Tina Cordova is intimately familiar with the legacy of the atomic bomb. Her hometown, Tularosa, New Mexico, is just thirty-four miles downwind from the Trinity Test Site, where Manhattan Project scientists first detonated what they called “the Gadget.” When both of her great-grandfathers, who were in Tularosa during the blast, succumbed to stomach cancer ten years later, it was just the beginning of her family’s troubles.

In early May, Cordova stood outside the U.S. Capitol alongside Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Benjamin Ray Lujan (D-NM) to urge the House to take up a bill, passed in the Senate, to extend and expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which was set to expire on June 7. “I’m the fourth generation in my family since 1945 to have cancer. And this,” she said as she held up a picture of her twenty-three-year-old niece, diagnosed with thyroid cancer, “is what the fifth generation looks like.”

“Woe to those that live in largely uninhabited areas.”

Enacted in 1990, RECA acknowledged and compensated American victims of the U.S. nuclear program. Between 1945 and 1962, the U.S. conducted 200 above-ground tests in the southwest and Pacific. These tests required the labor of thousands of uranium miners — mostly from the Navajo Nation — and the obliviousness of thousands more civilians living downwind. For decades, the government failed to warn the public of the hazards associated with radiation exposure, insisting that the bomb tests were safely conducted in “largely uninhabited areas,” prompting former Secretary of the Interior Tom Udall to cite an anonymous uranium miner: “Woe to those that live in largely uninhabited areas.”

When RECA passed, it was a significant, but narrow, victory. The bill offered partial restitution to a limited number of downwinders in Nevada, Utah and Arizona, and only pre-1971 uranium miners. Post-‘71 miners, as well as downwinders from New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Guam, and other parts of Nevada, Arizona and Utah, were excluded. In December 2023, a nine-year extension and expansion of RECA passed the senate with broad bipartisan support. Co-sponsored by Senators Lujan and Hawley, the bill expands coverage to neglected groups, increases victim compensation from $50,000 to $100,000, and funds a study on how to provide healthcare to victims. Crucially for Cordova, the bill marks the first time in eighty years that the government acknowledged the devastating, ongoing impact of that first test in New Mexico.

Trinity was unlike any other nuclear test. To help ensure that the nuclear reaction at the heart of the bomb would occur, it was packed with thirteen pounds of plutonium, far more than experiments suggested was necessary. When it was detonated just 100 feet above the ground, it created conditions that have been likened to a “dirty bomb.” Only three pounds of plutonium fissioned; the rest was incinerated, fusing with the sand, vegetation and animals surrounding it, rising high enough into the stratosphere to spread over thousands of square miles.

It wasn’t until 2006 that the Department of Energy admitted the danger to Trinity downwinders, conceding that Trinity “posed the most significant hazard of the Manhattan Project.” Four years later, a CDC report found that New Mexicans were exposed to radiation levels 10,000 times higher than currently allowed, and were “neither warned before…the blast, informed of health hazards afterward, nor evacuated before, during, or after the test.”

For 19 years, Cordova has worked to unearth Trinity’s dreadful legacy. In 2005, she founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which has collected over 1,200 health statements from downwinders, documenting an astonishing legacy of stomach, thyroid, brain and pancreatic cancers, and other illnesses.

Despite broad bipartisan support, on June 7, the House allowed the program to lapse. House Republicans cited the $50 billion price tag and refused to take it up. When all three New Mexico representatives attempted to attach it to this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, the House Rules Committee rejected the amendment in a 9-4 party-line vote.

The position defies logic. The Sentinel Nuclear Deterrence Act of 2023, which extends the life of the U.S.’s arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles, has cost taxpayers $150 billion since 2015, with an additional $130 billion price tag over the next decade according to the U.S. Air Force. Meanwhile, the $2.5 billion paid out over the entire 33-year lifespan of RECA is less than one percent of the $50 billion paid annually over that same period to maintain the nation’s nuclear arsenal. And that’s to say nothing of the $10 trillion the U.S. has spent on nuclear defense since the Manhattan Project began.

"The bill for this radiation has been paid,” he said. “It's been paid by the American people. . . They're the ones who are dying."

For the $2.5 billion already paid out by RECA, over 40,000 victims received compensation. Accounting for the increased individual compensation under the expansion, $50 billion dollars could potentially compensate 400,000 additional people over the next ten years. That would still fall short of compensating all of the potential victims, considering that a half-million people resided within the 150-mile blast radius of Trinity alone. “It’s a pittance and an embarrassment,” Cordova told me.

Senator Hawley was quick to call out his fellow Republicans on the senate floor. "The bill for this radiation has been paid,” he said. “It's been paid by the American people. . . They're the ones who are dying. They're the ones who are having to forgo cancer treatments for their children . . . because their government has exposed them to this radiation negligently . . . It's time the government bore its share." He described the House’s failure to act “a major betrayal.”

Extending and expanding RECA is about more than financial compensation. It’s about accountability. The government needs to acknowledge the pain and suffering it has caused to all of its citizens harmed as a result of the nuclear weapons industry. The wounds have not only been physical and financial, but psychological. “They lied to us,” Cordova told me. “Our government’s main role is to protect its citizens, and they did the opposite. They harmed us.” Failure to pass this legislation amounts to one more harm, one more denial, one more historic injustice.

This article originally appeared in Counterpunch. It has since been condensed and updated to reflect the bill’s current status.

Stewart Sinclair is staff writer for Anthropocene Alliance and the author of Juggling (Duke University Press, 2023), and Space Rover (Bloomsbury, 2024).