Anita Goldman: Vi är bara sex minuter från kärnvapenapokalypsen

Nobelkommitténs ordförande Jörgen Watne Frydnes motiverade priset ”… för att genom vittnesmål ha visat att kärnvapen aldrig får användas igen”. Nihon Hidankyo är en fredsorganisation som verkat i det tysta och ofta i motvind. Organisationen består av överlevande och anhöriga från USA:s atombombningar mot Hiroshima och Nagasaki under andra världskriget slut. Ohyggliga berättelser Med sina ohyggliga berättelser från kärnvapenbombningarna för 80 år sedan har de så kallade hibakushas, överlevarna, oförtrutet arbetat mot kärnvapen i världen. Och frågan har under anfallskriget i Ukraina aktualiserats på nytt sedan Ryssland och president Vladimir Putin gång på gång hotat med kärnvapen.

I Mellanöstern hotar kärnvapennationen Israel att bomba Irans anläggningar. Iran har ännu inga färdiga vapen, men är på god väg. I Nordkorea har kärnvapen utvecklats och i grannlandet Sydkorea vill en stor majoritet ha kärnvapen i rädsla från hotet i norr. Och de internationella avtalen om nedrustning av kärnvapen är på väg att löpa ut. Dessutom efterlevs nedrustningsavtalen i begränsad utsträckning. Inte med i förhandssnacket Nihon Hidankyo fanns inte med i diskussionen om troliga vinnare, men nobelkommitténs val gör nu att frågan om kärnvapenanvändning får stort utrymme på den internationella scenen. Och de är få som inte applåderar norska nobelkommitténs val.

Klockan elva på fredagsförmiddagen tillkännagavs mottagaren av Nobels fredspris 2024. Priset går till den japanska organisationen Nihon Hidankyo som verkar för överlevarna från atombomberna över Hiroshima och Nagasaki.   – Den får priset för sina ansträngningar att nå en värld fri från atomvapen, säger kommitténs ordförande.

Årets pris går till Nihon Hidankyo. Nobelkommitténs motivering lyder: ”Denna gräsrotsrörelse av atombomböverlevande från Hiroshima och Nagasaki, även känd som Hibakusha, får fredspriset för sina ansträngningar att uppnå en värld fri från kärnvapen och för att genom vittnesuppgifter demonstrera att kärnvapen aldrig får användas igen”. Jens Pettersson, generalsekreterare för Svenska FN-förbundet, tycker att det är helt rätt att Nihon Hidankyo tilldelas årets pris. – Jag är överraskad över tidpunkten men överlycklig över valet. Vi lever i en värld där kärnvapenhotet fortfarande finns och det är jättevälkommet att man ger pris till gräsrotsarbete, säger han. – Det är viktigt att behålla det tabu som ändå finns runt bruk av kärnvapen och då spelar de överlevande, de få som finns kvar från Hiroshima och Nagasaki, stor roll i att påminna oss hur hemskt det här vapnet egentligen är, fortsätter Jan Pettersson. Putin, Nordkorea, USA Frågan är mer aktuell än på länge, enligt Jan Pettersson. – I dagsläget när vi ser Putin hota med kärnvapen, när vi ser Nordkorea göra det och jag törs inte säga vad som händer efter det amerikanska presidentvalet heller. Kärnvapenhot är något vi måste komma bort ifrån. ”Borde ha vunnit flera gånger” Gabriella Irsten, sakkunnig vid Svenska freds, håller med. – Så värdiga vinnare, de borde ha vunnit flera gånger sedan 1945. Det här är människor som verkligen vet vad kärnvapen betyder, säger hon. Många i Hibakusha, som överlevde efter USA:s atombomber över Japan, börjar närma sig 90-årsåldern. – De kanske inte är med oss så länge till. Deras uppdrag är att lyfta de humanitära konsekvenserna. Många av de här får fortfarande sjukvård på grund av bomberna, säger Gabriella Irsten.

