“When the bomb went off, it was so bright that I could see the spine and ribs of the guy sitting a metre in front of me, like an X-ray. I put my hands over my eyes and could see the bones in my fingers, and could see the blood pumping around my hands. It was 4am but the sky turned blue, like it was daytime. The blast was like the sound of a pistol, except 1,000 times louder. After the fireball, a couple of minutes later, you feel the blast and a strong gust of very hot wind – if you had no shirt on it feels like it would burn through your back – then once the fireball starts to dissipate you get the mushroom cloud.” 

[...]

There were no long-term health studies of nuclear test veterans. Those who were there during the tests at Christmas Island were not given medical examinations when they left, and their health was not studied after they finished their service. Many servicemen – and many islanders – later reported severe health problems, which they believed where due to the radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests – from rare cancers to organ failure.

Some said they had fertility issues and difficulty conceiving, and many of those who did have children and grandchildren reported high incidences of birth defects, hip deformities, autoimmune diseases, skeletal abnormalities, spina bifida, scoliosis and limb abnormalities. Lax’s own health has been OK, but he does wonder about his children, who have both undergone surgery for a series of tumours, one at 14 years old.  

Lax’s nuclear veteran friend has three types of cancer, which he says the specialist attributes “100 per cent to exposure to radiation”.

Another veteran, Doug Hern, who witnessed five thermonuclear explosions, says his skeleton is “crumbling” and has skin problems and bone spurs. His daughter died aged 13 from a cancer so rare that doctors didn’t have a name for it, and he believes all of this is due to the genetic effects of radiation exposure.

[...]

The UK is the only nuclear power to deny special recognition and compensation to its bomb test veterans, of which there are estimated to be 1,500 surviving today.

If we’re talking about nuclear justice, please don’t forget the Marshall Islands.

Many people have already pointed out how the Oppenheimer film glosses over the effects of nuclear testing on Indigenous communities in the United States, and it’s undeniable that more people need to know about this. More attention also needs to be paid to the Marshall Islands, where the legacy of US nuclear testing still affects the Marshallese people to this day. Most Americans don’t even know where the Marshall Islands is—let alone what the US government did there during the Cold War.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear weapons on the Marshall Islands, which was then a US trust territory. The tests yielded the same level of radiation as 7,000 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, or 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for 12 years. The US government didn’t even evacuate some islanders from close proximity to the testing grounds. The fallout—which spread across the islands and beyond—caused deaths, miscarriages, stillbirths, radiation sickness, cancer, and many other health problems, with high cancer rates persisting to this day. Whole islands remain uninhabitable, and generations have been displaced.

It gets even worse. The US government knew that certain islands were too dangerous for human habitation and resettled the Marshallese there anyway; then US scientists studied the effects of radiation on them without their knowledge or consent in a secret program called Project 4.1. The US government secretly brought radioactive waste from Nevada and buried it in a concrete dome on Enewetak Atoll that is now vulnerable to erosion from the rising seas. And the US military also used the Marshall Islands for at least a dozen biological weapons tests. The US government did all of this to the Marshall Islands while it was a trust territory under US protection.

But in the decades since nuclear testing ended—even since the Marshall Islands’ independence in 1986—it has never received full compensation from the United States. Never.

There is a lot more that everyone should know about this history, and I recommend starting here to learn more:

The size of the Castle Bravo test on March 1, 1954 far exceeded expectations, causing widespread radioactive contamination. The fallout spread traces of radioactive material as far as Australia, India, and Japan, and even to the United States and parts of Europe. It was organized as a secret test, but it quickly became an international incident, prompting calls for a ban on the atmospheric testing of thermonuclear devices.

The first Chinese nuclear test was conducted at Lop Nur on October 16, 1964. It was a tower shot involving a fission device with a yield of 25 kilotons. #shorts

Song: Mounds

Artist: Bolot Bairyshev

Don’t forget the first victims when you go see Oppenheimer this opening weekend. Unforgivable not to include them in the narrative.

We love us some Nolan and Cillian but this is also a story that should never have taken place.

For further reading:

This is what happens when the US government goes nuclear-crazy during the Cold War and mines a shit ton of uranium. Lambs born with three legs and no eyes, and human stillbirths and agonizing deformities for those that survive. For decades it was referred to as a Navajo-specific hereditary illness. No one made the link to the mines and the drinking water.

2023 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) Workshop at UN Headquarters.

The workshop will increase awareness and stimulates understanding of the Treaty and promote its entry into force and universalization. The training would include lectures and discussions on specific aspects of the CTBT and related issues relevant to the work of the Organization.

