07/27/2026
The girls pictured here playing joyfully in a New Mexico river had no idea they were caught in the radioactive fallout from the world's first atomic bomb test. On July 16, 1945, thirteen-year-old Barbara Kent (center) and her fellow dance camp students thought the white flakes drifting from the sky were snow -- an inexplicable summer miracle. "We were grabbing all of this white, which we thought was snow, and we were putting it all over our faces," Kent later recalled. "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.'" It wasn't snow. It was fallout from the Manhattan Project's Trinity test, detonated just 40 miles away. Of the 12 girls at that camp, only two would live to see their 40th birthday.
That morning, the girls had been jolted awake at 5:30 AM when the explosion shook their cabin so violently that those in top bunks fell to the floor. Their dance instructor, Karma Deane, rushed them outside, thinking a water heater had exploded. Later that day, when the mysterious "hot snow" began falling, the excited girls changed into their swimsuits and spent the afternoon playing in the river, catching the flakes on their tongues and rubbing them on their faces. Government officials later told the community the explosion had been at a dump and assured everyone that everything was fine.
Kent wouldn't learn the truth for another ten years. "It was so wrong of the government not to evacuate everyone when they knew this was going to happen," she said. "They never told us so we played in the thing that killed us." Kent herself survived multiple cancers -- including endometrial cancer, skin cancers, and thyroid cancer requiring the removal of her thyroid -- before passing away in 2024. Her mother, who was staying nearby, died of a brain tumor.
The Trinity test was part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to develop the world's first atomic bomb during World War II. Nearly half a million people lived within a 150-mile radius of the test site -- some as close as 12 miles away. None were warned or evacuated. The radioactive fallout contaminated water, crops, and livestock across the region, with effects lasting decades. More than seventy years later, radiation at the site remains about ten times higher than normal background levels.
Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, described the affected communities as having been "relegated to a sort of nothingness as if we don't count." The toll was staggering: one Tularosa woman compiled a list of 285 people she knew who died from cancer in the decades following the test -- all from a small town of a few thousand people just 45 miles from the blast site.
In 1990, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) to provide $50,000 compensation to "downwinders" exposed to nuclear testing, but it only covered communities in parts of Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, not New Mexico. "This thing really caused so much suffering," Kent said, "and the government never wanted to acknowledge anything."
New Mexicans were finally included in July 2025 -- 35 years after RECA passed, and 80 years almost to the day after Trinity. The expansion offers $100,000 to people who lived, worked, or went to school in New Mexico for at least a year between September 1944 and November 1962 and developed one of 19 qualifying cancers. Roughly $56 million has reached 558 New Mexicans so far. Barbara Kent didn't live to see it -- she died the year before it passed. The deadline to file is December 31, 2027
Cordova's words cut to the heart of the matter: "America poisoned its own citizens, and it has been looking the other way. They can never say that they didn't know ahead of time that radiation was harmful, or that there was going to be fallout. They were depending on us to be unsophisticated, uneducated, and unable to stand up for ourselves. And anyone who hears this story and believes that people weren't harmed, or that it doesn't matter that they were harmed, is complicit if they chose to do nothing and look the other way. Our country has to be better than that."
For a gripping account of the impact of nuclear bomb testing on the western U.S., we recommend "Downwind: A People's History of the Nuclear West" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781496207661 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/439K2tI (Amazon)
For an unflinching look at the Manhattan Project physicians who warned about Trinity's fallout and were overruled, we recommend "Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780674248632 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/44QPe65 (Amazon)
For books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for truth, decency, and justice, even in dark times, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364
For a powerful book about a 6-year-old girl who survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, we recommend "Sachiko: A Nagasaki Bomb Survivor's Story" for ages 10 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/sachiko
For a detailed account of the civilian survivors of the Trinity test in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, visit https://thebulletin.org/premium/2023-07/collateral-damage-american-civilian-survivors-of-the-1945-trinity-test/
