Archbishop to denounce nuclear arms on Trinity test's 78th anniversary

Jul. 10—The first atomic blast that lit up the early morning sky at the Trinity Site in south-central New Mexico on July 16, 1945 — an event that opened the door for two nuclear bombs to be dropped on Japan — had an immense impact on the state that is still felt to this day.

Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester will mark the 78th anniversary of the Trinity test by denouncing the nuclear weapons program that has escalated since the long-ago detonation in a remote desert, and for which New Mexico finds itself in a primary role.

Wester and anti-nuclear groups are organizing an event Sunday at the Santa Maria de la Paz Community Hall, featuring speakers, music, exhibitions and moments of reflection and prayer on the atomic blast that reshaped civilization. The public can attend or livestream it.

"We can no longer deny or ignore the extremely dangerous predicament of our human family," Wester said in a statement. "We are in a new nuclear arms race far more dangerous than the first, and I believe we need to rejuvenate a sustained, serious conversation about universal, verifiable nuclear disarmament."

Because of Trinity, New Mexico will be forever linked to the two bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs, credited by many with hastening the war's end and saving tens of thousands of American lives, killed more than 200,000 Japanese people and inflicted radiation poisoning on much of the populace.

The atomic test released radioactive fallout in downwind communities in New Mexico, causing fatal illnesses such as cancer in what many believe are a large number of residents, though the actual quantity remains unknown because the federal government didn't track such aftereffects as part of the secrecy surrounding the project.

In recent years, Wester has become more vocal in his opposition to nuclear weapons, in part because Los Alamos National Laboratory has been called on for a different nuclear mission: producing plutonium triggers for warheads to modernize the arsenal.

The goal is for the lab to produce 30 of the bomb cores, or pits, by 2026, and for Savannah River Site in South Carolina to make an additional 50 pits by 2035.

"Existing nuclear weapons powers are modernizing their arsenals to keep nuclear weapons forever," Wester said. "New Mexico is at the center of the U.S. government's $1.7 trillion modernization plan."

Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, said it was important to remind people of the harm done, beginning with Trinity and continuing with regular above-ground explosive testing in Nevada until the early 1960s.

"Our government has never had any concern for the damage that they did to people's health in New Mexico," Cordova said. "We've been dealing with it ever since. In our community we don't ask if we're going to get cancer. We ask when it will it be our turn."

The effects of potent radioactive contaminants spread over a wide area are multi-generational, Cordova said. She came down with thyroid cancer at age 39 in the late 1990s, and her niece who's attending college was recently diagnosed with the same type of cancer.

In 2021, the National Cancer Institute concluded a six-year study of elderly downwinders. It concluded there was no evidence the radiation from the Trinity test caused genetic abnormalities that could be passed by birth to subsequent generations.

Cordova dismissed the findings as flawed based on sketchy data. For instance, the institute mainly focused on thyroid cancer and didn't look at the 19 other cancers linked to radiation, Cordova said. And it doesn't make sense for researchers to say radiation damages all cells except DNA, she said.

"Of course there's a genetic component," she said.

Anne Pierce-Jones, a spokeswoman for Soka Gakkai International-USA, said her organization's anti-nuclear roots date back to 1957.

Back then, the group's Japanese president, who had lived through the nuclear bombings in his country, began pushing to have these weapons abolished worldwide, she said.

Pierce-Jones echoed Wester and others who say the global nuclear threat is increasing as more countries get their hands on the weapons of mass destruction.

"The risk of nuclear war at this point is huge, and probably greater than it's ever been in history," Pierce-Jones said. "We need to shine a light on it so we continue to have a planet."