Filmen ”Oppenheimer” hade världspremiär i juli 2023. Men först nu står det klart när den går upp på bio i Japan, efter en känslig debatt kring synen på USA:s bombning av Hiroshima och Nagasaki i Andra världskrigets slutskede.

Det var vid midnatt den 10 december som en 54-årig man i Japan upptäckte en objuden gäst i sin lägenhet. Det var nämligen en kackerlacka som hade tagit sig in i bostaden på ön Kyushu, cirka 230 mil sydväst om Hiroshima. Men jakten efter skadedjuret fick oanade konsekvenser. Någon minut senare inträffade en explosion, uppger polisen i Kumamot till den japanska nyhetssajten The Mainchini. 54-åringen ska ha sprejat en stor mängd insektsmedel när han försökte döda skadedjuret, vilket orsakade explosionen. Ett balkongfönster krossades och mannen fick lättare skador.Polisen identifierade brännmärken vid hans ”kotatsu”, ett japanskt värmebord, enligt Mainichi. Utgör en risk Det är inte första gången något liknande inträffar i Japan. Landets myndigheter har varnat för att sprejning av insektsmedel nära eluttag kan utgöra en risk för skador. Myndigheten för konsumentfrågor i Japan har rapporterat om flera explosioner i Japan som tros ha orsakats av insektsmedel som antänts efter kontakt med eluttag eller andra källor. Det inträffade har fått stor uppmärksamhet i sociala medier, med många användare som hittat humor i den ovanliga händelsen. "Dödades kackerlackan?", frågar en användare på Instagram. En fråga som dock fortfarande är obesvarad.

När kärnklyvningens historia berättas glöms ofta ett namn bort – den svensk-österrikiska fysikern Lise Meitner. 1944 fick hennes forskarkollega, den tyska kemisten Otto Hahn, Nobelpriset för deras upptäckter. The New York Times skriver i ett reportage om vad som stoppade henne från att få priset; att hon var kvinna – och framförallt – judinna. Meitner flydde till Sverige när Tyskland invaderade och bodde här i 22 år. Totalt nominerades hon till Nobelpriset i både fysik och kemi 46 gånger, men fick det aldrig. Lise Meitner developed the theory of nuclear fission, the process that enabled the atomic bomb. But her identity — Jewish and a woman — barred her from sharing credit for the discovery, newly translated letters show. By Katrina Miller 2 October, 2023 There is a memorable scene in “Oppenheimer,” the blockbuster film about the building of the atomic bomb, in which Luis Alvarez, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, is reading a newspaper while getting a haircut. Suddenly, Alvarez leaps from his seat and sprints down the road to find his colleague, the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. “Oppie! Oppie!” he shouts. “They’ve done it. Hahn and Strassmann in Germany. They split the uranium nucleus. They split the atom.” The reference is to two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, who in 1939 unknowingly reported a demonstration of nuclear fission, the splintering of an atom into lighter elements. The discovery was key to the Manhattan Project, the top-secret American effort led by Oppenheimer to develop the first nuclear weapons. Except the scene is not entirely accurate, to the chagrin of some scientists. A major player is missing from the portrayal: Lise Meitner, a physicist who worked closely with Hahn and developed the theory of nuclear fission. Meitner was a giant in her own right, a contemporary of Nobel laureates like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Max Planck. After the second atomic device was dropped on Nagasaki, the American press dubbed her the “mother of the atomic bomb,” an association she vehemently rejected. Only Hahn won the Nobel Prize for nuclear fission. In his acceptance speech, he referred to Meitner with a German term that means assistant or employee, according to Marissa Moss, the author of a recent book about Meitner. “Or a co-worker at best,” she said. In 2022, Ms. Moss sifted through Meitner’s archive at the University of Cambridge. Since then, she has translated hundreds of letters between Meitner and Hahn, written in German, which she says offer a more nuanced perspective of their relationship’s demise. That insight also challenges a common perception that Meitner accepted the outcome of the Nobel Prize without resentment. The snub was about more than just gender, according to Ms. Moss. “It’s easy to say she didn’t get it because