[One film can’t do it all, but I can’t help feeling that the
retelling of this story, as it stands, is a missed opportunity.]
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WHAT ‘OPPENHEIMER’ DOESN’T TELL YOU ABOUT THE TRINITY TEST  
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Tina Cordova
July 30, 2023
New York Times
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_ One film can’t do it all, but I can’t help feeling that the
retelling of this story, as it stands, is a missed opportunity. _

A sign once carried by a victim of radiation from the 1945 atomic
bomb test in New Mexico on display at the New Mexico History Museum in
Santa Fe in 2019., Robert Alexander/Getty Images

 

_Ms. Cordova, the co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders
Consortium, wrote from Albuquerque. [OPINION - GUEST ESSAY]_

July is a hard month for a lot of us here in New Mexico, where
thousands of people’s lives were upended by the test of the
world’s first nuclear bomb. The events of July 16, 1945, weigh
heavily on us. And why wouldn’t they? They changed everything. The
people of New Mexico were the first human test subjects of the
world’s most powerful weapon.

This July has been more tense than usual, as our community waited for
the release of “Oppenheimer” — and some recognition of what we
have endured over the last 78 years. When I watched the film at a
packed screening in Santa Fe, I saw that wasn’t to be. The
three-hour movie tells only part of the story of the Manhattan
Project, which developed the bomb, and conducted the test code-named
Trinity that day in July. It does not explore in any depth the costs
of deciding to test the bomb in a place where my family and many
others had lived for generations.

One film can’t do it all, but I can’t help feeling that the
retelling of this story, as it stands, is a missed opportunity. A new
generation of Americans is learning about J. Robert Oppenheimer and
the Manhattan Project, and, like their parents, they won’t hear much
about how American leaders knowingly risked and caused harm to the
health of their fellow citizens in the name of war. My community and I
are being left out of the narrative again.

The area of southern New Mexico where the Trinity test occurred was
not, contrary to the popular account, an uninhabited, desolate expanse
of land. There were more than 13,000 New Mexicans living within a
50-mile radius. Many of those children, women, and men were not warned
before or after the test. Eyewitnesses have told me they believed they
were experiencing the end of the world. They didn’t reflect on the
Bhagavad Gita, as Oppenheimer said he did
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simply dropped to their knees and recited the Hail Mary in Spanish.

For days after, they said, ash fell from the sky
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contaminated with 10 pounds of plutonium. A 2010 study
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the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that after the
test, radiation levels near some homes in the area reached “almost
10,000 times what is currently allowed in public areas.”

That fallout has had devastating health consequences
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While I know of no one who lost their life during the test, the
organization I co-founded has documented many instances of families in
New Mexico with four and five generations of cancers since the bomb
was detonated. My own family is typical: I am the fourth generation in
my family to have had cancer since 1945. My 23-year-old niece has just
been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. She is a college student studying
art. Now her life, too, has been upended.

Despite this, New Mexicans who may have been exposed to radioactive
fallout from Trinity have never been eligible for compensation under
the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, a 1990 federal law that has
provided billions to people exposed during subsequent tests on U.S.
soil or during uranium mining.

“Oppenheimer” leaves out other stories, too. The Manhattan Project
and the nuclear weapons industry used the promise of a better life to
entice thousands of people in the Southwest into the uranium mines
that supplied the Manhattan Project. The miners went to work each day
without adequate safety gear, while supervisors wore it from head to
toe. Miners seldom left the mines during their shifts, even to eat
lunch. They drank the contaminated water inside the mines when they
were allowed to take breaks.

Many of the farmers of the Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico,
after being displaced through eminent domain so that the Los Alamos
laboratory could be built, were bused up the mountain to the lab site
to do the dirtiest jobs, including building the roads, the bridges,
the facilities. When those were complete, many were given new jobs at
the lab, including janitorial work. Their wives and other Hispanic and
Native American women were enlisted as domestic workers who cleaned
the houses, cooked the meals, filled the baby bottles, and changed the
diapers in the remote compound while the bomb was being developed.

Their sacrifices are still part of our lives today. I wept during the
scenes in the film leading up to the detonation and during the test
itself. I could hardly breathe, my heart was beating so fast. I
thought about my dad, who was 4 years old that day. His town,
Tularosa, was idyllic back then. After the test, after radioactive ash
covered his home, he carried on as he always had drinking fresh milk,
eating fresh fruit and vegetables that grew in the contaminated soil.
By age 64, he had developed three cancers that he didn’t have risk
factors for, two of which were primary oral cancers. He died at the
age of 71.

“Oppenheimer” portrays the scientist as the flawed man that he
was. But the film doubles down on the silence we’ve been living with
for eight decades about the loss of life and health that was a
consequence of the development and testing of the atomic bomb. While
the families in my community continue their wait for some wider
recognition of what they endured — including coverage by the
Radiation Exposure Compensation Act — we are left with a film that
declines to bear witness to our truth.

This, too, is the legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the government
he worked for. I will never be able to forgive them for wrecking our
lives and walking away.

_TINA CORDOVA is a seventh-generation New Mexican, born and raised in
Tularosa in south-central New Mexico. In 2005, she co-founded the
Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium (www.trinitydownwinders.com
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to the negative health effects of the Trinity test._

_THE NEW YORK TIMES. A gift you or they will open every day. 
Subscribe to the New York Times.
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* nuclear weapons
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* fallout
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* cancer
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* movies
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* Robert Oppenheimer
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* Radiation poisoning
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* Mexican Americans
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* Native Americans
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