Oppenheimer Biographer Calls for Compensation to NM Downwinders

Nuclear fallout

Notably absent from Christopher Nolan’s film on J. Robert Oppenheimer: the radioactive fallout for people living downwind of the 1945 test explosion. The New York Times examines a study released last week (prior to its submission to a scientific journal and peer review) that shows “the cloud and its fallout went farther than anyone in the Manhattan Project had imagined in 1945. Using state-of-the-art modeling software and recently uncovered historical weather data, the study’s authors say that radioactive fallout from the Trinity test reached 46 states, Canada and Mexico within 10 days of detonation.” Following news of the study, Pulitzer Prize-winning Oppenheimer biographer Kai Bird, along with the Navajo Nation, Nobel Laureates and atomic veterans on Friday all called upon Congress to strengthen and extend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to include those hurt by the Trinity test. US Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-NM, who has worked for years to extend and expand radiation exposure compensation to those communities, tells Roll Call in a written statement that the interest sparked by the movie provides “an opportunity to educate millions of Americans that nearly eight decades later, New Mexicans are still dealing with the impacts of radiation exposure.” (Read Luján’s Twitter thread on this topic here). Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium co-founder Tina Cordova tells Axios the 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,” and that not only did no one from the film contact New Mexico Trinity survivors, but “we’ve done everything to reach out to the filmmakers from the time that they were filming until today.”

And writing for Time magazine, Navajo Nation President Buu Van Nygren writes that Nolan’s film opened “five days after the 44th anniversary of the Church Rock uranium mill spill, when 94 million gallons of radioactive waste poured into the Puerco River, spanning northwestern New Mexico and northern Arizona, and across the Navajo Nation. Children played in the contaminated water, while livestock drank from radioactive aquifers. What came next—cancers, miscarriages, and mysterious illnesses—is a direct consequence of America’s race for nuclear hegemony. It’s an accomplishment built on top of the bodies of Navajo men, women, and children—the lived experience of nuclear weapons development in the United States. But, as usual, Hollywood chose to gloss over them.”

Political consultant James Hallinan dies

James Hallinan, who worked for numerous high-profile Democrats as a political consultant—including former Attorney General Hector Balderas and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham during her 2018 political campaign—has died at the age of 40. Southwest Public Policy Institute, of which Hallinan was a founding board member, announced his death over the weekend, and said it happened last Thursday. “His untimely departure has left a void in the hearts of all who knew him, as well as the broader community that he served with unwavering dedication,” SPPI’s statement reads. “His insight, passion, and commitment to creating positive change have been pivotal in the Institute’s endeavors to address critical issues facing our society.” Hallinan’s allegations that Lujan Grisham grabbed his crotch during the campaign on which he worked—allegations the governor has denied but paid $150,000 to settle—remained a point of contention during the last gubernatorial campaign. No cause of death has been announced. Hallinan’s sister Marissa on Friday wrote in a Facebook post: “At this time of deep sadness and mourning we thank you for your conveyed sentiments and support. In lieu of a formal ceremony, we ask that those who knew him spend time celebrating his life in a way that honors the joyous times you spent with him.”

Bandelier reopens after lead oxide scare

Bandelier National Monument reopened its visitor center on Saturday after closing July 7 to evaluate what were at the time unspecified “indoor environmental conditions.” Those conditions turned out to be, according to a Friday news release, the discovery of “a type of lead oxide (PbO)…in the varnish on some historic furnishings that were undergoing conservation work outside of the park.” Officials say they closed the park out of an “abundance of caution” and a National Park Service industrial hygienist conducted a variety of environmental tests. In addition, NPS staff “underwent blood sampling to determine if there was any threat to employee and visitor health.” According to the news release, all the tests showed “undetectable levels of lead or levels well below the Environmental Protection Agency and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention thresholds for what is considered acceptable” and, in fact, “the levels were all lower than what is seen in the general US population.” While the visitor center has reopened, its phone lines are, apparently, down.

