Downwinders from world’s 1st atomic test are on a mission to tell their story
It was the summer of 1945 when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan, killing thousands of people as waves of destructive energy obliterated two cities. It was a decisive move that helped bring about the end of World War II, but survivors and the generations that followed were left to grapple with sickness from radiation exposure.
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At the time, U.S. President Harry Truman called it “the greatest scientific gamble in history,” saying the rain of ruin from the air would usher in a new concept of force and power. What he didn’t mention was that the federal government had already tested this new force on U.S. soil.
Just weeks earlier in southern New Mexico, the early morning sky erupted with an incredible flash of light. Windows rattled hundreds of miles away and a trail of fallout stretched to the East Coast.
Ash from the Trinity Test rained down for days. Children played in it, thinking it was snow. It covered fresh laundry that was hanging out to dry. It contaminated crops, singed livestock, and found its way into cisterns used for drinking water.
The story of New Mexico’s downwinders — the survivors of the world’s first atomic blast and those who helped mine the uranium needed for the nation’s arsenal — is little known. But that’s changing as the documentary “First We Bombed New Mexico” racks up awards from film festivals across the United States.
It’s now screening in the northern New Mexico community of Los Alamos as part of the Oppenheimer Film Festival. It marks a rare chance for the once-secret city that has long celebrated the scientific discoveries of J. Robert Oppenheimer — the father of the atomic bomb — to contemplate another more painful piece of the nation’s nuclear legacy.
The film, directed and produced by Lois Lipman, highlights the displacement of Hispanic ranching families when the Manhattan Project took over the Pajarito Plateau in the early 1940s, their lives we