Satya Vatti
US bomb test victims still seek justice Before the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan, it conducted tests that caused serious health issues to New Mexico residents, who remain uncompensated
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n July 16, 1945, the firstever nuclear bomb was tested in New Mexico, in the Southwestern United States. The detonation was code-named “Trinity”. It was the day that would seal the fate of many Americans living in the surrounding areas for generations to come. Seventy miles from what became known as ground zero – the Trinity test site – Genoveva’s family lived on a ranch just outside the village of Capitan in New Mexico. Genoveva was born the year after the blast. Now 74, she recalls how her family remembers the day that would change their lives forever. Genoveva’s sisters had come to visit their father and pregnant mother at the ranch. At 5:30 a.m., as dawn broke, the sky suddenly went pitch dark. Having no other point of reference, they mistook the abnormally loud roaring and rumbling in the sky for thunder. The entire house began to shake. Fear-stricken, the family huddled together in a corner. When the sky cleared, her father stepped outside the house and found himself being
showered with a white powder. The powder was everywhere and covered everything around them. Nothing escaped it, not the cows the family had raised, or the vegetables in the garden, or the rainwater they stored in the absence of running water. Like other families who went through this experience, Genoveva’s family also dusted off the powder and consumed their vegetables and the stored water. The blast produced so much energy that it incinerated everything it touched and formed a fireball that rose more than 12 kilometers into the atmosphere. The fireball created ash that snowed over the communities surrounding the blast site. The people did not know it then, but this ash that covered thousands of square miles was the radioactive fallout from the explosion.
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read gripped the communities in Tularosa Basin who either witnessed or experienced the phenomenon they could not make sense of. Meanwhile, the immediate reaction of the staff of the Manhattan
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Project, which created the bomb, was of “surprise, joy, and relief”. Paul Pino, Genoveva’s cousin, who was born nine years after the Trinity blast, says that his family, which lived 33 miles from the blast site, was one of many who were unaware of what had transpired on that day. In the days and months leading up to the blast, US government officials did not notify anyone who lived in the region about the imminent nuclear bomb test. Nobody in the Tularosa Basin was evacuated to safety. In the aftermath of the nuclear test, officials began to cement a false narrative into the consciousness of the nation; saying the region was remote and uninhabited. Tens of thousands of people, in fact, lived in the Tularosa Basin in 1945. For a long time, the people of the basin believed that the blast was an ammunition explosion. “We were lied to by the government,” said Pino. It takes 24,000 years for half of the radioactive plutonium used in the Trinity bomb to decay. The people of the region have inhaled and ingested radioactive particles for 75 years because of environ-