Appraising NM’s political shift

Los Angeles Times political columnist Mark Z. Barabak examines New Mexico’s transition from “battleground state” status to Democrat stronghold, aka blue, as part of a series on the “new West.” In 2000, as the story notes, while all eyes were on Florida, Al Gore won New Mexico by just 366 votes. And in 2004, George Bush eked out a win by less than a percentage point. Since then, however, New Mexico has lost its swing-state tendencies. “It’s been one Democratic victory after another,” Barabak writes, “none of them close.” He attributes the shift to a variety of factors, including: people relocating to New Mexico from liberal states such as California; expansion of “Latino influence”; and Republicans’ “dramatically rightward” shift, particularly on issues such as immigration and abortion. The latter factor, Barabak opines, has antagonized both the “burgeoning Latino population,” not to mention your average Westerner. “They don’t like government interference,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham tells the Times. “What I mean by that is: Don’t make healthcare decisions for me. Don’t talk to me about what you deem to be equality. Don’t tell me what books I can or cannot read. Don’t tell me who I can marry.” In other words: “Don’t tell me what to do.”

Listen up

Washington Post Field Trip podcast host Lillian Cunningham visits White Sands National Park, site of the first atomic bomb test depicted in Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer. There she ponders the site’s natural beauty, as well as its dichotomous nature: “White Sands National Park is embedded within White Sands Missile Range, the largest military facility in the country,” Cunningham notes. “At first I was really surprised by this, but actually there are other arid national parks…that have also served as military testing grounds. There are places the government has both safeguarded and sacrificed. And I think there is no desert where that tension is on display more today than White Sands. This is a desert that holds stories: It’s where the first nuclear bomb was tested and where there’s now a race against time to protect fossilized footprints…that have raised new questions about our past.”

All in on Oppenheimer

Citing all the coverage Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer has received in the past week might overwhelm this newsletter’s heavy-eyed scribe, but a few highlights: The Washington Post talks to Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb about whether scientists ever worried the Trinity Test would accidentally destroy the world—as depicted in the film. Rhodes said they did not—their actual question prior to the test, he says, was: “Is it going to work at all?” Martin Fuller, writing for the New York Review of Books, tackles how well the film truly tackles “Oppie’s” actual sensibility. Oppenheimer, Fuller notes, “was a longstanding intimate and colleague” of I. I. Rabi, winner of the 1944 Nobel Prize in Physics, depicted in the film by David Krumholtz and—in real life—a first cousin of Fuller’s paternal grandfather. Fuller arranges to watch the film with Rabi’s younger daughter and his cousin Margaret Rabi Beels. Fuller and Beels differ on how well the film captured Oppenheimer, not to mention Margaret’s father, but Fuller’s key point is that Nolan’s film “glosses over” an essential part of Oppenheimer’s “conundrum”: his need for government validation and his own participation in “naming names of suspected Communists to the very body that was unjustly purging him.” And Foreign Policy magazine zeroes in on the White Sands landscape, noting that “there isn’t much left on the oppressive white sands of the New Mexico desert to mark that the nuclear age began here,” along with the aside that “the only reason the Trinity test did not irradiate 100,000 people was because of a shift in the wind: One wrong gust, and radioactive dust would have blanketed Albuquerque and Santa Fe.”

Honoring resilience

National Geographic magazine examines through a photo essay by Diné photographer Dakota Mace the history and indelible impact of the forced exile of Navajo (Diné)—known as the “Long Walk”—as part of its The Past Is Present project collaboration with For Freedoms. The Long Walk, starting in 1864, required more than 8,500 men, women, and children to walk in winter more than 300 miles from northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to an internment camp in eastern New Mexico, with hundreds dying on route “from starvation, exposure, and violence at the hands of the US military personnel who had evicted them from their homelands.” The Long Walk, Mace writes, “defined a new era of sovereignty, one of resilience and survival, and reminds us of the struggles for the rights of our land, natural resources, and freedom.” The photo essay includes multiple photographs of Native American elders from New Mexico, as well as letters and landscapes.

Dog days of summer

The National Weather Service forecasts a 20% chance for precipitation today, via isolated showers and thunderstorms after 3 pm. Otherwise, it should be mostly sunny with a high temperature near 94 degrees and west wind 5 to 15 mph.

Thanks for reading! According to the August edition of Harper’s Index, 18% of baby boomers believe in hell versus 32% of millennials and zoomers. The Word, a member of the chronically unpolled GenX, does not.