she was a woman,” Ms. Moss said. “One doesn’t think a woman is going to make noise about things.” Ms. Moss also believes Meitner’s heritage was at play: “This is a case where it was because she was a Jew.” In 1947, Meitner wrote to her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, a Jewish physicist who also contributed to the discovery of nuclear fission: “I know that his attitude contributed to the Nobel committee deciding against us,” she said of Hahn, in a letter translated by Ms. Moss. “But that is purely private stuff that we don’t want to make public.” Nobel Week is a moment when the scientific community celebrates its greatest achievements but also, increasingly, examines oversights and injustices. Lise Meitner is one of many women in science who failed to receive due credit for their work, including, perhaps most notably, Rosalind Franklin, the chemist who contributed to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953. “There are hundreds, if not thousands, of women who achieve something great in science that just didn’t get recognized in their lifetime,” said Katie Hafner, the host of the podcast “Lost Women of Science.” Ms. Hafner recently completed a two-part episode about Meitner, the second half of which opens with the fateful Oppenheimer scene. Unlike other figures on her podcast, Ms. Hafner said, “Lise Meitner is not lost.” But, she added, “she is misunderstood.” From the beginning, Meitner was breaking glass ceilings. Born in 1878 in Vienna, she began studying physics privately, as women in Austria were not allowed to attend college until 1897. In 1901, she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Vienna; five years later she earned a doctorate in physics, only the second woman from her university to do so. Meitner spent the rest of her career working among the greats. She moved to the University of Berlin and began auditing classes taught by Max Planck, who won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics — and who generally did not allow women to attend his lectures. In Berlin, Meitner also met Otto Hahn, a chemist who was around her age and had a more progressive attitude about working with women. Hahn was also eager to collaborate with Meitner, as physicists tended to have a better grasp on radioactivity, the energy emitted by unstable atomic nuclei, than chemists. But, as a woman, Meitner was not allowed upstairs in Hahn’s lab. So she worked — without pay — in the basement. (When she needed to use the restroom, Ms. Moss said, Meitner had to dash across the street.) In 1912, Meitner and Hahn moved to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Together, they discovered a new element named protactinium. When the men at the Institute were drafted during World War I, Meitner was given her own physics lab and the title of professor, a position that granted her recognition and the independence to pursue her own research. But outside the realm of science, the walls were closing in. Antisemitism was on the rise, and in 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. Many Jewish scientists left the country, but Meitner stayed, thinly protected by her Austrian citizenship and keen to hang on to the rare opportunity for a woman to conduct scientific research. “I love physics with all my heart,” she wrote in a letter to a friend. “I can hardly imagine it not being part of my life.” In 1938, Germany invaded Austria, leaving Meitner subject to the full extent of the Nazi regime. She opted to flee. The Nobel physics laureate Niels Bohr arranged for her to escape by train. Meitner eventually made her way to Sweden, devastated at having had to leave behind her life’s work and concerned about the safety of her family. She continued collaborating with Hahn by mail. He ran experiments, and she interpreted findings he did not understand. One result stumped them both: When uranium atoms were bombarded with neutrons, the neutron should have been absorbed and an electron released, creating a heavier element. Instead, Hahn found barium, a much lighter element. They were baffled. The finding was outside of Hahn’s expertise as a chemist. “Perhaps you can come up with some sort of fantastic explanation,” he wrote in a letter to Meitner translated by Ruth Lewin Sime, a chemist at Sacramento City College who published a biography of