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posted by janrinok on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-the-hell-was-that?! dept.

When a flash of light beamed from the arid New Mexico desert early on July 16, 1945, residents of the historic Hispanic village of Tularosa felt windows shake and heard dishes fall. Some in the largely Catholic town fell to their knees and prayed.

The end of the world is here, they thought.

What villagers didn't know was that just before 5:30 a.m., scientists from the then-secret city of Los Alamos successfully exploded the first atomic bomb at the nearby Trinity Site. Left in its place was a crater that stretched a half-mile wide and several feet deep.

Thursday mark[ed] the 70th anniversary of the Trinity Test in southern New Mexico. It comes as Tularosa residents say they were permanently affected by the test and want acknowledgement and compensation from the U.S. government.

Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders, said the aftermath caused rare forms of cancer for many of the 30,000 residents in the area surrounding Trinity. She said residents weren't told about the site's dangers and often picnicked there and took artifacts, including the radioactive green glass known as "trinitite."

Researchers from the National Cancer Institute are studying past and present cancer cases in New Mexico that might be related to the Trinity Test.

"It's a moral and ethical issue. It's about consent," said Cordova, a former Tularosa resident and cancer survivor. "We were never given the opportunity to do anything to protect ourselves, before or after."

Vera Burnett-Powell, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice's Radiation Exposure Compensation Act program, did not immediately return a phone message and email from The Associated Press.

Additional resources follow.

Isao Hashimoto created a video depicting the history of nuclear bomb tests entitled "1945-1998":

This piece of work is a bird's eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted.

The U.S. Department of Energy - Office of History and and Heritage Resources produced The Manhattan Project - an interactive history which provides an in-depth presentation of the entire Manhattan Project. It is categorized according to Events, People, Places, Processes, Science, and Resources.

There is an entire page dedicated to The Trinity Test, July 16, 1945.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @09:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @09:41AM (#210998)

    "We have become Death, destroyer of Worlds."

    Khrishna, become Shiva, Dance, Baby, Dance. It's the 'Pokycalpse what split little Adam in twain, running round the circletron, in a Riddley Walker kinda way.