Plutonium was a major ingredient in the first nuclear bomb to be detonated successfully, the Trinity test on July 16, 1945 near Socorro, New Mexico. The bomb contained thirteen pounds (5.9 kg) of plutonium, but subsequent measurements of the blast showed that only about three pounds (1.4 kg) of plutonium was consumed by the chain reaction. This means that the remaining ten pounds (4.5 kg) spread from the blast site over the New Mexico counties of Guadalupe, Lincoln, San Miguel, Socorro, and Torrance, as well as other counties and states to the east. As plutonium-239, the isotope used in the bomb, has a half-life of 24,000 years, virtually all that plutonium is still out there somewhere, with large amounts scattered among the ranches and villages of southeastern New Mexico. However, later investigations showed that some plutonium from the bomb reached 46 of the 48 continental United States as well as Canada and Mexico.
When breathed or ingested, the high-energy alpha particles (helium nuclei) that plutonium emits cause havoc in any living system they enter. In a documentary I saw last week entitled "First We Bombed New Mexico," a woman recalled the summer day in 1945 during her childhood when white particles looking something like snow began to fall. She and her brothers tried to form it into snowballs, but it wouldn't stick together. It turned out to be fallout from the Trinity test.
Far from being an uninhabited area, the part of New Mexico selected for the world's first nuclear explosion harbored ranchers, cowboys, and others trying to extract a hardscrabble existence from the dry soil. Most of them were poor, most of them were Hispanic, and virtually none of them knew anything about fallout, nuclear explosions, or radiation. But as rates of cancer, thyroid disease, and infant mortality began to rise in 1945 and 1946, people started to wonder what was going on.
It is impossible to "prove" that a particular case of cancer in one person was caused by radiation from the Trinity test. But statistics cited in the movie persuaded me that a great injustice has been wrought on the residents of the region heavily contaminated by fallout, an injustice that continues to this day as plutonium gets concentrated by rainfall in streambeds and aquifers in ways that no one has had the resources to quantify, except in rare cases.
Residents of Nevada near the subsequent thermonuclear-bomb test sites used in the 1950s, some residents of Utah, and some uranium miners were in principle compensated for their losses by the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which was proposed in 1979 but not signed into Federal law until 1990. Ironically, it excluded the first victims of nuclear fallout: the New Mexico residents who were the nation's first guinea pigs in the uncontrolled experiment of seeing what ten pounds of plutonium spread over the landscape would do.
An activist (and cancer survivor) named Tina Cordova has devoted most of her adult life to getting New Mexico included in an extension of RECA, which was set to expire in 2022 but was extended to 2024 by President Biden's administration. Cordova co-founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, a group of cancer survivors, uranium miners, and relatives of deceased victims of cancer who are trying to extend the reach of RECA to cover their region as well.
As I watched the film, I found myself imagining what would have happened if the Trinity test had been performed outside, say, Albany, New York instead of Socorro, New Mexico. Southeasterly winds would have carried the fallout over Springfield and Boston in Massachusetts and Hartford in Connecticut. If anything close to the level of radiation after Trinity was found in that part of the country, it's likely a bill would have been passed to dig up every square inch of soil in New England to a depth of six inches and get rid of it somewhere—maybe New Mexico? They need topsoil there, don't they?
There was very little in the way of technical information in the film. Most of the time, the director, Lois Lipman, followed Tina Cordova around as she spoke at rallies, visited community events, and participated in memorial ceremonies in which paper bags with candles in them, one for each cancer survivor, were blown out one by one.
The Catholic faith is a constant undercurrent in the region of New Mexico contaminated by plutonium, and many victims and relatives gave God credit for getting them through the tribulations of cancer treatments, the sadness of watching one relative after another die of cancer at an early age, and the frustration of seeing the RECA bill amendments turned down year after year. At this moment, the U. S. Senate has passed a version of the bill, but Speaker Mike Johnson is preventing it from coming to a vote in the House. God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but I'm sure He is interested in the outcome of this particular political tussle.
The nation was at war in 1945, and at least in the early stages of the nuclear bomb's development, we did not know how far Nazi Germany was in developing something similar. This situation initially justified a habit of secrecy which continued well after the end of the war, when the USSR became the chief nuclear threat instead. This air of secrecy perhaps explains, but does not justify, why virtually nobody in the path of the fallout was evacuated or even warned of the danger after the July 1945 test.
But now that we know and have records of the injuries and premature cancer deaths that ten pounds of plutonium have wrought upon thousands of mainly poor people in New Mexico, it is a simple matter of justice to compensate them in some way roughly equivalent to what the other people covered by the RECA law have received. That is the message of "First We Bombed New Mexico," and that is the message I hope our elected representatives get when Tina Cordova and others plead once again for its amendment and renewal.
Sources: The award-winning film "First We Bombed New Mexico" was shown at a community center in San Marcos and accompanied by the director, Lois Lipman. It is not generally available, but Lipman is trying to get it aired publicly in time for the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, which is coming up in July of 2025. I also referred to a news article on Tina Cordova at https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2024/03/05/activist-who-has-fought-for-reca-expansion-chosen-as-lujans-guest-for-the-state-of-the-union-address/ and the Wikipedia articles on plutonium and the Trinity test. I also included some information provided to me by Lois Lipman concerning the extent of the fallout.
