It Didn't Pay to be Down Wind

High atop a tower in the New Mexico desert, the world's first nuclear bomb was detonated in a test called Trinity on a July day in 1945. People over 100 miles away could see the mushroom cloud. No one knew then how far the fallout would go, but now a study shows that within 10 days the radioactivity had reached 46 states, Canada, and Mexico.

As depicted in the biopic, Oppenheimer, the Trinity test ushered in a new age of nuclear weapons testing that culminated in the bombing of two Japanese cities and ended in 1992 having set off over a thousand nuclear explosions.

Recently, scientists reconstructed the weather the day Trinity exploded by charting weather patterns extending thirty thousand feet up. Using this data, researchers could track the fallout of Trinity and the nearly 100 tests that followed.

They could estimate ground deposits of radioactivity for the first five days after each test. It revealed that northeastern New Mexico was heavily impacted. There are stories of children playing with the ash like snow, trying to catch it on their tongues.

Despite the passage of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, many in New Mexico have been denied. About half a million people lived within 115 miles of the test site. They weren't warned and many have since died of cancer. Even though the US and Russia have been reducing their nuclear stockpiles, countries like China and North Korea may be producing more.

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