Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium
In Pursuit of Justice for All Those Who Were DamagedSEEKING JUSTICE FOR THE UNKNOWING, UNWILLING, AND UNCOMPENSATEDINNOCENT VICTIMS OF THE JULY 16, 1945 TRINITY TEST IN SOUTHWESTERN NEW MEXICO   Please call NOW!Congresswoman Teresa Leger-Fernandez and thank her for all the work she has invested in getting RECA heard, passed and moved on from the House. Rep. Teresa has been our RECA champion since the first day she took office! WASHINGTON DC OFFICE1510 Longworth House Office BuildingWashington, DC 20515Phone: (202) 225-6190 LAS VEGAS OFFICE1103 National Avenue- Room 101Las Vegas, NM 87701Phone: (505) 570-7558 SANTA FE DISTRICT OFFICE120 S Federal PlSuite 323Santa Fe, NM 87501Phone: (505) 428-4680   Trinity Nuclear Test’s FalloutReached 46 States,Canada and Mexico,Study FindsThe research shows that the first atomic bomb explosion’s effects had been underestimated, and could help more “downwinders”press for federal compensation. By Lesley M. Blume July 20, 2023 In July 1945, as J. Robert Oppenheimer and the other researchers of the Manhattan Project prepared to test their brand-new atomic bomb in a New Mexico desert, they knew relatively little about how that mega-weapon would behave. On July 16, when the plutonium-implosion device was set off atop a hundred-foot metal tower in a test code-named “Trinity,” the resultant blast was much stronger than anticipated. The irradiated mushroom cloud also went many times higher into the atmosphere than expected: some 50,000 to 70,000 feet. Where it would ultimately go was anyone’s guess. A new study, released on Thursday ahead of submission to a scientific journal for peer review, shows that the cloud and its fallout went farther than anyone in the Manhattan Project had imagined in 1945. Using state-of-the-art modeling software and recently uncovered historical weather data, the study’s authors say that radioactive fallout from the Trinity test reached 46 states, Canada and Mexico within 10 days of detonation. “It’s a huge finding and, at the same time, it shouldn’t surprise anyone,” said the study’s lead author, Sébastien Philippe, a researcher and scientist at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. The study also reanalyzed fallout from all 93 aboveground U.S. atomic tests in Nevada and created a map depicting composite deposition of radioactive material across the contiguous U.S. (The team also hopes to study U.S. tests over the Pacific Ocean in the future). How much of Trinity’s fallout still remain at original deposition sites across the country is difficult to calculate, said Susan Alzner, an author of the study and the co-founder of shift7, an organization that coordinated the study’s research. The study documents deposition as it originally hit the ground in 1945. “It’s a frozen-in-time image,” she said. https://vp.nyt.com/video/2023/07/20/110154_1_21trinity-fallout-vid_wg_720p.mp4 Estimated radionuclide deposition density for the first 10 days after detonation of the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, at 5:29 a.m. local time. Credit: Sébastien Philippe, Susan Alzner, Gilbert P. Compo, Mason Grimshaw, Megan SmithThe findings could be cited by advocates aiming to increase the number of people eligible for compensation by the federal government for potential exposure to radiation from atmospheric nuclear explosions. The drift of the Trinity cloud was monitored by Manhattan Project physicists and doctors, but they underestimated its reach. “They were aware that there were radioactive hazards, but they were thinking about acute risk in the areas around the immediate detonation site,” Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, said. They had little understanding, he said, about how the radioactive materials could embed in ecosystems, near and far. “They were not really thinking about effects of low doses on large populations, which is exactly what the fallout problem is.” At the time, Dr. Stafford L. Warren, a Manhattan Project physician specializing in nuclear medicine, reported to Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, leader of the Manhattan Project, that the Trinity cloud “remained towering over the northeast corner of the site for several hours.” Soon, he added, “various levels were seen to move in different directions.” Dr. Warren assured General Groves that an assessment of the fallout’s reach could be undertaken later onhorsedback. In the decades that followed, a lack of crucial data has bedeviled assessments and attempts studies of the Trinity test’s fallout. The U.S. had no national monitoring stations in place in 1945 to track the fallout, Dr. Philippe said. Plus, essential historical weather and atmospheric data was available only from 1948 onward. Remodeling fallout from tests in Nevada — starting in 1951 — was easier, but Trinity remained frustratingly difficult to reanalyze. In the decades that followed, a lack of crucial data has bedeviled assessments and attempted studies of the Trinity test’s fallout. The U.S. had no national monitoring stations in place in 1945 to track the fallout, Dr. Philippe said. Plus, essential historical weather and atmospheric data was available only from 1948 onward. Remodeling fallout from tests in Nevada — starting in 1951 — was easier, but Trinity remained frustratingly difficult to reanalyze. “The data sets for the Nevada tests and the available data that we could possibly find for Trinity were not comparable,” Ms. Alzner said. “You couldn’t put them on the same map. We decided to keep pushing.”Determined to fill in the gaps, the team started the study about 18 months ago. Dr. Philippe has extensive background in modeling fallout and was an author of a similar project in 2021 that documented the effects from French nuclear tests. A breakthrough came in March, when Ms. Alzner and Megan Smith, another co-founder of shift7 and a former United States chief technology officer in the Obama administration, contacted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There, Gilbert P. Compo, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado and the NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory, told the team that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts had only a week