Brief history of the CTBT negotiations

Evolution of seismic monitoring

The International Monitoring System

The International Data Centre

On-Site Inspections

The Provisional Technical Secretariat and the Preparatory Commission

The sustainability of the verification regime

The Article XIV Process

Legal aspects of the Treaty

National Implementation Measures

The role of the CTBT in international peace and security

Monitoring and reporting on the DPRK nuclear tests

Civil and scientific applications of monitoring data, including NDC4All initiative

Knowledge exchange between science and diplomacy

Reinvigorating strategic support for the CTBT and the importance of preparing the next generation of leaders and policy makers in all aspects of the CTBT

Expanding the pool of expertise to the New York based disarmament experts to increase active engagement on the critical issues underpinning the Treaty

Promoting leadership among diplomats whose political influence may sway decisions in favour of entry into force.

Upcoming training and capacity building activities

PTS staffing and human resources

Financing the CTBTO

Guests at the Last Frontier pool watched as a mushroom cloud rose from the Simon Test, part of the Operation Upshot-Knothole, at the Nevada Test Site outside of Las Vegas on April 25, 1953. The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce issued a calendar for tourists, listing the scheduled times of the bomb detonations and the best places to view them.

When I saw this photo shared on Facebook by the National Atomic Testing Museum (Atomic Museum), I was thinking what a contrast from just eight years earlier when Enrico Fermi was taking bets ahead of the Trinity test about whether a nuclear detonation would ignite the atmosphere and possibly destroy the world. That’s an episode recounted in John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic which I saw at Lyric Opera in the 2007/8 season.

I knew Fermi wasn’tserious, but hadn’t understood that by that time that particular catastrophe had already been ruled out by scientists as even a remote possibility, but the idea that it at least might have been possible lived on in the more popular imagination for some time.

Computer room at the Nevada Test Site.

(National Archives)

my hot take on the awful nuclear war movie discourse is that i do actually think there is a way to create a critical but sympathetic biopic abt the jewish leftist/communist scientists involved in the manhatten project, who at the moment of 1942 did earnestly (and had reason to) view themselves as part of an urgent struggle against global nazism, and which can cut thru the usamerican imperialist apologia hero-fetish impulse and lay bare the genocidal devastations left in the wake of continuing us counterinsurgent militarism across the continent and pacific (which means addressing the anticommunism!) w/o resorting to white man existentialist handwringing. such a film however, would not be politically commensurable as a bajillion dollar summer blockbuster directed by christopher nolan!

The day we nuked Mississippi

The day we nuked Mississippi

Horace Burge, 2 miles from Ground Zero, came home to more damage than expected The Salmon test on Oct. 22, 1964 and the Sterling test on Dec. 3, 1966, were conducted to help determine whether and how nuclear test yields could be disguised through “decoupling” and how well such blasts could be detected. After nine years of negotiations, the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries…

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(alt included in all images)

Another thread by Senator Ben Ray Luján here.

A book on the subject (haven't read it myself):

One of the sources in another one of Alisa's furiously impassioned twitter threads have been debunked, so I didn't include that. But she claims that her own family was caught in the fallout zone when her mother was a baby, which eventually led to her and large numbers of her community developing cancer. It's human for that kind of grief to be caught up in inaccuracies. People are already being ghastly and racist to Hispanos and Indigenous people criticizing the hype for the movie. They're not attacking Oppenheimer for being Jewish, they're criticising the erasure of the human cost of these bombs and the continued valorisation of the U.S military's actions in World War II as some kind of moral saviourism.

While Oppenheimer himself believed that the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally justified (they had planned to drop them on Germany except they surrendered before they could), he also felt had blood on his hands and regretted his role as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb". He spent the rest of his career vehemently opposing further development of thermonuclear weapons and the hydrogen bomb accurately predicting the concept of mutually assured destruction. This eventually made him a victim of Senator McCarthy's Red Scare and his clearance was revoked. I haven't seen the movie (Christopher Nolan is the kind of casual white racist I avoid on principle) but people who have seen it say that it doesn't glorify nuclear weapons and depicts the man himself with the complex moral nuance that seems to be accurately reflective of his real life.

The backlash to Indigenous and Hispanos people's criticisms and to people pointing out that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocides is also frustrating because...both world wars were a clash of genocidal empires. The reason they were world wars is because the countries colonized by Japan, China, the European powers and the US were all dragged into it, whether they wanted to or not. Jews were one of the many colonized peoples that suffered in that time, who were left to die by everyone until they could be used to frame the Allied powers as moral saviours, establishing a revisionist nostalgia for heroism that powers the US military industrial complex to this day.

