Ten Pounds of Plutonium

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.

The Pros and Cons of Cancer Blood Tests

 

Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott made the news the other day without ever touching a football.  He came out in favor of federal legislation that would require Medicare to pay for a blood test that can detect 20 different types of cancer.  Prescott's mother died of cancer, as did the mother of Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, who is sponsoring the legislation.

 

A recent article in the Austin American-Statesman describes how two million people a year are diagnosed with cancer, but often too late to do anything about it.  Prescott believes in the test so much that he had the Cowboys' entire staff screened at his expense, which was considerable as the tests range between $2000 and $3000 a person.  Cowboys staffer Tad Carper is glad he did, though, because it caught his case of cancer of the tonsils.  Presumably, he had his tonsils removed and that took care of the problem. 

           

This particular test has not yet been approved by the Federal Drug Administration, but if the proposed legislation passes it would automatically be paid for once approval is given.  It's not hard to figure that this would add several billion dollars to the annual cost of Medicare, which is already one of the primary budget-busters in the federal budget.  But who cares if it saves lives?

 

We all care, or should.  From an engineering point of view, this is a classic tradeoff, in the sense that we face a decision which will favor one good at the expense of a different good.  On the one hand, more cancer screening will help us find, and hopefully treat or cure, more cancers, leading to longer lives.  On the other hand, more money spent by the federal government that it doesn't have will lead to less money somewhere else, or inflation, or some other less well-defined but nevertheless negative fiscal consequence sooner or later.  And there's always the possibility that the tests may turn out to be, if not a total boondoggle, at least a lot less effective than we hoped. 

 

Paralysis in Congress (legislative, not literal) being what it is, the chances of this bill getting approved are iffy at best, as it has come up several times in the last few years and never made it into law.  But let's take this idea to the limit. 

 

Suppose we found some genetic test that would not only predict cancers, but would outline our entire medical history, to the extent possible.  Obviously, it couldn't predict things like a person taking poison at the age of 43, but there are many diseases, the main killers of heart disease and cancer among them, which have a strong genetic component.  This pipe dream is already somewhat realistic today and will only become more so in the future.  Wouldn't it be a great idea to profile every baby at birth and lay out his or her entire medical life history at the get-go?

 

On the one hand (here we go again), you could take steps to forestall diseases that a person might be especially prone to.  My wife had breast cancer, which was treated, and now she is cancer-free.  But some women carry genes that make them especially susceptible to breast cancer.  And some of those, on discovering this fact about themselves, decide to undergo pre-emptive double mastectomies. 

 

But what if you find out you'll die of lung cancer at the age of 43, say?  At this time, most lung cancer is basically untreatable except in a palliative sense.  Or what if you're going to get Alzheimer's when your 72 and die at 85?  There's no treatment for that either. 

 

I once read a short story whose author or title I can't recall (what if your memory starts to fade when you're 71?), but the gist of it was a dinner party at which a magician told the fortune of everyone at the table, and they believed him.  He laid out exactly what was going to happen to them from that day forward.  I forget the rest of the story, but the point was that knowing the future is a two-edged sword.  Yes, you can forestall some things that would be good to know about in advance.  But other things are truly inevitable, and knowing them would cast a pall over one's entire future and possibly lead even to depression and suicide. 

 

Pancreatic cancer rates are increasing for unknown reasons, and it is one of the most insidious and deadly types of cancer, often being asymptomatic until it's far too late to treat.  And even if caught in the early stages, it spreads so fast that surgery usually doesn't help.  The most famous recent victim, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was accidentally diagnosed with pancreatic cancer as a result of an examination for something else, and following her surgery for it she survived for an extraordinary eleven years, far above the norm for such a situation.  So having a blood test for pancreatic cancer under the present conditions of treatment protocols would in most cases just let you know earlier that you were going to die of it.  Sometimes ignorance truly is comparative bliss.

 

This brings to mind what the 18th-century wit Samuel Johnson said when he heard that a former acquaintance was going to be executed soon.  "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."  Perhaps it would be a good thing to have a populace with minds concentrated by the knowledge that they are going to die at a future date certain.  But we all know we're going to die sometime anyway, and there's all the difference in the world between knowing that, and knowing when and how.

 

It's up to Congress to decide whether a blood test for many types of cancer should be made available for everyone on Medicare.  But if that does come to pass, you can depend on it to have unintended consequences, some of which we may regret.

 

Sources:  The article by Nicole Villalpando, "Dak Prescott:  Medicare should cover cancer test" appeared on p. 1 of the Saturday Feb. 1, 2025 edition of the Austin American-Statesman.