earlier released historical data that charted weather patterns extending 30,000 feet or higher above Earth’s surface. “For the first time, we had the most accurate hourly reconstruction of the weather back to 1940, around the world,” said Dr. Compo, who became a co-author on the study. “Every single event that puts something in the air, no matter what it is, can now be tracked, by the hour.” Using the new data and software built by NOAA, Dr. Philippe then reanalyzed Trinity’s fallout. And while the study’s authors acknowledge limitations and uncertainties within their calculations, they maintain that “our estimates likely remain conservatively low.” “It’s a very comprehensive, well-executed study,” said M. V. Ramana, professor and Simons chair in disarmament, global and human security at the University of British Columbia, who was not involved in the study. Dr. Ramana was unsurprised by the study’s findings about Trinity. “I expected that the old estimates were understating what was actually deposited,” he said. The results show that New Mexico was heavily affected by Trinity’s fallout. Computations by Dr. Philippe and his colleagues show the cloud’s trajectory primarily spreading up over northeast New Mexico and a part of the cloud circling to the south and west of ground zero over the next few days. The researchers wrote that there are “locations in New Mexico where radionuclide deposition reached levels on par with Nevada.”  A map depicting composite deposition of radioactive material across the contiguous U.S. from the Trinity test in New Mexico and from 93 atmospheric tests in Nevada.Credit…Sébastien Philippe, Susan Alzner, Gilbert P. Compo, Mason Grimshaw, Megan SmithTrinity’s fallout, Dr. Philippe says, accounts for 87 percent of total deposition found across New Mexico, which also received deposition from Nevada’s aboveground tests. The study also found that Socorro County — where the Trinity test took place — has the fifth highest deposition per county of all counties in the United States. Trinity test “downwinders” — a term describing people who have lived near nuclear test sites and may have been exposed to deadly radioactive fallout — have never been eligible for compensation under the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). It has provided over $2.5 billion in payments to nuclear workers in much of the Western U.S. and to downwinders who were located near the Nevada test site and may have developed cancer or other diseases as a result of radiation exposure. “Despite the Trinity test taking place in New Mexico, many New Mexicans were left out of the original RECA legislation and nobody has ever been able to explain why,” said Senator Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat. He has helped lead efforts in Congress to expand and extend the legislation, currently due to sunset in 2024. Census data from 1940 shows that as many as 500,000 people were living within a 150-mile radius of the test site. Some families lived as close as 12 miles away, according to the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. Yet no civilians were warned about the test ahead of time, and they weren’t evacuated before or after the test. “This new information about the Trinity bomb is monumental and a long time coming,” Tina Cordova, a co-founder of the consortium, said. “We’ve been waiting for an affirmation of the histories told by generations of people from Tularosa who witnessed the Trinity bomb and talked about how the ash fell from the sky for days afterward.” The study also documents significant deposition in Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and Idaho, as well as dozens of federally-recognized tribal lands, potentially strengthening the case for people seeking expanded compensation in those areas. Although Dr. Wellerstein said that he approaches such reanalyses of historical fallout with a certain amount of uncertainty, partly because of the age of the data, he said there is value in such studies by keeping nuclear history and its legacy in the public discourse. “The extent to which America nuked itself is not completely appreciated still, to this day, by most Americans, especially younger Americans,” he said. A correction was made on July 20, 2023: An earlier version of this article misspelled a researcher’s surname. He is Sébastien Philippe, not Phillippe.Check out these links to more media coverage andinterviews with Trinity Downwinders. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/outside-in/id1061222770?i=1000621735834 https://sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/in-the-shadow-of-oppenheimer/ Collateral damage: American civilian survivors of the 1945 Trinity test https://apnews.com/article/oppenheimer-atomic-bomb-radiation-legacy-new-mexico- https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/field-trip/ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/science/trinity-nuclear-test-atomic-bomb-oppenheimer.htm We Are All Downwinders Visit our website  “There is nothing comparable in our history to the deceit and the lying that took place as a matter of official Government policy in order to protect this industry. Nothing was going to stop them and they were willing to kill our own people.”–Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior from 1961 to 1969, under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and father of Senator Tom Udall.    http://www.TAMACC.orgCLICK HERE:Interview withTina Cordova andPaul Pino  *To help us increase this podcast’s audience:Listen, Like and Post Your Comments. That’s how it works. Tina Cordova, Co-founder and Director of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium (TBDC)  Paul Pino, Member of the TBDC Steering Committee  Tina Cordova testifies before US Senate Judiciary in 2018. Seated behind and to right of Tina is Barbara Kent, Downwinder survivor seen in photo at right.  