Archbishop to denounce nuclear arms on Trinity test's 78th anniversary

By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
Jul 10, 2023

The first atomic blast that lit up the early morning sky at the Trinity Site in south-central New Mexico on July 16, 1945 — an event that opened the door for two nuclear bombs to be dropped on Japan — had an immense impact on the state that is still felt to this day.

Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester will mark the 78th anniversary of the Trinity test by denouncing the nuclear weapons program that has escalated since the long-ago detonation in a remote desert, and for which New Mexico finds itself in a primary role.

Wester and anti-nuclear groups are organizing an event Sunday at the Santa María de la Paz Community Hall, featuring speakers, music, exhibitions and moments of reflection and prayer on the atomic blast that reshaped civilization. The public can attend or livestream it.

“We can no longer deny or ignore the extremely dangerous predicament of our human family,” Wester said in a statement. “We are in a new nuclear arms race far more dangerous than the first, and I believe we need to rejuvenate a sustained, serious conversation about universal, verifiable nuclear disarmament.”

Because of Trinity, New Mexico will be forever linked to the two bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs, credited by many with hastening the war’s end and saving tens of thousands of American lives, killed more than 200,000 Japanese people and inflicted radiation poisoning on much of the populace.

The atomic test released radioactive fallout in downwind communities in New Mexico, causing fatal illnesses such as cancer in what many believe are a large number of residents, though the actual quantity remains unknown because the federal government didn’t track such aftereffects as part of the secrecy surrounding the project.

In recent years, Wester has become more vocal in his opposition to nuclear weapons, in part because Los Alamos National Laboratory has been called on for a different nuclear mission: producing plutonium triggers for warheads to modernize the arsenal.

The goal is for the lab to produce 30 of the bomb cores, or pits, by 2026, and for Savannah River Site in South Carolina to make an additional 50 pits by 2035.

Existing nuclear weapons powers are modernizing their arsenals to keep nuclear weapons forever,” Wester said. “New Mexico is at the center of the U.S. government’s $1.7 trillion modernization plan.”

Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, said it was important to remind people of the harm done, beginning with Trinity and continuing with regular above-ground explosive testing in Nevada until the early 1960s.

“Our government has never had any concern for the damage that they did to people’s health in New Mexico,” Cordova said. “We’ve been dealing with it ever since. In our community we don’t ask if we’re going to get cancer. We ask when it will it be our turn.”

The effects of potent radioactive contaminants spread over a wide area are multigenerational, Cordova said. She came down with thyroid cancer at age 39 in the late 1990s, and her niece who’s attending college was recently diagnosed with the same type of cancer.

In 2021, the National Cancer Institute concluded a six-year study of elderly downwinders. It concluded there was no evidence the radiation from the Trinity test caused genetic abnormalities that could be passed by birth to subsequent generations.

Cordova dismissed the findings as flawed based on sketchy data. For instance, the institute mainly focused on thyroid cancer and didn’t look at the 19 other cancers linked to radiation, Cordova said. And it doesn’t make sense for researchers to say radiation damages all cells except DNA, she said.

“Of course there’s a genetic component,” she said.

Anne Pierce-Jones, a spokeswoman for Soka Gakkai International-USA, said her organization’s anti-nuclear roots date back to 1957.

Back then, the group’s Japanese president, who had lived through the nuclear bombings in his country, began pushing to have these weapons abolished worldwide, she said.

Pierce-Jones echoed Wester and others who say the global nuclear threat is increasing as more countries get their hands on the weapons of mass destruction.

“The risk of nuclear war at this point is huge, and probably greater than it’s ever been in history,” Pierce-Jones said. “We need to shine a light on it so we continue to have a planet.”

Greg Mello, published comment:

As a veteran of dozens of UN diplomatic meetings on nuclear disarmament, and a partner in the successful, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning effort to a enact the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and with more than 30 years of working here in the U.S. on nuclear weapons policy, I would like to a) commend Archbishop Wester for his views, but also b) remind him and especially his followers of the wisdom in the old saying, "fine words butter no parsnips."

Nuclear disarmament is a fine goal, but the devil is in the details, and of course the devil is in his own archdiocese, as noted above. While providing leadership up to a point, Archbishop Wester has not gone as far as did Bishop Matthiesen of Amarillo, whom we knew. Matthiesen came right out and said that working on The Bomb was a sin, and encouraged his parishioners to quit their nuclear weapons jobs at the Pantex nuclear weapons plant. He promised to find or provide other jobs for the people who quit, and he did. One person who quit went to work for the Diocese itself. My wife Trish, who was mentored by him as a parishioner, worked with her neighbors to defeat the proposed plutonium pit factory then planned for the Pantex plant.

Here, Archbishop Wester has not condemned the plutonium pit factory being assembled at LANL. I must be blunt. There is nothing specific about his airy-fairy call for nuclear disarmament, and therefore nothing powerful. Being in favor of nuclear disarmament is a lot like being in favor of motherhood and apple pie. Even the U.S. government is officially on record promising to negotiate an end to nuclear weapons someday (that would be in Article VI of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, a cornerstone of the legal framework of nonproliferation). It is a mistake on the part of some of his followers to imagine that his words alone will somehow be more powerful than those of the hundreds of other political and religious leaders who have said the same thing over the decades.

A lot of people are finding it rather cozy to identify with mutual nuclear disarmament someday. It's fully compatible with building a factory for nuclear weapons, as many people find. It does not require any sort of moral courage, to be frank.

Progress on nuclear disarmament requires a level of trust with, first of all, Russia, that is utterly absent today. It requires accommodating the legitimate security needs of our nuclear adversaries, which would then no longer be adversaries. Those conditions are absent today, and each week of escalation in Ukraine drives them farther away. If you want nuclear disarmament, more than as a mere rhetorical gesture, the first requirement is peace in Ukraine. For that to happen -- or for any diplomacy worth the name, in whatever field, it will be necessary to understand the other guy and take his needs into account. That is the opposite of what the U.S. has been doing over the past decade, and it will now take a generation or more to regain any modicum of trust in the U.S.-Russian relationship. At present, U.S. policy is aimed at defeating Russia, destroying its sovereignty, and deposing its leader. That is leading toward nuclear war, not disarmament. In fact the quest for disarmament looks a lot like a bad case of delusion or at the very best denial of the actual realities of U.S. policy today. It begins to look like hypocrisy and propaganda -- an empty gesture rather than digging in to really accomplish something.

If you want disarmament, work to stop the LANL pit factory, the sole purpose of which is to make a) new and b) additional nuclear weapons. Without the LANL factory, those additional nuclear weapons can't be made, not for a long time -- a decisively long time. You can find all the information you need at lasg.org. Or call us at 505-265-1200. Or, equally to the point and more widely pertinent, stop the Ukraine war. Any U.S. president could do that in a day. Stop the killing first. Then you can talk.