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Previously: Bulletin #259 (06/18/19) Peace leader in Albuquerque, almost 96 years old, begins fast against US sanctions and sieges, calls for solidarity

Bulletin 260: Trinity: “The most significant hazard of the entire Manhattan Project”

July 15, 2019

Dear friends and colleagues –

Tomorrow is the 74th anniversary of the July 16, 1945 Trinity test near Alamogordo, New Mexico – the first nuclear explosion. The world changed that morning, as William Lambers recently reminded Albuquerque Journal readers.

What followed – two Japanese cities bombed, a Cold War arms race that badly deformed our politics, economic life, and culture – has hurt billions of people, all told.

And the harm continues. Will the U.S. in particular finally wake from the dream of global domination that more or less began in its modern form 74 years ago, in time to avoid ecological apocalypse?

Among the very first victims of the nuclear Faustian bargain were New Mexicans downwind of the Trinity test, many of whom were infants.

Kitty Tucker, who died before today’s article could be completed, and her husband Robert Alvarez, have published some of what is known about those first victims in “Trinity: ‘The most significant hazard of the entire Manhattan Project’.” More will be revealed when a National Cancer Institute study, now nearing completion, is done.

With the Trinity test, a series of decisions began by which the Bomb Cult, embodied in a set of powerful institutions and propaganda narratives, came to dominate New Mexico politics in the postwar years. As a result, New Mexico never really found its way home from the war. Some part of the State still wanders the Jornada del Muerto long after the biblical 40 years, looking for the nuclear Promised Land. The State remains trapped in what the late Stewart Udall called the “myths of August,” to our collective cost. We accept the triumphalist nuclear origin myths woven around the Trinity test to our peril.

Even with all that was seen at Trinity, and even after the twin horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the casual sacrifice of human life in the quest for bigger and better nuclear weapons increased, reaching grotesque dimensions in the Marshall Islands.

In addition to the horrific consequences to the Marshallese, fallout was by then global. Considering just Operation Castle (February-May 1954), Alvarez wrote:

In May 1955, an AEC report (which subsequently remained classified for nearly four decades) estimated that about 23 million curies of radioactive fallout from the Castle series of tests raised global background radiation levels 10 to 20 times. Hot spots 5,000 miles away in the United States showed radiation levels as much as 200 times greater than normal background.

Meanwhile, we now know that continental victims of U.S. nuclear testing may number far more than has been understood. Keith Meyers of the University of Arizona used (pdf) existing county-level fallout and mortality data in a novel and more inclusive way to arrive at an estimate of 340,000 to 690,000 fallout-induced deaths in the continental U.S. alone from 1951 to 1973.

A full picture of the death toll from the nuclear weapons industry, not even counting deaths incurred in and by other nuclear weapon states, would include deaths caused by U.S. fallout in the rest of the world, the tens of thousands of occupational illnesses resulting in death among nuclear weapons workers, the large number of early deaths among thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen cycled through the U.S. testing program, and deaths among uranium miners.

The human cost of the Bomb Cult cannot be tallied. It started with Trinity and is still rising. Through miscalculation -- or, far less appreciated, through a lazy misdirection of our national attention and investments in a time of existential environmental crisis, when emergency action is needed to save humanity and living nature -- it could easily become infinite.

Greg Mello, for the Study Group