Barbara is in the middle of this group of girls who attended a dance camp in Ruidoso, New Mexico in 1945. They woke on July 16 to play in the “snow” falling from the July sky. Barbara is the only girl at that dance camp who lived to see her 40th birthday. Barbara is now 80+. NM delegation travels to DC for Senate Judiciary hearing on RECALeft to right: Therese Perea, Andrea Steves, Christy Pino, Doris Walters, Livia Cordova Landrum,Bernice Gutierrez, Tina Cordova, Louisa Lopez, Joni Arends, Holly Beaumont,Barbara Kent, Laura Greenwood, Casey Kent, Myrriah Gomez. Best Way to Honor Downwinders? Extend, Expand RECA BY MIA MONTOYA HAMMERSLEY- STAFF ATTORNEY, N.M. ENVIRONMENTAL LAW CENTER Jan. 27, 2022 January 27 is the National Day of Remembrance for Downwinders. Mia Montoya Hammersley is an Indigenous water and environmental attorney, member of the Piro, Manso, Tiwa Tribe and a Yoeme (Yaqui) descendant.  Every summer when I was growing up, I looked forward to the time I would spend with my family in Tularosa. A quiet oasis, these weeks were spent picking fruit from the trees in my grandparents’ yard and racing empty banana split boats through the irrigation ditches with my cousins. My grandfather, Demetrio “Dee” Herrera Montoya, served as mayor of Tularosa for many years. He passed away in 2010 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He and my grandmother were children when the world’s first nuclear weapon was detonated on July 16, 1945, approximately 45 miles from their homes in the Tularosa Basin. This nuclear test, code named “Trinity” by Los Alamos Laboratory Director J. Robert Oppenheimer was carried out without the knowledge or consent of the approximately 500,000 people within a 150-mile radius of the blast zone. The blast took place in the White Sands, a place sacred to many Indigenous communities and rich with cultural resources such as the recently discovered 23,000-year-old human footprints. Oral histories from the time of the detonation tell of how ash fell from the sky like snow for days afterward, blanketing entire communities and contaminating crops, drinking water, soil and livestock grazing sites with toxic radiation. The history of World War II that I learned growing up never included the fact the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were preceded by a nuclear test that exposed American citizens, my own family and community, to harmful radiation. The cost was immense; many people lost their lives to cancer, and families struggled with the medical bills and travel required for treatment. In the 77 years since the Trinity test, the U.S.government has never recognized the tremendous harm to the communities enlisted into service of our country without their consent. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act fund provides compensation to individuals who contracted certain cancers or other serious diseases resulting from exposure to radiation released during above-ground nuclear weapons tests or from exposure to radiation during employment in underground uranium mines. The original RECA is due to sunset in July. However, Senate 2798, sponsored by Sen. Ben Ray Luján, and (the identical) House 5338, sponsored by Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, are being considered as amendments to extend and expand RECA. (The House version) recently passed the House Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support. Everyone in New Mexico and the nation should be standing together to ensure these bills are passed. Over the past 31 years, the RECA fund has paid out approximately $2.5 billion to impacted individuals, while the U.S. government spends approximately $50 billion per year to maintain our nuclear arsenal. The expense of extending and expanding RECA would be nominal in comparison. As with other environmental injustices, Indigenous communities and communities of color like mine have shouldered the greatest costs of nuclear weapons development, from uranium mining to nuclear testing. To those who believe the Trinity test was a necessary cost to safeguard our national security, the time has come to recognize and compensate downwinder communities for their sacrifice. Whenever I drive by the White Sands, I can’t help but think about the devastation caused by the Trinity test not so long ago. But I also think of the time spent with my cousins, sledding down the dunes. Link to the RECA bill with list of current co-sponsors: www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/5338?r=10&s=1 “President Ronald Reagan believed that nuclear weapons are immoral, and so he sought their complete elimination, and I agreed – and still dowith deep conviction. In the end, this is a matter of profound morality.”–George P. Schultz, US Secretary of State 1982-89  Some of the highest cancer mortality rates in the nation are found in New Mexico. The cancer mortality rates for the four counties surrounding the Trinity Test Site(Lincoln, Otero, Sierra and Socorro) are three to eight times higher than the national rate. The data we are collecting using Health Surveys supports the information provided. The data above was posted on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website. That data has since been remove from their website.  When Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the atomic bomb, witnessed the first atomic inferno called Trinity, the unexpected and unnerving thought that came to him was a sentence from the BHAGAVAD GITA: Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.  Donate to the Cause. The Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium needs your financial assistance to continue the important work that we have started.Please make a donation in any amount by visiting our website and clicking on DONATE at the top of the page. You do not need to have a PayPal account to donate. Or make checks payable to: TBDC Visit our website Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium www.trinitydownwinders.com 7518 2nd St. NW / Albuquerque, NM 87107 Phone 505-897-6787 / Fax 505-890-0157 / tcordova@queston.net Newsletter Editor: Holly Beaumonth abeaumont@aol.com |
| Interfaith Worker Justice – NM | PO Box 23468, Santa Fe, NM 87502 |
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The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner
How Oppenheimer’s First Nuclear Test Changed the World—Forever
Survivors Of The Trinity Nuclear Test Weren’t Warned — Then Were Lied To After
How They Hid the Bomb: 78 Years After the Trinity Nuclear Test
Cancer Risk Projection Study for the Trinity Nuclear Test—Community Summary
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