Meitner in 1996. “If there is anything you could propose that you could publish, then it would still in a way be work by the three of us!” Hahn and his colleague Fritz Strassmann submitted the results for publication in December of 1938. Their tone was uncertain. “There could perhaps be a series of unusual coincidences which has given us false indications,” they wrote in German. Meitner was not included as an author, nor was there any mention of her contribution to the work. In Sweden, Meitner mulled over the results with Frisch, her physicist-nephew. One snowy day, Frisch recalled in a memoir, they took a walk, eventually stopping to sit on a tree trunk and scribble calculations on scraps of paper. Uranium was extremely unstable, they realized, and likely to fracture on impact with, say, a neutron. Those fragments would be violently blasted apart. If one of those pieces were barium, Meitner mused, the other would have to be another light element called krypton. She computed the energy driving the blast using Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc². Hahn and Strassmann had split the atom. “We have read and considered your paper very carefully,” Meitner wrote to Hahn in January 1939. “Perhaps it is energetically possible for such a heavy nucleus to break up.” In a later letter, she expressed disappointment at being absent: “Even though I stand here with very empty hands, I am nevertheless happy for these wonderful findings.” Meitner and Frisch published their theoretical interpretation of Hahn and Strassmann’s results in the February 1939 edition of the journal Nature. Frisch and Meitner devised experiments to test their hypothesis. In the following weeks, they published two more papers with the results, which became the first physical confirmation of what Frisch coined “nuclear fission.” Behind the scenes, Meitner and Hahn’s correspondence spiraled into misunderstanding. Hahn thought that she was angry that he had published without her. “What else could I have done?” he wrote to Meitner. “Believe me, it would have been preferable for me if we could still work together and discuss things as we did before!” Hahn was also receiving pushback for working with a Jewish scientist. “I don’t give these things much weight, of course, but didn’t want to confess to the gentlemen that you were the only one who found out everything immediately,” he wrote Meitner in 1939. Later that year, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun. And the race was on to build an atomic bomb. Word spread about nuclear fission. Though a single split atom did not generate enough energy for potential use in a weapon, some speculated that a chain reaction could do the trick. Bombarding uranium with neutrons not only produced lighter elements; it also created more neutrons. If those neutrons collided with more uranium, the reaction might sustain itself. The American government assembled the Manhattan Project to develop such a weapon. Many of Meitner’s peers, including Frisch and Bohr, became involved. Einstein did not, although he had written a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to secure uranium and fund chain reaction experiments. Meitner, though she had been invited, refused to join. (“I will have nothing to do with a bomb!” she famously said.) In 1945, after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to the end of the war, some newspaper stories claimed that Meitner had smuggled the recipe for the weapon out of Nazi Germany in her purse. She dismissed them. “You know so much more in America about the atomic bomb than I,” she told The New York Times in 1946. In 1945, Hahn was nominated for the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, one year late, for the discovery of nuclear fission. Meitner and Frisch were also nominated for the physics prize that year. But only Hahn won. Details of Nobel Prize deliberations remain secret for 50 years after an award is given. After the documents surrounding Hahn’s win were released, science historians published an analysis of the deliberations in Physics Today in 1997. “None of this embittered Meitner,” they wrote. “She complained very little, and forgave a great deal.” Ms. Hafner takes issue with that stance. “Who is going to say, ‘Hey, I’m bitter’?” she said. “What are the optics of that?” Ms. Moss thinks bitter