“Thirteen-year-old Barbara Kent (center) and her fellow campers play in a river near Ruidoso, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, in the hours after the bomb’s detonation. Fallout flakes drifted down that day and for days afterward. “We thought [it] was snow,” Kent says. “But the strange thing, instead of being cold like snow, it was hot.”
Courtesy of Barbara KentThe flakes were fallout from the Manhattan Project’s Trinity test, the world’s first atomic bomb detonation. It took place at 5:29 a.m. local time atop a hundred-foot steel tower 40 miles away at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, in Jornada del Muerto valley.
The site had been selected in part for its supposed isolation. In reality, thousands of people were within a 40-mile radius, some as close as 12 miles away. Yet all those living near the bomb site weren’t warned that the test would take place. Nor were they evacuated beforehand or afterward, even as radioactive fallout continued to drop for days.
As time passed, Kent says she began to hear disturbing reports that her fellow campers were falling ill. By the time she turned 30, she says, “I was the only survivor of all the girls at that camp.” She adds that she has suffered from lifelong illnesses: She had to have her thyroid removed and has survived several forms of cancer, including endometrial cancer and “all kinds of skin cancers.”
U.S. lawmakers move urgently to recognize survivors of the first atomic bomb test
The Covid’n ‘MRNA treatment of the 20th century.
They had yet to conceive of duck ‘n cover drills. We had those in grade school and they would give us pamphlets on how to build rudimentary fallout shelters. To protect us from Soviet radiation – bad. American radiation was good, it enhanced evolution. So as the Doomsday Clock ticks to nanoseconds before midnight be of good cheer. We’re that much closer to Evolving to Our Higher Selves
— “all kinds of skin cancers.”
We grew up in NM, my late mother had “all kinds of skin cancers” along with my late father, plus two of my siblings had cancerous skin growths removed. We didn’t live anywhere near the test site, and my parents didn’t move to NM until 6 years after the detonation. NM is the land of open sky, lots of unfiltered UV rays, more so at higher elevations like where we lived. How would the “survivors” here be distinguished separately from those who didn’t put on enough sunscreen, smoked too much, or were more susceptible to cancer?
‘U.S. lawmakers move urgently to recognize survivors of the first atomic bomb test’
How about survivors of the intervening 80 YEARS? If they made it to now, we can dismiss any concerns.
Anecdata: Gamecock’s mother was the first female in the West – perhaps the world – to enter a nuclear reactor. She was the first female health physics tech, paving the way for all the rest. She was pulled off the job 3 times because her dosimeter read too high. She died 4 months short of 100 years old. Radiation exposure is not necessarily harmful; perhaps beneficial in some cases.
I read somewhere that many survivors of the Hiroshima bombing lived long lives. not saying I want to trade places with them but… so much we don’t know
Then there is the USS Reagan.
A nuclear powered ship.
According to a study the cancer risk 920% above average.
Most probably not because of the nuclear drive(such facilities effect at best small children)but because of its massive involvement during the Fukushima desaster.
Or the movie the Conquerer – shot in a Fallout Zone.
The entire leading cast died from cancer within ca.25 years.
1/4 of the filmcrew did so while the average global cancer mortality is about 16% .
I refused to “sign up” to read the whole NatGeo article on principle – they ceased printing factual, balanced material back in the 70s.
The whole radiation bogeyman was concocted out of whole cloth to create the “Linear No Threshold” contamination concept whose real purpose was to demonize nuclear energy.
Paul Ehrlich said “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun”.
LNT has been misused by EPA to hamstring American industry and society with reams of worthless regulations. Shut it down. Leave “environmental “ policy to States
EPA is one of the few federal agencies that are constitutional (which is not a defense of their abuses).
Anecdata:
Gamecock grew up in SC. There was a paper plant on the GA side of the Savannah River, below Augusta, about 15 miles away. On some summer nights, when the wind was just right, the stench was unbearable.
‘Leave “environmental “ policy to States’
Georgia wouldn’t do a damn thing about it. The plant employed thousands, and all the stench blew into SC. Clearly, it required federal involvement.
Similar- I lived in Lewiston Maine through which flows the Androscoggin River. Many cavernous pre-Civil War textile mills in Lewiston and many more paper mills up river. On summer days the heavy smell of sulphur was pervasive for miles. Very little lived in the river and nobody swam in it. Not long after the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 Atlantic Salmon were observed spawning for the first time in decades
I lived about 2 miles from that plant in the early to mid-eighties, on the Georgia side, west of the plant. Most of the time I couldn’t smell it (probably going to you, Gamecock) but once every two to three months the wind would shift and we would get our dose of it. Pee-you!
They cleaned it up after I left, of course.
FYI we have paper mills in the north as well. when I was a kid in the 1960s one of the stinkiest paper mills was located in cloquet Minnesota… a smallish town just west of Duluth Minnesota. It didn’t happen often but when the wind was right or call it wrong it was a stinky place. my opinion, the smell and pollution was cleaned up 35 years ago, so where’s the justification of the EPA now????? oh yeah, their justification is to enrich themselves
I used to test my 1958 model Navy surplus Geiger counter by pointing the wand at the sun. Nobody compares roofer exposures to exposure of folks miles away from a fission flash, but they ought to.
A lot of people, including US soldiers and the scientists themselves, were exposed early on because they did not understand the medical effects of it. Skin cancers in NMex? How about the average elevation is something above 4000 feet? The sun is out in cloudless skies 300+ days a year, and most people worked outside in the old days. If all of her friends died, how did so many Mescalaros on the reservation there survive? I grew up about the same distance from the bomb site but in the opposite direction. I don’t recall any massive die off in any age group among the people who lived there. Maybe the wind blew the ash onto the lady and her friends in particular, because to my knowledge no towns on the peripheries of the bomb site had any age group die off at an unusually fast and odd rate, and we played sports against their high school teams including Las Cruces and Alamogordo.