As cinephiles gear up for Friday’s release of “Oppenheimer,” the blockbuster biopic about the “father of the atomic bomb,” some residents in southern New Mexico where the bomb was first tested say they’ve been largely erased from the narrative. Those residents say their families have battled rare cancers for generations and have been ignored while Manhattan Project scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer are celebrated.
“Oppenheimer,” directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt, follows the American scientist as his team races to create the bomb and deals with the aftermath of its creation.
There were, in fact, dozens of families within 20 miles, largely poor families of ranchers and farmers, many Hispanic and Indigenous, who unwittingly went about their daily lives in the first fallout of the atomic age. Now, those who were infants and children downwind of the detonation of the “Gadget”—a code name for the plutonium bomb used in the Trinity test—are nearing the end of a decades-long battle to be recognized and compensated for generations of illness they trace to exposure from radioactive fallout.
The movie is based on the 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.”
Oppenheimer led a group of scientists during World War II to build the bomb first tested in New Mexico near the homes of Hispanic and Native American residents.
The U.S. government previously seized land from Hispanic and Indigenous homesteaders in northern New Mexico that Oppenheimer knew from horseback riding trips to build a then-secretive lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Known as the Trinity Test, scientists first detonated the bomb near the historic Hispanic village of Tularosa and the Mescalero Apache Reservation on July 16, 1945.
Curious residents went to ground zero to picnic and take artifacts, including the radioactive green glass known as trinitite and contaminated pieces of cloth that were used to make christening dresses. They learned the bomb was atomic about a month later.
The new movie “is nothing but an over-glorification of the science and the scientists, again, with no reflection on the harm done to the people in New Mexico,” Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which advocates for families affected by the Trinity Test, told the press.
Cordova says no one from the movie ever contacted survivors.
“We’ve done everything to reach out to the filmmakers from the time that they were filming until today.”
“Just include a panel, a message at the end of the film that acknowledges the sacrifice and suffering of the people of New Mexico,” says Cordova, who plans to watch the film and join panel discussions on it this weekend.
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