is the wrong word. “She was very, very hurt,” she said of Meitner, at both the lack of credit and the passive loyalty she felt Hahn had to Germany. “It was quite clear to me that Hahn was completely unaware of his unfriendly behavior,” Meitner wrote to a friend in 1946. “Naturally, the time together with him was somewhat painful, but I was prepared for it and held myself firm, bringing up no personal debates.” Meitner was nominated again — five times — for the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics. According to the authors of the Physics Today article, the Nobel committee argued that it was “firm tradition” to award the prize for experimental, rather than theoretical, discoveries. But Demetrios Matsakis, a retired physicist of the U.S. Naval Observatory, said it is impossible to separate the “interplay between experimentalists and theorists. They need each other.” (Dr. Matsakis learned of Meitner in 2018, and was inspired to petition to rename another radioactive process, to recognize Meitner’s role in that discovery.) Hahn deserved the award, but Meitner did, too, Dr. Matsakis said: “She should have gotten the Nobel Prize. There’s really no question about that.” As an inverse comparison, scientists note the case of Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese American physicist who ran experiments showing that some particle interactions do not obey mirror symmetry. In 1957, two of Wu’s male colleagues won the Nobel Prize in Physics for building the theory confirmed by her results. The award recipient — the experimentalist or the theorist — “seems like it was reversed in these two cases,” said Harry Saal, a physicist who studied under Wu at Columbia University. “And in both cases the woman got screwed.” In his later years, Hahn seemed to try to make amends. He and Meitner remained friends, and he offered her a head position at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, which she declined. In 1948, he nominated her for the Nobel Prize in Physics. Meitner went on to be nominated 46 times for the Nobel in both physics and chemistry, but she never won. (To date, only four women have won in physics, most recently in 2020, and only eight have won in chemistry.) In 1968, Meitner, then 89, died in England. An obituary that ran in The Times referred to her as an “atomic pioneer” and the “scientific partner of Otto Hahn, the Nobel Prize-winning nuclear chemist and the discoverer of nuclear fission.” In 2020, the official Nobel Prize account on X, formerly known as Twitter, acknowledged that both Hahn and Meitner discovered nuclear fission. The post was accompanied by artwork showing Meitner standing behind Hahn, to the outrage of many people. Any effort to award a Nobel to Meitner posthumously would be in vain. “Once a Nobel is given, there is no going back,” Dr. Sime said. The best that can be done is to acknowledge Meitner in the present, she added — and her omission from the new Oppenheimer film “was not excusable.” Ms. Moss is still translating Meitner’s letters; so far, she has worked through more than 700 pages. “Now I’m just doing it because I fell in love with her,” she said. “She’s an incredible person.” She plans to write another book about Meitner with all the material that did not make it into the first one. Earlier this year, Ms. Hafner and a friend visited Meitner’s grave, located in a tiny English churchyard “in the middle of nowhere,” she said. It took them half an hour to find the faded tombstone, which was overgrown with weeds. Ms. Hafner was surprised at how unremarkable the grave was for such “a giant in science,” she said. Still, she was comforted to find a stone perched atop the marker, a Jewish practice to honor the dead. Ms. Hafner added visitation stones for herself, Ms. Moss, Bohr, Einstein, Frisch and even Hahn. This is how people are remembered, Ms. Hafner said. “Until we chip away at this and continue to remind people of the important work she did, it just won’t get recognized,” she added. So “we do everything we can to set the record straight.” © 2023 The New York Times Company. Read the original article at The New York Times.

