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The NYT reports that thousands of visitors converged Saturday on the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico where the first nuclear bomb was detonated nearly 70 years ago. Many posed for pictures near an obelisk marking the exact location where the bomb went off and were also able to see a steel shell that was created as a backup plan to keep plutonium from spreading during the explosion. "It brought a quick end to World War II, and it ushered in the atomic age," Erin Dorrance said. "So out here in the middle of nowhere New Mexico changed the world 70 years ago." Pete Rosada, a Marine Corps veteran, drove with another military veteran from San Diego to make the tour. Rosada said he previously visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese targets of atomic bombs during World War II after the test at the Trinity Site. "This completes the loop," said Rosado.
Tourists who joined a vehicle caravan out to the site at a school in Tularosa were greeted by demonstrators from the Tularosa Basin Downwinders who came to protest the 70th anniversary tour. The Downwinders is a grass-roots group that has set out to bring public awareness about the negative impacts of the detonation of the bomb. Henry Herrera was 11 years old when he got up to help his father with the car on that fateful July morning in 1945 and says the dust from the blast scattered all over Tularosa, remembering how his mother had to wash clothes twice that day due to the fallout dusting the family's clothes line. "I stop to think I'm one lucky, fortunate guy because I'm here and so many are dead," says Herrera. "Gobs of people from around here died and nobody knew what they died of, they just went to bed and never woke up." Albuquerque resident Gene Glasgow, 69, visited the Trinity Site for the first time with relatives from Arizona. Born and raised in New Mexico, he said he'd grown curious through talking to people who witnessed the explosion, including one man who was laying trap line in the mountains at the time. "He thought the end of the world had come."
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:23AM
No one died during or shortly after these bomb tests.
Thirty years on, cancer rated were higher.
It was the known and expected affect of low(-ish) level radiation.
I think that line was thrown in by the journalist, (Tara Melton) just because she was covering the Downwinders. The Downwinder piece is full of platitudes
and inaccuracies. (Including the claim on the Downwinder's sign.)
70 years on, the 11 year old kid is 81. If you are 81, almost everyone you ever knew has already died, and in only a few cases did you ever
fully understand the reason why. That doesn't mean nobody else did.
The test site wasn't as well studied as other sites, Either before or After. It was rather hurriedly chosen,
see http://www.lahdra.org/reports/LAHDRA%20Report%20v5%202007_App%20N_Trinity%20Test.pdf [lahdra.org]
Interesting reading about the preparations and test shots with regular explosives.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday April 08 2015, @06:25AM
It depends on how you define "shortly after." A few months ago, I read a fascinating but seriously disturbing detailed two-part interview (part 1 [unlv.edu], part 2 [unlv.edu]) with a couple from Salt Lake City, which turned out to be hit hard by fallout according to the National Cancer Institute. According to their experience and studies performed by NCI/others, very abnormal numbers & types of cancer deaths in SLC and southern Utah were already spiking to a very alarming degree by 1955, especially among children.