Atomic Downwinders of New Mexico: The Test They Didn't Tell You About

At five-thirty in the morning on July sixteenth, nineteen forty-five, a light brighter than the sun rose from the desert in south-central New Mexico, approximately two hundred miles south of here. It was the first nuclear weapon ever detonated. The Manhattan Project called it Trinity. The people who lived upwind were not told it was coming.

The residents of communities in the fallout path, predominantly Hispanic ranching and farming families whose roots in this high-plains country extended back generations to Spanish colonial land grants, were given no warning, no evacuation instructions, and no health monitoring in the days and weeks that followed. Fallout drifted north and northeast in the prevailing winds. Children and animals developed burns in communities that had no frame for understanding what had happened. Water sources were contaminated. Food grown from contaminated soil was eaten for weeks.

The federal government did not release public information about the test or its effects on local communities. The atomic program was classified. By the time any public accounting occurred, years of exposure had already accumulated.

The Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium has spent decades documenting the cancer rates, thyroid disease rates, and infant mortality patterns in communities affected by the Trinity fallout. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, passed in nineteen ninety to address the health consequences of nuclear testing and uranium mining, excluded New Mexico downwinders entirely for decades. A contested expansion that would have covered New Mexico downwinders did not pass before the act expired in two thousand twenty-four; the legal and legislative status of their claims remains unresolved at the time of this recording.

The test site is open to public visits once a year, on the third Saturday of October, as a White Sands Missile Range open day. The families downwind are still waiting for resolution.