The world's 1st atomic bomb causes rare cancers in New Mexico and no apologies for 76 years

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

On a cool July dawn, 11-year-old Henry Herrera and his father were outside their home in Tularosa, New Mexico, when they saw a bright light and heard the boom of what turned out to be the world's first atomic bomb test.

Hours later, their home was covered in ash.

Why it matters: Three-quarters of a century later, Hispanic and Mescalero Apache families and descendants of those living near the Trinity Test are dealing with rare cancers that have devastated nearly four generations, while the federal government ignored, dismissed and forgot them.

Those families, mainly Latino and Native American, now want acknowledgment and compensation like white families near U.S. nuclear testing sites in other states. But time is running out.

The big picture: "The military didn't tell us a damn thing. Not even, 'I'm sorry.' They didn't hurt nothing but a bunch of Mexicans who lived there, I guess," Herrera, now 87, tells Axios.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/worlds-1st-atomic-bomb-causes-182837002.html

[Bayard]

1. Not even a warning

The height of callousness.

[Runningdawg]

2. I worked with a nurse who was in the AF along with her husband and viewed the tests.

Before 1990, both she, her husband and one of their adult children died from a rare form of lung cancer. I knew a person who died a year or so after 911 with cancer all her body. The government doesn't care about the military or civilians, especially Natives.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

3. U.S. lawmakers move urgently to recognize survivors of the first atomic bomb test

Barbara Kent joined Carmadean’s dance camp in the desert near Ruidoso, New Mexico, in the summer of 1945. During the day, she and nine other girls learned tap and ballet. At night, they slept in a cabin by a river. Early in the morning on July 16, 1945, Kent says that she —then 13—and the other campers were jolted out of their bunk beds by what felt like an enormous explosion nearby. Their dance instructor rushed the girls outside, worried that a heater on the premises might have burst.

“We were all just shocked … and then, all of a sudden, there was this big cloud overhead, and lights in the sky,” Kent recalls. “It even hurt our eyes when we looked up. The whole sky turned strange. It was as if the sun came out tremendous.”

A few hours later, she says, white flakes began to fall from above. Excited, the girls put on their bathing suits and, amid the flurries, began playing in the river. “We were grabbing all of this white, which we thought was snow, and we were putting it all over our faces,” Kent says. “But the strange thing, instead of being cold like snow, it was hot. And we all thought, ‘Well, the reason it’s hot is because it’s summer.’ We were just 13 years old.”

The flakes were fallout from the Manhattan Project’s Trinity test, the world’s first atomic bomb detonation. It took place at 5:29 a.m. local time atop a hundred-foot steel tower 40 miles away at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, in Jornada del Muerto valley.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/u-s-lawmakers-move-urgently-to-recognize-survivors-of-the-first-atomic-bomb-test/ar-AAOFOcg

[Sur Zobra]

4. Some of the scientists working

on the project thought that the bomb might even set fire to the atmosphere and some thought the bomb could destroy everything between Trinity and El Paso

And some thought it would be a dud. The Army, which was in control of the Manhattan Project, didn’t give a damn about the humans who might be affected.

However, the science of the atomic bomb is spectacular and the splitting of the atom was inevitable.