Ursinne över hashtaggen #Barbenheimer, praktfulla matsuri-festivaler, gårdagens rafflande kvartsfinal i fotbolls-VM mellan Sverige och Japan, är augusti-snackisar i Tokyo. Erik Augustin Palm tar åter tempen på sommaren i den japanska huvudstaden. Augusti är den värsta sommarmånaden i Tokyo, men den fuktiga hettan kan undvikas för en stund i luftkonditionerat biografmörker. För många cineaster i en vacklande biografkultur har de enorma succéerna för ”Barbie” och ”Oppenheimer” varit en källa till glädje. Så till den grad att hashtaggen #Barbenheimer har uppstått i sociala medier, som en portmanteau av filmernas titlar, med en flodvåg av meme som skämtsamt belyser de två filmernas vitt åtskilda estetik och teman. Men i Japan har hashtaggen och online-hybriderna av Barbies rosa fantasivärld med bilder av kärnvapenexplosioner, mötts av ursinne. På sociala medier sprids hashtaggen #NoBarbenheimer – dels för att kärnvapen inte är något man skämtar om i Japan, där USA:s atombombningar under andra världskriget dödade hundratusentals människor. Och dels för att den internationella premiären av filmerna i slutet av juli ägde rum kort inför årsdagarna då bomberna föll över Hiroshima och Nagasaki, den 6:e och 9:e augusti. Nyligen nådde de japanska motreaktionerna en sådan kokpunkt att Warner Bros japanska dotterbolag publikt kritiserade huvudkontorets sociala medier-hantering av “Barbie”, och beklagade att Barbenheimer-mem lagts ut på det officiella Twitter-kontot för ”Barbie”, inför den japanska premiären den 11 augusti. I skrivande stund finns inget premiärdatum för ”Oppenheimer” i Japan, som har den tredje största biografmarknaden i världen. Den mest folkkära sporten i Japan är inte sumobrottning, utan baseboll. Men sedan 1990-talet har fotbollens popularitet i landet ökat avsevärt, särskilt efter att Japan, på herrsidan, för första gången tog sig till VM 1998 och därefter arrangerade turneringen 2002. Således var exalteringen stor bland både svenskar och japaner i Tokyo, inför gårdagens kvartsfinal i fotbolls-VM mellan Sverige och Japan. Japan var publikfavoriter inför matchen efter sina hittills imponerande insatser, inklusive en krossande 4-0-match mot Spanien. Trots förlusten mot Sverige består japanska damlandslaget som landets nya hjältar. Själv är jag högst likgiltig inför både Sveriges vinst och Japans förlust, men gläds åt sammanhang där länderna möts. ”Matsuri” är det japanska ordet för festival, och matsurifestivaler är de religiösa och kulturella evenemang som firas i Japan under sommaren. Kulmen är i augusti, då byar och storstäder fylls av gamla och unga i frapperande yukatas (sommarkimonos). I de skimrande ”Bon-Odori”-folkdansparaderna rör sig deltagarna längs huvudgatorna i intrikata cirkelrörelser med symboliska handgester, ackompanjerade av traditionella instrument och folksång. Givetvis handlar matsurikulturen även om att dricka alldeles för mycket sake, vilket är särskilt påtagligt under Awa Odori – en av Tokyos största matsurifestivaler. Den hålls i mitt kvarter Koenji; känt som en historisk knutpunkt för allsköns alternativ kultur och ett särdeles livat bar- och nattliv. ”Bon-Odori”-parader med 65-åriga punkare är en fröjd för ögat – och örat. En fröjd för ögat är även Omotesando, även kallad Tokyos Champs-Élysées; den ikoniska modeavenyn mellan ungdomstrendiga Harajuku och det livliga nöjesdistriktet Shibuya, där man ser japaner medvetet stoltsera med sin stil, skrudade i allt från ny japansk haute couture till korsbefruktningar av gatumode och traditionell klädsel. En uppvisning av performativ kreativitet som när som helst under året ger en inblick i hur oerhört välklädda Tokyobor är. I augusti är det särskilt tydligt hur Omotesando och dess omgivning utgör själva märgen i Japans modevärld, då Tokyos största modevecka äger rum där. Men även nu perioden innan vibrerar området av modemässig innovation, när japanska fashionistas undersöker vilka av deras outfits som skapar mest uppmärksamhet, medan de vässar sitt svassande nedför avenyn. Trots sin hyperurbana image, kontureras Tokyoregionen av en till synes ändlös kustlinje. De under resten av året sömniga stränderna genomgår en synbar förvandling under sommaren, kännetecknad av uppkomsten av ”Umi no ie”, vilket direkt översatt betyder ”havshus”. Tillfälliga, ofta färgglada, träkonstruktioner monteras upp på sanden, och fungerar som kombination av barer, caféer, restauranger – och som skydd mot den obarmhärtiga solen. Och det sistnämnda är något som Tokyo aldrig kan ha för mycket av, om du frågar undertecknad.

