South Dakota, and Illinois and continued eastward toward the Atlantic Ocean, bringing lower levels of nucleotides.
The U.S. government told American citizens living downwind from 215 nuclear blasts not to worry. It’s not dangerous, said government officials, including some scientists, They failed to disclose to these Americans that these clouds carried ionized radiation comparable to those released by Chernobyl.
Case Studies: Examining Real-Life Impacts on Individuals and Communities
Thousands of people worldwide have suffered long-term health effects from ionizing radiation from atomic and nuclear bombs. Days after the Trinity Test in Alamogordo, the United States dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, respectively). One of the first reports on the effects of these bombs on the Japanese people was written by J. Robert Lifton (Death in Life, Survivors of Hiroshima, 1968). Lifton visited and reported survivors’ experiences of the terror associated with nuclear weapons for several decades. Given the worldwide interest in the movie Oppenheimer, this quote from Lifton’s book is a critical point in this discussion.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors deserve more credit than they have received for bringing about this degree of restraint. As truth tellers where truth is resisted, they have been a crucial source of wisdom. Their narratives have informed the work of every authentic chronicler of nuclear threat, whether through interviews with American or Japanese or other investigators or tireless public testimony which they have given in countries throughout the world. Their words and images, in ways that are not easily measurable, have contributed, as nothing else has, to a collective world consciousness of nuclear danger. For that reason we can say that atomic-bomb survivors made a considerable contribution to the evolving Soviet-American nuclear detente during the mid- and late 1980s. And it was they who could make the most authoritative connections between nuclear weapons and the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, even if the latter resulted from “peaceful” use of atomic energy, since the radioactive consequences of both were all too similar. It is not too much to say that atomic-bomb survivors, through no choice of their own, have taken on the prophetic function of warning their people—in this case the people of the world—about the error of their ways.
Lifton, Robert Jay (2011-12-31T22:58:59.000). Death in Life . The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.
American Bomb Tests
After these two bombs were dropped on Japan, early nuclear club countries (USA, UK, France & the Soviet Union) conducted atomic bomb tests for over two decades.
Carol Gallagher (American Ground Zero, The Secret Nuclear War) and Sarah Alizabeth Fox (Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West) published separate studies by spending years traveling, photographing, and recording stories from people living “downwind” from the more than 500 atmospheric tests done by the United States government.
Carol Gallagher: The Secret Nuclear War
During Carol Gallagher’s research on the “nuclear military-industrial complex” she came across appalling and disturbing documents about how the United States government considered people living downwind from atom bomb tests “a low-use population segment.” Because of statements like this, she gave up her career as a photographer in New York City and in 1981 moved to St. George, Utah. She realized that she would have to change her physical appearance, the clothes she wore, and the words she used to get close to the people she hoped to meet to learn and report their stories of enduring the effects of the atomic bombs on their health and well-being. She wouldn’t get anywhere if she didn’t lose her “city slicker” demeanor.
Her book organizes her findings gathered over a more than 10-year period into four segments:
- The Nevada Test Site Workers: Taking Risk as it Comes.
- Atomic Veterans: “We were expendable.”
- Downwind: “A low-use segment of the population”
- Contaminated lives and landscapes of the West: “A damn good place to dump razor blades
Test workers, veterans, husbands, wives, and children—all were considered replaceable. They were beneficial by government officials who were plotting, untruthful, and ruthless. Gallagher reports their stories in vivid detail. Here are introductions to two of her stories.
Robert Carter, Taylorsville, Utah
Robert Carter was a 19-year-old platoon soldier when a 74 kiloton atom bomb was exploded at the Nevada Testing Site. It was a bomb was suspended 1500 feet above the desert floor. The explosion would be the largest nuclear detonation within the U.S. It was later learned that this was the first hydrogen bomb to explode in the United States. (Source of Robert Taylor’s story is Carol Gallagher (American Ground Zero, The Secret Nuclear War), pp. 61 – 63).
“I was full of life before I saw that bomb,” he says. He continues. I was skinny kid seated among forty other strobe-lit men near the press area, before the bomb exploded. They would soon be marched closer to ground zero. They were not even protected by trenches. All stood out in the open, more vulnerable than they ever had been in their lives.
The Countdown
When the countdown began, I was scared to death. The explosion went off, and I remember feeling the confusion that just blew me. It just blew me forty feet into the mountainside and all these men with me. I felt elbows, I felt knees, I felt heads banging, I felt my head hit the ground. There was dirt in my ears, my nose, it went down my throat. I had a blood nose. these terrible things that you don’t want to go through in your whole life. I remember the ground so hot that I couldn’t stand on it, and it was just burning alive. It was like I was being cooked. After the shot, my coveralls were cracked and burned, there was so much heat.
Bob Carter, and other soldiers like him, were soon very sick. Bob started losing his hair. He had a vast sunburn and was in great pain riding a bus away from ground zero. Carter complained of the pain after the bomb blast. He was transferred to a psychiatric place and locked up for days. Carter was threatened with treason if he told anyone about his atom bomb experience. At the time of his interview with Gallagher, he used a wheelchair. He described himself and one of his sons as clinically depressed.
The Role of Government and the Scientific Community in Raising Awareness
The United State government has a responsibility to compensate the survivors and their spouses, children and grandchildren. Not all American citizens who were exposed to radiation from atomic bomb blasts from 1945 to 1962 have been compensated. There is a Downwinders Claims available to some cancer survivors who lived in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah.
The links below will you to U.S. government sites outlining the benefits and requirements for the programs.
Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, but not New Mexico
At present, downwinder groups are organizing to expand the coverage of compensation for atom bomb tests. Radiation caused thousands of people who have long-term health consequences, including cancer and genetic damage.
New Mexico citizens who experienced the effects of the bomb testing are not included in compensation maps. I have shown in this post, all of New Mexico was blanketed with the fallout from the Trinity test.
However, in the New Mexico News (July 28, 2023), there was a report that lawmakers on Capitol Hill are closer to getting reparation for New Mexicans. Thousands were affected by the detonation of the first atomic bomb at the Trinity site 78 years ago. Through the work of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortiums, leaders of the group say that New Mexicans should be eligible for benefits after suffering the effects of atomic bomb testing radiation. The U.S. Senate passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to extend and expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to include New Mexicans.
Tina Cordova, the co-founder of the Downwinders Consortiums, says that compensation should not only be for down winders but for uranium miners who were subjected to radiation and downwinders.
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