We are all familiar with the general facts regarding the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, the residents of those cities were not the first victims of atomic warfare. With all due respect to the Japanese who died in those attacks, the first victims of the nuclear age were Americans. Specifically, those who were downwind of the first atomic explosion – at Alamogordo, in the New Mexico desert, in July 1945.

On July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico hinterland, the first atomic test was conducted by the scientists and military officials of the Manhattan project. Codenamed Trinity, the explosion was more powerful than the physicists anticipated, and the fallout zone was larger and more extensive than they had calculated. The area surrounding the explosion was sparsely populated, and US military authorities would later claim that the area was uninhabited.

Barbara Kent was 13 years old when the explosion occurred. She and her classmates – they were on a summer dance camp in Ruidoso, New Mexico – were thrown out of their bunk beds by the force of the blast. The detonation at Alamogordo, NM, was so bright it was seen from hundreds of miles away. In another small town, Carrizozo, residents ran into the local church, believing the Rapture and the end times was upon them.

Kent and her schoolmates ran outside, and began playing in what they thought was snow. Snowing in July? It was strange, but teenagers intent on playing cannot be stopped. The white dust which enveloped their location was radioactive fallout from the explosion. The kids rubbed it on their skin, in their faces – the dust contaminated their drinking and cleaning water. Farm animals consumed it with the grass and crops.

The mushroom cloud – the iconic symbol of nuclear power – went up 50 000 to 75 000 feet in the air from the Alamogordo blast. Higher than anticipated, the fallout from the explosion is only now slowly being uncovered. The US military failed to evacuate people from the immediate vicinity of the blasts, and the Trinity downwinders, as they are known, having been fighting for recognition, an apology and compensation.

Trinity downwinders were told, in 1945, that the explosion they witnessed was from an ammunition dumping ground. It was only after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the downwinders began to understand the magnitude of what had befallen them.

The families of the Trinity downwinders have experienced generations of cancers – stomach, thyroid, pancreatic, among others. Tina Cordova, a resident of Tularosa, NM, has been fighting for the Trinity downwinders. Her home is only 34 miles from the original atomic test site. Her family, from her great grandparents onwards, have been afflicted with various types of cancers. In the immediate three months after the Trinity tests, infant deaths from cancer in NM jumped by 56 percent.

Cordova formed the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium in 2005, and has painstakingly accumulated medical evidence and statements from downwinder families about the cancers they have suffered, along with the official neglect they have encountered. It is true that in 1990, the US Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) which provided limited and partial compensation for those affected by radiation exposure from US military atomic tests.

The RECA act excluded the Trinity downwinders, but provided compensation to those affected by the hundreds of post-1945 atomic tests throughout the United States. From 1945 to 1992, the US conducted 1054 atomic tests, including atmospheric and underwater environments. Each one took its ecological and financial toll.

The other group of Americans excluded by the RECA act is the uranium miners, most of whom are from the Navajo indigenous nation. The tests performed in south west Nevada, for instance, required the laborious exertions of labourers from the indigenous and Hispanic communities.

It is indicative of the priorities of the US Republican Party when they complain about the financial burden of RECA. In what way? The $2.5 billion dollars paid out to radiation victims over the last approximately 30 years pales into insignificance compared to the hundreds of billions spent to upgrade and maintain the stockpile of nuclear weapons. Somehow, financial burdens are absent when considering the maintenance of nuclear weapons.

When Soviet dissident and nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov (1921 – 1989) denounced the Soviet nuclear programme, and upheld the basic principles of human rights and civil liberties, he was hailed as a hero in the West. Sakharov was granted east access to the Reagan administration, and received overwhelmingly positive coverage in the corporate media.

That is all well and good, except for the glaring hypocrisy at the heart of the Sakharov human rights project. Not only was the Reagan administration a ferocious advocate of nuclear weapons, increasing spending on that military technology by the millions. Astrophysics and the military have a close, intertwined relationship. Authors Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang describe that relationship as a double-hinged door in their 2018 book Accessory to War.

The principles of high energy physics are partly based upon the thermonuclear fusion that occurs in cosmic environments. Astrophysicists who study the collisions and emergence of particles at such high energy states are fully aware of the military implications of their work, sharing laboratory facilities and sometimes working within shouting distance of each other.

Our understanding of cosmic interactions, and the particles that pop in and out of existence, is inextricably linked with government programmes to support military research. Sakharov was well aware of this symbiotic relationship. His failure to even acknowledge this issue blasts a huge hole in his credibility as a universal human rights peacemaker.

How about we begin to acknowledge the ecological and medical harm caused by US nuclear testing. As Cordova explains in her documentary film, First We Bombed New Mexico, thousands of Americans were lied to about the Trinity tests, exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation, and then neglected for generations. A historic injustice needs to be corrected.