The downwinders: New Mexicans sickened by atomic bomb testing fight for compensation
Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernández watched Oppenheimer – a top contender at Sunday’s Academy Awards and Christopher Nolan’s treatment on the physicist who guided testing of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico – months ago.
And soon after the scene where Cillian Murphy, as J Robert Oppenheimer, peered through safety goggles in a fortified shed at the huge mushroom cloud, the New Mexico Democrat realized “the untold story” lay on the cutting room floor.
“We see nothing on the impact the bomb had on people living in northern New Mexico,” Fernández said. “There’s no way [Manhattan Project physicists] could not have been aware of the radiation’s impact on the communities downwind of the Trinity bomb site.”
As a 17th-generation descendant of Mexicans who became New Mexicans, Fernández, 65, speaks of “people living off the land, hanging their clothes, coated with [radioactive] ash, chickens picking in the yard, the lingering effects of what fell onto the ground and crops and was absorbed by animals and people” – for decades to come after the testing of the bomb.
Fernández was awakened to the vast reach of the radiation after winning her congressional seat in 2020, meeting constituents and befriending Tina Cordova, the leader of “downwinders” – survivors and descendants of multigenerational illnesses discovered well after the 1945 Trinity bomb.
Cordova, who earned a master’s degree in biology before becoming the owner of an Albuquerque roofing company, is a survivor of thyroid cancer. Her 24-year-old niece has also grappled with the same condition – and is a fifth-generation family member afflicted with one form of cancer or another.
Cordova is the protagonist of Lois Lipman’s award-winning documentary, First We Bombed New Mexico, which also played a role in Fernández’s grasp of bomb-related injustices.
Cordova was not yet born when radioactive ash settled across a vast area of the state’s western desert. But her father, Anastacio Cordova, was four at the time, living in Tularosa, a farming village 45 miles from the bomb site. The genetic line of cancers began with him.
In sharing the details of her family’s plight, Cordova said: “I sensed a level of sadness in [Fernández]. She said she had lost family members but didn’t go into detail.”
A non-smoker, Anastacio had part of his tongue removed at 61, before treatment for the spread of cancer necessitating “high levels of radiation in his head and neck”, Cordova said.
“All his teeth had to be extracted,” she said. “Then he got prostate cancer. Eight years after the primary oral cancer he had a second primary lesion on his tongue. The doctor said they could remove the tumor but he couldn’t have any more radiation because in the first bout with cancer he had been treated with the maximum amount of
radiation.”
Cordova’s father died in 2013 after nine years of illness and repeat trips to Houston’s MD Anderson cancer center.
Listening to the stories of Cordova and other downwinders indeed had resonance for Fernández, the congresswoman said. Her mother came from Colonias, a village in Guadalupe county “within the concentric circles of people exposed to radiation”.
“I am not a downwinder,” Fernández said. “I will not be a claimant” – if pending legislation for survivors, which she has co-sponsored, passes Congress. “These people are part of who I am.
“My maternal grandmother died of leukemia blood cancer. My mother, a non-smoker, died of lung cancer. Both were in their 70s.”
Her maternal grandfather also died of cancer.
She made it a point to say that there was no speculation among her relatives at the time that their illnesses stemmed from the nuclear bomb in New Mexico. But she made clear that their pasts – combined with that of people like Cordova – made her realize “we’ve never as a nation apologized to the people of New Mexico”.
And Fernández, a graduate of Yale and Stanford law school who worked as a public interest attorney before Congress, is working to fix that.
Her efforts come in the form of fighting for passage of a bill first filed by Ben Ray Lujan, Fernandez’s congressional predecessor who was elected to the US Senate in 2020. The now expanded legislative proposal seeks financial compensation – reparations – for downwinders, a category that also extends to Nevadans afflicted from later nuclear testing, victims of uranium pollution in Utah and Missouri, and workers from several other states exposed to radiation from the nuclear testing infrastructure, long cloaked in secrecy.
Fernández is quick to invoke a surreal scene from First We Bombed New Mexico to discuss the legislation: “Little girls dancing around in the ash, tasting it on their tongues, thinking it was summer snow” – in the early aftermath of the bomb testing.
But it’s now more than just the film that is catalyzing support for providing downwinders with long-due compensation after losing so many loved ones to nuclear fallout disease patterns.
The compensation bill championed by Lujan in the Senate and Fernández in the House has earned backing across the political aisle from Missouri’s farright US senator Josh Hawley.
Hawley joined Lujan and Fernández’s ranks last summer after an investigation by the Missouri Independent, MuckRock and the Associated Press uncovered rare cancers as well as autoimmune disorders among St Louis workers who processed uranium used in early stages of the Manhattan Project at the heart of Oppenheimer. There was radioactive waste found in lakes and creeks and groundwater pollution at sites in St Louis county yet to be cleaned.
The bill co-sponsored by Hawley – who gave a clenched fist salute to supporters of former president Donald Trump before they staged the January 6 Capitol attack – is likely one of the few political issues on which the Missouri Republican is likely to agree with the Joe Biden White House.
Biden, too, endorsed the compensation bill which on Thursday passed the Senate 69-31 with a broad bipartisan vote. The measure now goes to the House.
Fernández stressed the coalition is “not questioning the US’s decision to pursue the bomb and nuclear power as part of national security” to end the second world war. But, she said: “We need for victims of that national priority to receive compensation for what they and their families suffered.”
A sequence in First We Bombed
New Mexico poignantly conveys that point.
The former US senator Tom Udall tells Tina Cordova’s group how moved he was to have heard their stories. The film cuts to grainy footage of Tom’s father, Steward Udall, as the US’s secretary of the interior in the 1960s. With a catch in the throat, the elder Udall shows outrage about disease-stricken uranium miners in Utah – then says cynically: “No matter how much they have lied or what harm they may have done, you cannot sue the government.
“As one Atomic Energy Commission official I knew in the [early 1960s] said, ‘Well, if we admit now that we have not told them the truth, they won’t believe anything we said.’”
First We Bombed New Mexico has a private screening for members of Congress. It will be shown at 7pm on 26 March at the Environmental film festival on the American University’s campus in Washington, with Cordova and Lipman taking questions.