Trinity downwinders decry secrecy in new federal study of atomic test’s health impacts

Seventy years after the top-secret explosion of the world’s first nuclear device in the Southern New Mexico desert, advocates for New Mexicans who say radioactive fallout from the Trinity Site test made them ill are growing increasingly wary of what they say is a new round of government secrecy, even as they are finally getting attention from the government after years of having their complaints ignored. This new uneasiness was apparent as they met in Santa Fe last week with National Cancer Institute researchers who are making the first attempt to document possible doses of radiation received by individuals across the state and assess the health risks. For privacy and scientific-research reasons, the researchers said, they could not reveal the protocols they are following as they conduct a survey of lifestyles that might have led to internal exposures to radiation from the nuclear cloud that deposited fallout across a wide area in July 1945. That explanation failed to satisfy some who have complained that the U.S. government told them nothing about the potential dangers before or after Los Alamos scientists set off the atomic bomb. “When something is done in such secrecy … when they say ‘we can’t share that, we can’t share this,’ it just makes me very suspicious,” said Tina Cordova , leader of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which is working to get Congress to acknowledge Southern New Mexicans’ claims of decades of suffering from what they believe were radiation-induced cancers, thyroid disease and other afflictions. “It’s just reminiscent of the secrecy that was in place around the development of the Trinity bomb and the testing, and even what goes on in Los Alamos today,” she said. “I can’t help but think that in some regard, we’ve become victims again.” National Cancer Institute researchers briefed members of Cordova’s group and other activists, as well as representatives from New Mexico Indian tribes and the state’s congressional delegation, on the institute’s work toward determining possible statewide health effects from the Trinity test...more