Column: movie raises awareness of nuclear fallout

On orders from President Franklin Roosevelt one of the largest concentration camps in the United States was built in Santa Fe in 1942 and imprisoned some 4,555 people of Japanese heritage. During World War II National Guard units from New Mexico became trapped on the Bataan peninsula where they experienced torture at the hands of soldiers of the Empire of Japan. Four Los Alamos scientists armed the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed over 200,000 children, women and men.

Beginning in 1958 Homestake Mining Company gouged uranium from New Mexico leaving piles of waste rock laden with selenium causing cancers and thyroid disease in its wake. In 1979 an earthen dam collapsed releasing 1,100 tons of uranium waste and 94 million gallons of radioactive and highly acidic water into Navajo tribal lands.

Tritium, a naturally occurring radioactive isotope of hydrogen that can cause birth defects and spontaneous abortions, has been found in groundwater near Los Alamos National Laboratory. Today, Cochiti Reservoir at the confluence of the Rio Grande and Santa Fe River is a radioactive sewer impounding millions of cubic yards of silt contaminated with chromium and the effluent from thousands of upstream septic systems after decades of bomb making at Los Alamos. 

In 2022, Archbishop of the Santa Fe Diocese John C. Wester offered a pastoral letter he calls “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament.” Cannon Air Force Base near Clovis is home to the plane that dropped a Massive Ordnance Air Blast or 'Mother of all Bombs' on Afghanistan. 

Democratic New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham is at odds with the US Department of Energy and Bechtel National who seem to believe transporting diluted nuclear waste like plutonium over and over America's railroads and highways is completely harmless. Energy has set a goal of producing 80 new plutonium pits a year by 2035, enough to fully replace the triggers in every existing thermonuclear warhead by 2105. 

A nuclear waste dump would make southeast New Mexico a sacrifice zone that amounts to “nuclear colonialism," according to Leona Morgan, a Diné woman and organizer with the Nuclear Issues Study Group.

New Mexico’s Democratic delegation is moving an amendment through Congress to the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act intending to offset decades of hardships suffered by people downwind of the atomic bomb tests in the 1940s.

Dr. Lyndon  Haviland is a regent at Western New Mexico University and a distinguished scholar at the CUNY School of Public Health and Health Policy. She lives with her husband, Tom on their spectacular Morning Star Ranch in rural Santa Fe County. Last October they hosted a fabulous wedding party for neighbors Kate and Phil.

The movie “Oppenheimer” shows the destruction from the blast of the first atomic bomb, known as the Trinity test, on July 16, 1945, roughly 200 miles south of Los Alamos, N.M. It’s a sad fact that a Hollywood movie was needed to spur political action to correct a major public health injustice. The victims of New Mexico deserve to be compensated for the suffering they have endured. It should have happened decades ago. But Congress can finally right this wrong by honoring those who’ve been ignored for far too long. [Haviland, In New Mexico, ‘Oppenheimer’ offers new hope for long denied compensation]

Learn more from the Associated Press.