◆ ‘Downwinders’ of Trinity test bring their case to the Capitol.
The government’s refusal to acknowledge dire health effects that the world’s first atomic blast inflicted on many New Mexicans 75 years ago should raise concerns about U.S. leaders’ current push to boost the nuclear arsenal, activists said Friday at the state Capitol.
Speakers decried what they called a renewed nuclear arms race by leaders who ignore the lessons of history, including impacts of the Trinity test on nearby “downwind” communities such as Socorro, Carrizozo and Tularosa.
“My job today is to express to you how important it is to reflect on the idea that it has been 75 years ... since people were greatly harmed in the state of New Mexico,” said Tina Cordova, co-founder of Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium.
Cordova and other activists spoke at the 11th annual Witness for the People event in the Capitol Rotunda.
They used the upcoming 75th anniversary of the atomic detonation on July 16, 1945, in what is now the White Sands Missile Range to underscore their call for nuclear disarmament.
It’s been widely reported in recent years that the government underestimated how widespread the radioactive fallout from the blast would be. Military officials did not evacuate nearby communities, and because the test was part of the secretive Manhattan Project near the end of World War II, they claimed at the time that the explosion people heard happened at an ammunition dump in a remote range.
For decades, the federal government conducted no comprehensive studies on the health of residents living near the Trinity site and whether rising cancer rates, infant mortality and children’s diseases might be linked to the blast’s radioactive fallout.
The National Cancer Institute began belated research about five years ago surveying 210 elderly downwinders about lifestyles and diets that might have led to increased doses of internal radiation from the Trinity blast fallout. The institute has yet to release a report.
Radiation affected hundreds of thousands of people living within 100 miles of the site, as well as subsequent generations, Cordova said. She recently heard of a 4-year-old girl in San Antonio, N.M. — another town not far from Trinity — dying of cancer.
The girl is part of the sixth generation of downwinders since 1945 to be diagnosed with cancer, Cordova said, arguing there’s a genetic component that gets passed to offspring.
“We will never see an end of the invasion of our environment that took place,” she said.
An untold number of people were also exposed to nuclear fallout from tests in Nevada that took place until the early 1960s, Cordova said.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act offers funds to help cover medical care for those who can show their health suffered because of radiation, whether it was mining and processing uranium or exposure to fallout from the nuclear testing before 1963.
Passed by Congress in 2000, the program is set to expire in 2022, after which victims won’t be able to seek benefits. Cordova said she and others are working to amend the law so the medical benefits are extended.
Ken Mayers of Veterans for Peace said the atomic bomb detonated at Trinity is small compared to today’s more powerful, fusion-based warheads.
In 2017, the United Nations adopted a treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons, but it requires 50 countries to ratify it before it can go into effect internationally, Mayers said. So far, 35 countries have approved it.
But efforts at nuclear de-escalation have been negated by “global disruptions,” Mayers said. That includes the U.S. withdrawing from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia and the Iran nuclear deal, he said.
The rise in international tensions and weapons development are among factors that contributed to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists setting the Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight, the most perilous point it has ever reached, he said.
In the late 1980s, the détente between the U.S. and the then Soviet Union led to a reduction in the arms race and a ban on nuclear testing in 1992, said Mayers, adding that a similar de-escalation is possible.