As Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer painstakingly demonstrates, after witnessing the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, J. Robert Oppenheimer, knew the destructive force he had helped to unleash with the Trinity Test in 1945. Almost eighty years later, Americans and people across the globe are still living with the devastating consequences.
The film has been criticized for not including what came after Trinity, but fortunately it is generating a long overdue dialogue about the test’s aftermath—not just the arms race it triggered, but the millions of innocent people around the world, including my family and I, whose lives have been shattered by nuclear weapons production and testing.
US Congress/Public domain
1950-1957 fallout from Nevada nuclear tests. From U.S. Congressional Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, June 1957.
As audiences leave theaters, I want them to think about this: the explosion at Trinity was only the first nuclear bomb detonated on American soil. From 1951 to 1992 during the Cold War, the United States detonated 928 nuclear bombs in the deserts of Nevada, just sixty-five miles from Las Vegas. Hundreds were many times more powerful than those that leveled Hiroshima and 100 were detonated in the open air, spreading radioactive fallout across the entire nation and beyond. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) knew when it moved testing to Nevada that the prevailing winds in the United States would blow eastward and carry fallout with them, but it went ahead with testing there anyway. They hid the truth from the public for decades opting instead for the “judicious handling of public information.” The landmark federal case Allen v. United States concluded in 1984 that the government’s negligence harmed and killed its own citizens.
We have known since a landmark National Cancer Institute study in 1997 that every county in the continental United States received some level of fallout from atmospheric tests in Nevada.
A Princeton study released this July mapped how fallout from Trinity sent lethal clouds of radiation over communities downwind of Los Alamos and into forty-six states and how fallout from ninety-four atmospheric nuclear weapon tests in Nevada spread throughout the country. We have known since a landmark National Cancer Institute study in 1997 that every county in the continental United States received some level of fallout from atmospheric tests in Nevada, exposing 160 million Americans, virtually the entire population at the time and that hot spots occurred in “unpredictable places.” As a result, we were all exposed; we are all downwinders, a term that is typically only applied to communities directly exposed to nuclear fallout in the Southwest.
Just as people on the East Coast and in the Midwest have come to understand the impacts of living downwind of Canada’s wildfire smoke this summer, those of us out West know first-hand how the silent poison from nuclear testing was carried by the wind and fell to the earth. As fallout combined with rain, snow, sleet, and hail, it quickly worked its way into the food chain and into our bodies, making untold numbers of us sick and leaving us to bury the dead.
As a child in Salt Lake City, I was repeatedly exposed. In my twenties, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. In my thirties, I underwent surgery that left me unable to have children. I have been radiated, sliced, and scooped out. I worry desperately with each ache, pain, and lump that I am getting sick again.
Over the years, my older sister and I counted fifty-four people in our childhood neighborhood who developed cancer, tumors, leukemia, and autoimmune disorders.
Over the years, my older sister and I counted fifty-four people in our childhood neighborhood who developed cancer, tumors, leukemia, and autoimmune disorders, including a ten-year-old classmate who died of a brain tumor in 1964 and her four-year-old brother who died a few weeks later of testicular cancer. I later testified at a hearing with their heart-broken mother.
In 2001, my sister died of the autoimmune disorder she had battled for nine years, leaving behind three children. Another sister is fighting a rare stomach cancer. I’m still discovering others with whom I grew up who have developed cancer. The list has mushroomed to include too many friends and loved ones whose lives were cut short through no fault of their own.
Of the downwinders I worked with most closely in Utah, I am the only one still living. I mourn the dead, comfort and advocate for survivors, and feel an enormous responsibility to bring attention to what happened to us at the hands of our own government.
I’ve listened to hundreds of heart-wrenching accounts from survivors not just in the United States, but worldwide—casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; of tests in the Pacific Ocean, Kazakhstan, China, Australia, and elsewhere, as well as atomic veterans, test-site workers, uranium miners, those downwind of plutonium pit production, waste storage, and more. We have suffered—and continue to suffer—because of the reckless actions of our own governments. We are the real legacy of Oppenheimer’s bomb, the collateral damage of the Cold War.
The harm hasn’t ended. The cumulative exposure to radiation can take decades to show up as cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.
The harm hasn’t ended. The cumulative exposure to radiation can take decades to show up as cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. New cancers are diagnosed, cancers return, other health complications arise, medical bills and the emotional toll mount. And because of the long half-lives of many isotopes, the radiation is still present in our ecosystem. We will forever be living with the fallout of nuclear weapons.
All these decades later, few of us who have suffered the consequences have been acknowledged or compensated. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), first passed in 1990, provides some help to downwinders and uranium miners. But the program excludes too many, including those in more populated areas like where my family lived.
National Archives at Boston, Massachusetts/Public domain
Test project personnel don "radsafe" clothing to enter blast area soon after Operation Cue atomic explosion, May 1955.
After decades of working to expand RECA eligibility, an unexpected glimmer of hope came after a last-minute amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that passed in the U.S. Senate on July 27. It would give more downwinder and uranium mining communities, many on tribal lands, access to RECA. This was the product of an inspiring moment of bipartisan cooperation between Senators Ben Ray Lujan, Democrat of New Mexico, Mike Crapo, Republican of Idaho, and Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri.
In addition to extending RECA by nineteen years, the amendment expands the program to cover Idaho, New Mexico, Montana, Colorado, the entire states of Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, and the territory of Guam as well as uranium miners who worked after 1971. At last, it includes Trinity downwinders and residents of Missouri who were exposed to radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project.
While the amendment’s passage is a victory, it is not a done deal. I was encouraged to see President Joe Biden’s words of support to Senator Lujan. Biden stated during a speech in New Mexico that he is “prepared to help in making sure that those people are taken care of.” However, the Senate version must still go through conferencing with the House when Congress reconvenes. If it fails to pass, RECA will expire next June. Time is literally running out each day as more downwinders and uranium miners die. As our government continues to heavily invest in its nuclear arsenal, it is time for Congress and the Administration to include in that cost the damage done to those whose lives have been ruined by the building and testing of these weapons.