#trinity test

[panicdriveshumanherds]

Trinity, July 16 1945

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Trinity Test

On the morning of 16 July 1945, just as dawn broke over the desert of New Mexico, the world’s first nuclear test was conducted.

Known as the Trinity Test, it marked the beginning of the atomic age.

Yet, only miles away in the Ruidoso area, a group of thirteen-year-old girls were on a simple summer camping trip.

They swam in the river, laughed, and played under the sky, completely unaware that an unprecedented explosion had just torn through the desert horizon, releasing radioactive fallout that would drift silently across the land.

Among those girls was Barbara Kent, pictured at the front of a photograph taken that day.

Like the others, she unknowingly came into contact with fallout from the blast, which settled on the earth and water where they played.

In later years, Kent recalled how she and her friends had tossed ash-like debris in the air, never imagining it was radioactive dust.

It was, for them, a summer of innocence, while history was quietly reshaped around them.

The consequences, however, were devastating. Over the decades, Kent began to hear that her fellow campers were succumbing to illness, one by one.

By the time she reached thirty, she realized she was the sole survivor of the group.

In 2021, at the age of 89, she spoke about her life marked by repeated battles with cancer — endometrial, skin, and others — tracing it back to that summer morning in 1945.

Her testimony remains one of the most poignant reminders of how the atomic age touched not only the battlefields of war but also the quiet lives of ordinary children.

© Reddit

[rauko]

The Gadget | First Atomic Bomb Prototype | 07.16.45

Finally over the horizon on nuclear fission weapon technology, the U.S. government could have put the same amount of time & energy testing nuclear fusion reactors—achieving a surplus of electricity for every American. Instead, it dropped a plasma ball hotter than the sun on a civilian populace of two hundred thousand humans—twice.

[soos-idae]

got tickets to both Barbie and Oppenheimer yesterday, proud to say I survived barbenheimer

Last picture credits to @falconsnat on twitter

[ineffableclassics]

World War II is still ongoing, and Crowley's got yet another commendation he has no idea about. He figures he ought to go and check this one out, and ends up in a little town in the New Mexico desert, in July of 1945...

Words: 3,923

Status: Complete

Rating: Teen And Up

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Listen Here!

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[probablyasocialecologist]

In the Shadow of Oppenheimer

How popular narratives of the atomic age obscure the bomb’s first victims.

Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project knew from the start that this place was not all that isolated and was far from uninhabited. There were, in fact, dozens of families within 20 miles, largely poor families of ranchers and farmers, many Hispanic and Indigenous, who unwittingly went about their daily lives in the first fallout of the atomic age. Now, those who were infants and children downwind of the detonation of the “Gadget”—a code name for the plutonium bomb used in the Trinity test—are nearing the end of a decades-long battle to be recognized and compensated for generations of illness they trace to exposure from radioactive fallout.

[...]

The reactions of Manhattan Project observers at the Trinity site are well documented. “Words haven’t been invented to describe it,” physicist Val Fitch said of the enormous fireball. General Thomas Farrell said the awesome roar “warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous.” “A few people laughed, a few people cried,” Oppenheimer recalled years later. “I remembered a line from the Hindu scripture . . . Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge said, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” Less documented are the reactions of the many New Mexicans who lived near Trinity. They had no warning, no context for the star-level explosion that shook their homes and startled them awake that morning. Worse, in the weeks after the test, they were never advised that their land, crops, livestock, and water may have been irradiated. A 2010 report to the CDC used archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory to re-examine the extent to which New Mexicans were unknowingly exposed to radioactive contamination from Trinity. Its findings revealed a shambolic and sometimes cynical effort to track the Gadget’s fallout that windy morning using “crude” and “ineffective” measures. Spotlights were deployed to try to follow the 230 tons of sand and ash falling from the mushroom cloud as it dispersed over southern New Mexico. Film badges designed to detect and measure radiation had been sent to nearby post offices before the test, but because of the Manhattan Project’s secret nature, there was little explanation on how the badges were meant to be used or why, and so they were deployed incorrectly or not at all. Some soldiers assigned to chase and monitor the radioactive cloud couldn’t relay their findings to headquarters in Albuquerque because they were not equipped with long-distance radios; other monitors attempted to gather fallout samples with domestic Filter Queen brand vacuum cleaners. (These samples were later lost or destroyed.) At least one monitor left the area after his superior declared tracking fallout a “waste of time,” while another soldier misplaced his respirator and took the official but scientifically misguided precaution of breathing through a slice of bread.

[un-ionizetheradlab]

Oppenheimer (2023)

[oscarisaacasimov]

Oscars 2024 & political issues

I get cheesy about the Oscars.

At its best, this is a celebration of humanity, of people sharing their artistic vision with the world, of creating from the heart of what they care about, of reflecting social and ethical crises through the medium of movies, be they documentary, historical fiction, or fantasy.

--In the monologue, Jimmy Kimmel offered support and solidarity to the members of IATSE, the union representing many crew members, which is currently in contract negotiations that are expected to be difficult. IATSE was a key ally to the writers and actors during their 2023 strikes.

--The In Memoriam segment began with a clip from last year's winning documentary "Nalavny" - "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for the good people to do nothing."

--Osage Nation member & songwriter Scott George says about their performance "We're hoping you see us as a people that have survived and that are able to hold on to what we have."

--Cillian Murphy dedicated his Oppenheimer Oscar to "the peacemakers everywhere."

--Nimona director Troy Quane wore a Protect Trans Kids pin.

--Oscar speeches don't often open with the words, "I wish I'd never made this film." Mstyslav Chrernov accepted Ukraine's first ever Oscar and closed his speech with the words "Slava Ukraini - Glory to Ukraine."

--Zone of Interest filmmaker Jonathan Glazer's speech reflected themes from his movie: "All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, Not to say 'look what they did then'; rather, 'look what we do now.' Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst.

Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and a Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the seventh in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza. How do we resist?"

--attendees from Mark Ruffalo to Billie Eillish to Ava DuVernay wore a red&black pin to show their support for a ceasefire in Gaza

--protestors calling for an immediate ceasefire closed a major intersection and blocked traffic near the Dolby Theatre, delaying the award show — and forcing an acknowledgment of the issues the protest centered on.