By Dan Chasan in the Post Alley Newsletter – (Independent Writing and Editing Professional. Harvard University. Vashon, Washington)
The blockbuster release of the popular film Oppenheimer gives Americans a chance to re-visit the complicated history of this nation‘s development, testing, and use of nuclear weapons during World War II and the long Cold War that followed.
The movie isn’t entirely accurate, some people have pointed out, and it leaves out certain accomplishments and outrages. But that doesn’t mean the people who say, “yes, but” should be ignored. If we’re going to revisit the world-changing early decades of nuclear weapons, people should recognize the historic importance of eastern Washington’s Hanford nuclear site, and we should all realize that our government exposed thousands and thousands of its own citizens to radiation from airborne waste and the fallout from nuclear tests.
Oppenheimer turned out to be a “missed opportunity,” Tina Cordova wrote in The New York Times. It ignored the people living downwind of the Trinity test who were exposed to radiation, and the miners who extracted the uranium that Hanford made into plutonium for the blast. (Uranium miners, many from indigenous communities in the Southwest, faced high odds of developing lung cancer, particularly for smokers.) “A new generation of Americans is learning about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project,” Cordova wrote, “and, like their parents, they won’t hear much about how American leaders knowingly risked and caused harm to the health of their fellow citizens in the name of war. My community and I are being left out of the narrative again.
“The area of southern New Mexico where the Trinity test occurred was not, contrary to the popular account, an uninhabited, desolate expanse of land. There were more than 13,000 New Mexicans living within a 50-mile radius. Many of those children, women, and men were not warned before or after the test. Eyewitnesses have told me they believed they were experiencing the end of the world.”
Hanford produced not only the plutonium that exploded at Trinity but also the plutonium that exploded over Nagasaki and at the South Pacific atoll of Bikini, and the plutonium in bombs that American strategic bombers carried during the Berlin crisis and the Cuban missile crisis, and the plutonium used in the test explosions that irradiated those thousands of American citizens. (Continued)
Rick & I have owned property in Santa Fe, NM for thirty years. The article is helpful in pointing out the ongoing dangers from the Manhattan Project which include ongoing issues with water source contamination to lower elevation properties and Native Pueblos such as San Ildefonso, the home of famed potter Maria Martinez. Cancer & cancer related issues are also elevated such as Hanford.
Such criticism ignores that it was wartime and many difficult choices had to be made. Criticism that would be fair post-WW2 may sound stupid when applied to wartime urgency.