From ‘atomic summer’ to no nukes?

In the article (“Trinity Site memorial replica taken in ‘heist,’ ” June 28), there was the statement that the staged removal of a replica obelisk identical to the one at the Trinity Site in Alamogordo (which was egregiously displayed downtown and rightfully the cause of controversy) “brought to a close the strange episode of what some are calling an ‘atomic summer’ of nuclearthemed events, shows and exhibitions.”

Please, let us not forget that July 16 marked 73 years since the Trinity test, the detonation of the first atomic bomb on Earth. We have just passed the anniversaries of the bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945; and Thursday, Aug. 9, Nagasaki.

You’ve probably never heard of Kyoko Hayashi. She lived through the bombing of Nagasaki when she was 15 and wrote about it, beginning in her 30s, until she died last year. Years ago, she was compelled to travel here to New Mexico, to see where the bomb began. You can read about her pilgrimage in the book From Trinity to Trinity, translated by Eiko Otake (2010), and I hope you will.

Looking over the New Mexican landscape at Trinity, where the plutoniummodel bomb like the one dropped on Nagasaki was first detonated, she writes: “From this point in July, fifty years ago, the flash of light of the atomic bomb ran all directions in the desert. … Without time to defend and fight back, the wilderness was forced into silence. … Until now as I stand at the Trinity Site, I have thought it was we humans who were the first atomic bomb victims on Earth. I was wrong. Here are my senior hibakusha [survivors of the atomic bombings]. They are here but cannot cry or yell. Tears filled my eyes.”

I am grateful to the Santa Fe Opera for catalyzing a crucial local conversation this summer by producing Doctor Atomic in collaboration with local Pueblo people and Downwinders who have suffered from and lived with the effects of the Trinity test and the ongoing nuclear production conducted at Los Alamos National Laboratory. I am perhaps more grateful still to Jennifer Marley and Kayleigh Warren for writing the article, “Doctor Atomic and Nuclear Colonialism of Tewa Lands in Northern New Mexico” (available via theRedNation. org), which gives voice to the “Tewa perspective” not heard on the opera stage. I learned much from it, including the fact that, “Over 18,000 acres of Pueblo lands were lost in U.S. courts at the start of the Manhattan Project, which signifies the transition into what scholar Joseph P. Masco calls the ‘plutonium economy.’ ”

Recently, at Ashley Pond Park in Los Alamos, a small group of us gathered in honor of Hiroshima Day. We performed slow movement from 8:15 a.m. (the time the bomb was dropped in Hiroshima, in local time) to 8:15 p.m. as a ritual of what Eiko Otake calls “sustained mourning.”

In honor of all those living the with a legacy of harm left by Trinity, by Los Alamos; the effects of ongoing nuclear production in New Mexico, primarily the people of the Eight Northern Pueblos; the hibakusha of Japan; those killed both instantly and slowly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as Hayashi Kyoko puts it, “deprived of their own personal deaths;” for the future ones and, truly, for all of our sakes, please — may this summer’s dialogue spark a meaningful and ongoing conversation wherein we listen to the voices and perspectives we have not yet heard; where we even listen for those forced into silence, without time to defend or to fight back. May it continue to be an “atomic summer” in this sense, and fall and on from there, until we imagine into being a nuclear-free world.