Law, Power, and Justice

www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/opinion/international-world/oppenheimer-nuclear-bomb-cancer.html

Excerpts

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.

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.

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

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.