![]() ![]() On December 4, 1947, Warren’s medical assistant, Fred A. “I understand the rate at Alamogordo, nearer the site of the test, was even higher than Roswell.” Behnke, a health care provider from Roswell, New Mexico, wrote. “As I recall, in August 1945, the month after the first bomb was tested in New Mexico, there were about 35 infant deaths here…” Kathryn S. In October 1947, the first concerns over a rise in infant mortality along the fallout path of the Trinity explosion were raised in a letter to Stafford Warren, a medical radiologist and radiation safety chief of the Manhattan Project and the Trinity test in particular. Infant mortality concerns raised about Trinity. Regardless of the outcome of this study, it is clear the public was put in harm’s way because of US government negligence in conducting and its participation in a coverup of the results of an exceedingly dangerous experiment. Meanwhile the National Cancer Institute is conducting a study to model the dispersion and dose reconstruction for people who may have been exposed to fallout from the Trinity explosion. Source: Centers for Disease Control (2010). (See Figure 1.)Įstimated exposure rate in milliroentgens per hour (mR h -1 ) 12 hours after detonation GZ = ground zero of Trinity. The 21 kiloton explosion occurred on a tower 100 feet from the ground and has been likened to a “dirty bomb” that cast large amounts of heavily contaminated soil and debris-containing 80 percent of the bomb’s plutonium-over thousands of square-miles. Federal and New Mexico data indicate that between 19, infant death rates in the area downwind of the test site steadily declined-except for 1945, when the rate sharply increased, especially in the three months following the Trinity blast. ![]() Their response misrepresented New Mexico’s then-unpublished data on health effects. In October 1947, a local health care provider raised an alarm about infant deaths downwind of the Trinity test, bringing it to the attention of radiation safety experts working for the US nuclear weapons program. Even though the first scientifically credible warnings about the hazards of radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion had been made by 1940, historical records indicate a fallout team was not established until less than a month before the Trinity test, a hasty effort motivated primarily by concern over legal liability. Evidence collected by the New Mexico health department but ignored for some 70 years shows an unusually high rate of infant mortality in New Mexico counties downwind from the explosion and raises a serious question whether or not the first victims of the first atomic explosion might have been American children. ![]() We are republishing it as a public service on this 75th anniversary of the Trinity test.įor the past several years, the controversy over radioactive fallout from the world’s first atomic bomb explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945-code-named Trinity-has intensified. Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2019. ![]()
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