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Trinity/1945-Remember the Down Winders

July 7, 2022 By Bob Kinsey

From the Nuclear Ban Treaty Collaborative,

Greetings,
We’re writing to encourage your ongoing action, through marking Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Trinity Day this summer. This particular email is about July 16: the date of the Trinity Test in 1945, when the first nuclear weapon was exploded in the USA state of New Mexico, and the date of the Church Rock uranium tailings spill in 1979, when 1,100 tons of radioactive detritus and 93 million gallons of uranium processing waste crashed out of a broken uranium tailings dam. Wherever you are in the U.S., we hope you’ll commemorate this important day in nuclear and national history.

Some action ideas include:

  • Contact your congressional members and ask them to support bills expanding the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or better yet, organize a call-in day or letter writing party
  • Organize a candlelight vigil in solidarity with the Red Water Pond Road Community Association and the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium who are having local events that day.
  • Nukewatch’s Kelly Lundeen is asking people to celebrate her upcoming birthday by sending donations to the Red Water Pond Road Community Association here and the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium (TBDC) here:

TBDC c/o Tina Cordova
7518 2nd St. NW
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87107

Tina Cordova, co-founder of the TBDC, describes how, “The [Trinity] explosion produced more heat than the sun, and caused radioactive ash to fall for days – covering and contaminating crops, homes, bodies, and water supplies. We were innocent children, women, and men who were left to deal with the horrid consequences of being overexposed to radioactive fallout. Our families suffer from cancer, radiation-related illnesses, and early death. The people of New Mexico have been waiting over 77 years. We have never been acknowledged although we were the original Downwinders, the first people to be exposed to a nuclear bomb and nuclear fallout anyplace in the world. We have been casualties of the U.S. government’s quest for nuclear superiority. There is so much more to the history than what the U.S. government has been willing to share, and we were the human sacrifice.”

Thank you for your consideration, and for working for nuclear abolition, peace, and justice,

Sofia Wolman, Amy O’Brien & Kelly Lundeen

Filed Under: Events, Take Action

About Bob Kinsey

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Disarmament Quotes

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth BainbridgeDeputy Director Manhatten Project

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlisterKings Bay Protestor 2019

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight EisenhowerUS President 1953-1961

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford"The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee ButlerFormer Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

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