- The Manhattan Project displaced some New Mexicans and employed others at Los Alamos in the 1940s.
- When the project detonated the first atom bomb, radioactive fallout rained on thousands of people.
- Christopher Nolan's new film "Oppenheimer" leaves out these lasting, local impacts.
When the Manhattan Project team led by J. Robert Oppenheimer detonated the first atom bomb in the New Mexico desert in 1945, Tina Cordova's family was living in nearby Tularosa.
After the bright blast, radioactive ash fell from the sky for days.
A decade later, Cordova says, her great-grandfathers were both diagnosed with what was called "stomach cancer" at the time. Then her grandmothers had cancer. Then her father. Now Cordova herself is a survivor of thyroid cancer.
"The first question they asked me was 'When were you exposed to radiation?'" Cordova, who founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, said in a panel discussion on July 17. "And now I have a 23-year-old niece going to college in California, studying art, wants to work at Pixar. And in November, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer."
The Manhattan Project displaced some New Mexicans, employed others, and irradiated potentially thousands. None of them appear in the new Christopher Nolan film about the project, called "Oppenheimer."
Cordova said she made several unsuccessful attempts to contact somebody on Nolan's team, hoping to ensure the film acknowledged these local impacts.
"A reflection on those sorts of things would've taken nothing away from this film and actually would be in line with the regrets that Robert Oppenheimer eventually expressed," Cordova told Insider during the panel.
In December, Olivia Fermi also tried to contact filmmakers by reaching out to lead actors on Instagram or via contact forms on their charities' websites, and by asking for help from Kai Bird, an author of the book "American Prometheus", which is the basis of the new movie.
"I hoped only that they would include something in the end credits," Fermi, a psychological counselor in Vancouver and an acquaintance of Cordova's, told Insider. Her grandfather was the physicist Enrico Fermi, who worked on the Manhattan Project and is played by Danny Deferrari in the film.
"I was hoping that because of my last name that somebody would notice," Fermi said.
It's not clear if her messages reached anybody involved in the film, based on emails and screenshots that Fermi shared with Insider.
"There's no excuse in 2023 to not include families, women, and minorities," she added.
NBCUniversal, the company that owns the studio behind the film, did not respond to Insider's request for comment.
The Manhattan Project grabbed some locals' land and recruited others
When the US government first chose Los Alamos as the location for its secret nuclear lab, it displaced several families who had been living and farming the land for generations.
Many of the homesteaders were Hispanic. The language barrier and sight of uniforms and guns may have intimidated them into accepting the government's offer to buy their land, said Rosario Martinez Fiorillo, a descendant of one of the evicted families.
Some homesteaders received as little as $7 an acre for their land, while the government paid about $225 an acre for the Los Alamos Ranch school and $43 an acre for the Anchor Ranch, both Anglo-owned.
After homesteaders' descendants petitioned the federal government over the discrepancy, Congress set up a $10 million fund, acknowledging the Hispanic homesteaders had been paid less for their land.
Even after the displacement, people still lived near the lab and what would eventually become the Trinity site, where the scientists and military personnel tested the first atomic bomb. Residents from the San Ildefonso Pueblo, El Rancho, and other nearby communities started working at the laboratory site.
Many of the women started as house cleaners or babysitters for the scientists and their spouses, but many eventually became technicians or clerical workers as the project expanded and more and more workers were needed.
None of those local landowners or workers appear in the Nolan film. The Oppenheimer character briefly mentions people living in the area when he proposes it as the site for the Manhattan Project.
The first atom-bomb test spread nuclear fallout over thousands of people
On the night before the Trinity Test, Elizabeth and Alvin Graves, a married couple of physicists who worked at Los Alamos, headed to a cabin in Carrizozo, New Mexico, about 45 miles from the test site.
Though the project's scientists weren't sure exactly how the radiation would affect humans, they still thought that Elizabeth Graves, who was pregnant, should be miles away.
"Their understanding of what's a safe amount of radiation to be exposed to is not the same one we would have today," Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear technology and professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, told Insider.
Post-war research would focus heavily on the effects of radiation, but at the time, "their real priority is making the atomic bomb, not keeping these marginalized communities safe," he said.
On July 16, 1945, the world's first atomic bomb exploded. Over 280 miles away, in Amarillo, Texas, residents could see a bright flash. Windows broke and dishes rattled in Silver City, New Mexico. It was 5:30 a.m.
Almost 11 hours later, the cloud of radiation wafted toward the Graves. The needle on the couple's Geiger counter was stuck on the highest reading.
There were people living even closer to the test site, though, some within 13 miles of the blast, according to Cordova and the National Park Service, which maintains Los Alamos as a historical park.
Tens of thousands of people lived within 50 miles of the test site.
The difference between them and the Graves' is that the locals had no idea what was happening. Nobody had warned them.
To explain the flashes, booms, and rattles, Gen. Leslie Groves had an officer from the Alamogordo Air Base tell the Associated Press that "a remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics exploded" but that no one was injured.
No evacuations as radioactive ash fell from the sky
Wellerstein said the Army had people stationed in downwind towns with radiation detectors, and plans to initiate evacuations if the radiation spiked past a certain level. Ultimately, nobody was evacuated.
"They did have towns that, according to their surveys, picked up radiation. They judged all of this to be within safe tolerances," Wellerstein said. "Today we probably wouldn't judge that to be acceptable amounts of radiation to be exposed to."
Radioactive fallout from the blast spread northeast, over an area about 250 miles long and 200 miles wide, according to NPS. Ash fell from the sky for days. The radiation landed on vegetables and cattle that locals relied on for food, and in cisterns they used to collect rainwater, since many had no running water.
"Truly it set up the perfect storm for overexposing us," said Cordova, whose father was four years old and lived in a downwind community at the time.
Oppenheimer once wrote that his "two great loves" were "physics and New Mexico."
"I am distressed every time I hear that because I too love this great state. This is where I have chosen to live and where I choose to live every day," Cordova said. "We never were asked permission. We were never given a chance to weigh in on all of this. And this is the legacy that we live with."