13-åriga Lucy Benavidez Garwood vaknade av att marken skakade morgonen den 16 juli 2045. Det var chockvågorna från Trinity – världens första atombombstest, som utfördes i hemlighet. Sedan dess har en stor andel av hennes och många andra Tularosabors familjer dött eller drabbats av cancer – och de är övertygade om att det kan kopplas till Manhattanprojektet. Men myndigheterna vägrar lyssna på deras vittnesmål om en självförvållad hälsokatastrof. Washington Post har träffat människorna som lidit i skuggan av J Robert Oppenheimers världsomvälvande uppfinning. (Svensk översättning av Omni). Lucy Benavidez Garwood remembers being roused from sleep by the force of the world's first atomic bomb, which was secretly tested in 1945 just beyond the southern New Mexico town where her family lived. By Karin Brulliard and Samuel Gilbert 30 July, 2023 TULAROSA, N.M. - A strong rumble woke 13-year-old Lucy Benavidez Garwood in the darkness, shaking the three-room adobe house where she and her family lived and rattling dishes in the kitchen cupboard. Neighbors who gathered that morning agreed it must have been an earthquake. They learned the truth several weeks later when U.S. forces attacked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The atomic bombs dropped on the two cities had been developed in Tularosa's own backyard - that pre-dawn test blast jolting communities across southern New Mexico, shooting a mushroom cloud 10 miles into the sky, then raining radioactive ash on thousands of unsuspecting residents. What happened here in the aftermath, surviving "downwinders" and their relatives say, is a legacy of serious health consequences that have gone unacknowledged for 78 years. Their struggles continue to be pushed aside; the new blockbuster film "Oppenheimer," which spotlights the scientist most credited for the bomb, ignores completely the people who lived in the shadow of his test site. Yet for all their ambivalence about the movie's fanfare - the northern New Mexico city of Los Alamos, where J. Robert Oppenheimer located the Manhattan Project, just threw a 10-day festival to celebrate its place in history - locals also have hope that the Hollywood glow may elevate their long quest to be added to a federal program that compensates people sickened by presumed exposure to radiation from aboveground nuclear tests. "They were counting on us to be unsophisticated and uneducated and unable to stick up for ourselves," said Tina Cordova, a Tularosa native who for 18 years has led the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which she co-founded after being diagnosed with thyroid cancer. "We're not those people anymore." The Trinity site, about 60 miles northwest of tiny Tularosa, was chosen in part for its supposed isolation. Nearly half a million people lived within a 150-mile radius, though. Manhattan Project leaders knew a nuclear test would put them at risk, but with the nation at war, secrecy was the priority. Evacuation plans were never acted upon. The military concocted a cover story: The boom was an explosion of an ammunitions magazine. "I feel like we weren't valued," said Garwood, now 91, with a family tree scarred by cancers. "Like they didn't value our lives or our culture." The July 16, 1945, blast was more massive than Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists expected, equivalent to nearly 25,000 tons of TNT, according to recent estimates. Witnesses said the plutonium ash fell for days, on areas where people grew their own food, drank rainwater collected in cisterns and cooled off in irrigation canals that made the arid region fertile. Jimmy Villavicencio was 4 years old when the bomb detonated near his home in Oscura, a railroad camp to the east. He was outside helping his mother and a neighbor do laundry in the cool before sunrise. "I looked over to a big old cloud, what my mother called a tsunami," Villavicencio, another cancer survivor, recalled several days ago. His mother frantically removed the wet clothes from the line and hung the pillowcases in the windows to protect their home from the incoming dust. "We heard like a gush of wind, and right behind it came the dirt, and I mean dirt." The debris caked the pillowcases. A powder coated their car. Long after the seeming storm had settled, "snowflakes kept falling," he said. Weeks later, a neighbor's chickens began dying. "We … are still paying the price," he added. According to a new study, the fallout floated to 46 states, Mexico and Canada within 10 days. In 28 of 33 New Mexico counties, it estimates the accumulation of radioactive material was higher than required under the federal compensation program. That program - the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 - has paid out more than $2.5 billion to people who lived downwind of dozens of aboveground explosions conducted starting in the 1950s at the Nevada Test Site, as well as uranium industry workers and "on-site participants" at the Trinity test. New Mexico civilians have never been eligible. New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R) of Idaho have pressed for years to expand RECA to include people who lived