OPPENHEIMER IGNORES THE FIRST VICTIMS OF THE NUCLEAR ERA
Posted: 31st July 2023
THE MOVIE REPEATS THE MYTH THAT THE NEW MEXICO BOMB SITE WAS IN A DESOLATE AREA WITH “NOTHING FOR 40 MILES IN EITHER DIRECTION.”
What was formerly Technical Area 21 is now an almost-bare mesa after Recovery Act funding demolished 24 Manhattan Project and Cold War-era buildings at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
On July 16, 1945, the world ended. Or at least it seemed that way to residents of the Tularosa Basin in New Mexico.
Unbeknownst to local civilians, J. Robert Oppenheimer had chosen their backyard as the proving ground for the world’s first nuclear weapon. The explosion, which U.S. officials publicly claimed to be an accident at a local ammunition depot, tore through the morning sky, leaving a 40,000-foot-tall cloud of radioactive debris that would cake the surrounding area with dust for days on end.
Tina Cordova, whose hometown of Tularosa lies just 45 miles from ground zero, remembers her grandmother’s stories about wiping that infernal dust off every nook and cranny of her childhood home. No one knew what had happened quite yet, but they figured it must have been something special. After all, a local paper reported that the explosion was so bright that a blind woman had actually seen it.