As early as May 1942, and again in June, the BBC reported the mass murder of Polish Jews by the Nazis. Although both US President, Franklin Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, warned the Germans that they would be held to account after the war, privately they agreed to prioritise and to turn their attention and efforts to winning the war. Therefore, all pleas to the Allies to destroy the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau were ignored. The Allies argued that not only would such an operation shift the focus away from winning the war, but it could provoke even worse treatment of the Jews. In June 1944 the Americans had aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex. The Allies bombed a nearby factory in August, but the gas chambers, crematoria and train tracks used to transport Jewish civilians to their deaths were not targeted.

(Source)

Uncritical consumption of World War II media is the reinforcement of imperialist propaganda, more so when one group of colonized people is used to silence other colonized peoples. Pitting white Jewry against BIPOC is to do the work of white supremacy for imperialist colonizers, and victimizes Jews of colour twice over.

Edit: friends, there's been some doubt cast on the veracity of Alisa's claims. The human cost to the Hispanos population caught downwind of the nuclear tests is very real, as was land seizure without adequate compensation. However, there's no record I can yet find about Los Alamos killing livestock and Hispanos being forced to work for Los Alamos without PPE. There is a separate issue about human testing in the development of said PPE that's not covered here. I'm turning off reblogs until I can find out more. Meanwhile, here's another more legitimate article you can boost instead:

A map depicting composite deposition of radioactive material across the contiguous U.S. from the Trinity test in New Mexico and from 93 atmospheric tests in Nevada.

by u/dtdv

Fallout map from nuke tests. The original map comes from the SGS group @ Princeton. I put the interactive map together on RAMADDA.

I found their use of colors quite beautiful

i haven’t been around and i haven’t been making any art for some time because life has gotten unbelievably busy and stressful, but i took a day off to do a barbenheimer double feature at the theatres and oh my god. please watch barbie.

Aliens upon learning that we were not actually in a nuclear war: Ok? I guess testing a weapon makes sense. But why did you need to test the same weapon 2058 times?

Human: 2056

Alien: *visible fear as the realization kicks in and they question which ones weren’t tests

Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project knew from the start that this place was not all that isolated and was far from uninhabited. There were, in fact, dozens of families within 20 miles, largely poor families of ranchers and farmers, many Hispanic and Indigenous, who unwittingly went about their daily lives in the first fallout of the atomic age. Now, those who were infants and children downwind of the detonation of the “Gadget”—a code name for the plutonium bomb used in the Trinity test—are nearing the end of a decades-long battle to be recognized and compensated for generations of illness they trace to exposure from radioactive fallout.

[...]

The reactions of Manhattan Project observers at the Trinity site are well documented. “Words haven’t been invented to describe it,” physicist Val Fitch said of the enormous fireball. General Thomas Farrell said the awesome roar “warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous.” “A few people laughed, a few people cried,” Oppenheimer recalled years later. “I remembered a line from the Hindu scripture . . . Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge said, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” Less documented are the reactions of the many New Mexicans who lived near Trinity. They had no warning, no context for the star-level explosion that shook their homes and startled them awake that morning. Worse, in the weeks after the test, they were never advised that their land, crops, livestock, and water may have been irradiated. A 2010 report to the CDC used archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory to re-examine the extent to which New Mexicans were unknowingly exposed to radioactive contamination from Trinity. Its findings revealed a shambolic and sometimes cynical effort to track the Gadget’s fallout that windy morning using “crude” and “ineffective” measures. Spotlights were deployed to try to follow the 230 tons of sand and ash falling from the mushroom cloud as it dispersed over southern New Mexico. Film badges designed to detect and measure radiation had been sent to nearby post offices before the test, but because of the Manhattan Project’s secret nature, there was little explanation on how the badges were meant to be used or why, and so they were deployed incorrectly or not at all. Some soldiers assigned to chase and monitor the radioactive cloud couldn’t relay their findings to headquarters in Albuquerque because they were not equipped with long-distance radios; other monitors attempted to gather fallout samples with domestic Filter Queen brand vacuum cleaners. (These samples were later lost or destroyed.) At least one monitor left the area after his superior declared tracking fallout a “waste of time,” while another soldier misplaced his respirator and took the official but scientifically misguided precaution of breathing through a slice of bread.