The state’s link to that fateful day — from the builders of the first atomic bomb, to its 1945 detonation in a test at Trinity Site, to the victims of contamination decades later — gives New Mexico a special responsibility to lead the way to a peaceful future free of nuclear weapons, Archbishop of Santa Fe John Wester said Sunday afternoon.

“What could be more pro-life than ridding the planet of the only weapons capable of ending God’s creation on this, our only Earth?” Wester said Sunday.

The debate over nuclear weapons is particularly charged this month, with the highly anticipated release later this week of the movie Oppenheimer, which details the life of the bomb’s key player: J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Seventy-eight years after the device was exploded in a test north of Alamogordo, its reverberations are still being felt. Wester has made nuclear disarmament one of his key causes. He and representatives of other faiths and anti-nuclear groups organized a prayer and remembrance ceremony Sunday afternoon at the Santa María de la Paz Community Hall on the anniversary of the Trinity test north of Alamogordo and a 1979 uranium mill spill near Church Rock.

“These are two examples of nuclear colonialism in rural New Mexican communities and what makes today such a politically and emotionally charged day,” said Myrriah Gómez, author of Nuclear Nuevo México, a book that examines the state’s nuclear history in the context of the Spanish and American colonialism that preceded it.

Gómez said the national laboratories that employ so many New Mexicans could be repurposed to discover cures for diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s.

“We’re not advocating for shutting down the lab. ... We’re asking for the abolition of nuclear weapons,” she said.

She noted the Catholic Church, seen by many as a key player in Spanish colonialism, is now working to end “nuclear colonialism.”

With the war in Ukraine and rising tensions between the U.S. and Russia, Wester said “we are in a new nuclear arms race that is arguably more dangerous than the first.” He criticized plans to ramp up plutonium pit production at Los Alamos, plus what he said would be the new missiles, submarines and bombers that will be built “at enormous taxpayer expense” to deliver the new weapons.

Wester also pushed back on those who say it is naive to imagine a world without nuclear weapons. He pointed to 1960s U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s comments that only luck prevented human civilization from being wiped out as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“Counting on luck is not a winning strategy,” Wester said.

Tina Cordova said she and five generations of her family have gotten cancers she attributes to the radiation from the Trinity test. She said when she co-founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium 18 years ago, she assumed the federal government would help her and her neighbors if they brought the problem to their attention.

“We were so very naive,” she said.

The “downwinders” from the Trinity test, unlike some other communities affected by nuclear testing or weapons production, still are not eligible for federal compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, despite the efforts of New Mexico lawmakers like U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, who attended Sunday’s event.

Charles Oppenheimer, the grandson of Robert Oppenheimer, read some of his grandfather’s words:

“The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish. This war, which has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand.”

Charles Oppenheimer said his grandfather believed “managing the risk together” was the only way to avoid catastrophe, advice that is more relevant today than ever.

“It is not too late to listen to him now,” Oppenheimer said.