News |

At Annapolis Film Festival, new documentary shows side of nuclear test ‘Oppenheimer’ did not tell

They thought they were playing with warm snow.

In the summer of 1945, a dance troupe of young girls from El Paso, Texas had made their way to the mountains of Ruidoso, New Mexico, where their instructor would host camps once the Texas heat became unbearable. 

One morning, the girls were overjoyed by what looked like snow falling from the sky. They put on their bathing suits and rushed to a nearby creek, rubbing the powder into their faces and trying to scoop it up to make snowballs.

Years later, Barbara Kent would be the only dancer who survived that morning. The girls, most of whom died before they were 40, were playing with radioactive fallout from the first nuclear explosion in the world.

The Trinity test, the climax of the U.S. government’s Manhattan Project, took place 52 miles away.

Kent’s story is one of many to be featured in Lois Lipman’s new documentary “First We Bombed New Mexico,” which screened earlier this month at the Annapolis Film Festival.

Lipman, a former instructor at the University of Maryland who once produced international stories for the long-running CBS news magazine show “60 Minutes,” spent years chronicling the New Mexico “downwinders,” largely indigenous communities that have faced the cancerous brunt of the Trinity test for generations.

Though the downwinders are fighting now for reparations, the consequences from the bombing will continue to sicken them; with a half-life of more than 24,000 years, radioactive remnants from Trinity are expected to affect the next 7,000 generations.

“The government destined our children forever more,” Tina Cordova, a downwinder and advocate in Lipman’s documentary, told The Capital.

For years, Cordova has pushed for those affected in her region to be acknowledged by the federal government. In 1990, Congress passed a bill to reimburse certain uranium miners and some citizens living in fallout zones, but not the Trinity downwinders. Now, they hope to expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act before it expires in June.

Lipman’s documentary has become part of an impact campaign to spur members of the House of Representatives to take on the bill. Since the Senate approved RECA’s expansion in March with the support of the Biden Administration, the proposal has awaited introduction to the House floor. The film will be free to watch online from May 10 to 12.

“If they know about the story, it will encourage them to vote,” Lipman said.

Another side of the story

Cultural interest in the Manhattan Project has been renewed following the publicity and release of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” The three-hour biopic follows “the father of the atomic bomb” during his time at the project’s Los Alamos laboratory and his own fallout with both the post-war government and the nuclear weapon.

Despite the praise it received throughout this year’s awards season, including a Best Picture win at the Academy Awards as well as Best Actor for Cillian Murphy, the film drew criticism from audiences in New Mexico and Japan, where viewers felt the devastation wrought by the bombings was not sufficiently portrayed.

Lipman said of her documentary, “This is the story that ‘Oppenheimer’ does not tell.”

While Nolan’s film presents the area surrounding the Trinity site as barren, more than 13,000 New Mexicans were living within a 50-mile radius of the blast, said Cordova, a co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. Lipman profiles many of those who lived – those who thought the world was coming to an end in 1945 – as well as the relatives of those who didn’t survive.

Their tragedies have not dissipated.

“It’s torture for us,” Cordova said.

Denial of danger

No one near the Trinity test was warned about the dangers of fallout or radiation exposure. In the years after the bomb test, hundreds of infants would die, many poisoned by their own mothers’ milk, and within a decade, cancer was present at an alarmingly disproportionate rate.

Cordova was the fourth generation of her family to be diagnosed with some form of the disease, despite having no risk factors, and her college-age niece recently became the fifth.

“The part that is so hard for me is knowing that they never gave us an opportunity to protect ourselves,” Cordova said in the documentary, “to make choices about where we lived, how we lived. I can’t give anyone a pass on that one.”

Beyond a lack of caution for citizens, the government showed little interest in mitigating the harm produced by Trinity before or after the test.

Just as it was portrayed in the Nolan film, the detonation took place during a thunderstorm, much to the real-life chagrin of researchers with the Manhattan Project. Lipman’s documentary explains the rush was part of a geopolitical stunt to intimidate the Soviet Union with proof of a successful, new American weapon. The Soviets, however, already knew about the bomb and the thunderstorm went on to produce heavier concentrations of fallout throughout the New Mexican region.

In the days after the bombing, Army leaders, including Major Gen. Leslie Groves, the head of the project, were informed that Trinity had a much farther reach than expected; four days after detonation, the mushroom cloud had traveled over 200 miles from the site. Even that would prove to be an understatement. A 2023 study from Princeton showed fallout from Trinity reached 46 states, including Maryland, as well as Canada and Mexico.

Even so, it was recommended to the Army in 1945 that if another “test of this magnitude” were to be conducted, the Army should find a location with no citizens within a 150-mile radius.

Despite this, the Atomic Energy Commission continued to deny the public was in danger.

“They knew it immediately after the test,” said Dr. Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer based in Takoma Park and the president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. “And they didn’t inform anybody.

“If they are going to do something in the name of national security,” Makhijani continued, “they should make that very clear and say, ‘These are the risks.’”

The fight for recognition

Since the detonation, the downwinders have been left to advocate for themselves.

For years, Cordova and others have pushed Congress to broaden and prolong the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act, which was signed into law in 1990. For over 30 years, it has provided health coverage and restitution to federal employees and some citizens exposed to radiation in tests like Trinity, but not the New Mexico downwinders.

During that time, however, the compensation RECA has provided pales in comparison to other kinds of defense spending. Whereas costs to maintain the United States’ nuclear arsenal reach $50 billion a year, Cordova said only about $2.6 billion has been paid out in RECA claims over the past three decades.

“It’s a pittance,” Cordova said. “We should be ashamed of ourselves.”

Though some efforts to expand RECA have fallen flat – last year, an amendment to a defense bill that would include New Mexico ultimately failed on the House floor – the most recent has seen more progress than ever before.

In March, through a bipartisan effort, the Senate voted 69-30 and passed the RECA proposal. Both Maryland senators, Democrats Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, supported the measure.

The bill, if passed, would not only bring New Mexico into the program but parts of Idaho, Montana, Colorado and Guam, as well. Additionally, all of Nevada, Arizona and Utah, the states originally included in the RECA bill, would become eligible for compensation.

The House has until June 7 to approve the bill. If it fails, the RECA compensation program will expire.

“First We Bombed New Mexico” will be available online to view for free from May 10 to 12. To receive access, visit watch.showandtell.film/watch/firstwebombednm. For more information about the documentary, visit firstwebombednewmexico.com.