in their and other states during test periods. On Thursday, the Senate took up the amendment for the first time and passed it. Approval by the House remains uncertain, with some members contending the cost is too high. The program will expire next May without further action. "This is a historic victory," Luján said in an interview after the vote, which he attributed in part to the success of "Oppenheimer" and its scenes in New Mexico. "Any time there's more stories being told, more information being shared, it educates all of us." Proving that radiation caused the cancers that have afflicted New Mexico's downwinders is extremely difficult. A major study published in 2020 by the National Cancer Institute concluded that Trinity fallout may contribute to as many as 1,000 cancers by 2034, most in people who lived very near the test. There is "no evidence to suggest" cases among subsequent generations were related, the study noted. But RECA does not require claimants to establish causation, only to show that they or a relative had a qualifying disease after working or living in certain locations during specific time frames. "Why is our suffering different?" asks Bernice Gutierrez, who was born eight days after the test. She lived in Carrizozo, directly east of the Trinity site. She, her eldest son and daughter and 20 other family members have battled cancer, she said. "What has made us different than the other people given compensation?" To many here, scientific proof is unnecessary. They say the evidence is clear in their family albums, at town gatherings and funerals. "The Durans. The Chavezes. I mean, you go down the road, and I could tell you this one, this one, this one," said Garwood's daughter, Doris Walters, 68. She became active with the downwinders consortium after her own breast cancer diagnosis. "You knock on the door, they would say, 'Yes, cancer affected me or my family.'" The group has collected about 1,000 family health histories from people in the area and found new supporters along the way. Edna Kay Hinkle is one. Her father grew up on a ranch 27 miles from the Trinity site and was 14 when the explosion woke him as he slept on the front porch. A few years later, he, his brother and their wives - all young newlyweds - walked around the site. The gate was wide open. "They picked up all this melted sand, all this glass, took it home and had it in the kitchen floor by the door," Hinkle said. A decade ago, she was selling vegetables at the Tularosa farmer's market when a consortium leader approached and asked her to make a list of everyone she knew who were sick or had died of cancer. Hinkle, who had recently learned she had breast cancer, figured the effort wouldn't go anywhere. Then she started her list, and "it dawned on me," she said. All four of the newlyweds who'd explored the site had cancer. So did 25 other relatives from her grandparents' generation on. A cousin had been born with no eyes and later suffered ovarian cancer. Though Tularosa has grown some in the ensuing years, its population remains only a couple thousand. Adobe houses line its still and sunbaked streets. Pecan and pistachio orchards grow just outside of town. Hinkle never considered leaving; she raises horses, cattle and vegetables she thought were the cleanest she could eat until she began wondering whether they were affected by contaminated soil. She has no plans to sit through "Oppenheimer." Any glorification of the bomb, she said, "ticks me off." Garwood and Walters decided to see the movie on its opening weekend in nearby Alamogordo, where the drone of jets from Holloman Air Force Base is everyday background noise. The older woman found herself overcome by memories of an era infused with a sense of patriotism and fears for her father, who was serving in Europe. Her daughter kept thinking about the multiple meanings of the word "trinity." "Every day, I get someone on my prayer list that is suffering from cancer, and I think of the father, son, and holy spirit," Walters said. The downwinders are trying to seize the moment. In Santa Fe, Cordova attended an "Oppenheimer" screening with others from the consortium and participated in a panel discussion on the broader legacy of the Manhattan Project. "To say that this is an emotionally charged issue in which the government has failed to serve its own citizens, and whose protection is its moral imperative, is an understatement," Archbishop John C. Wester told the audience. Well into the film, Cordova began sobbing as the test bomb was detonated in an apocalyptic inferno. She was thinking of her father, grandmothers and great-grandfathers, who she said all succumbed to cancer, and what others have shared about the actual event, when "they thought they were experiencing the end of the world." She wished the movie included even a few words at the end about how local communities were forever changed by what took place. But emails she received over the weekend, from people who had just gone to "Oppenheimer," lifted her spirits. "Whether the [filmmakers] acknowledge us or not, what's going to happen is people are going to watch the movie, they're going to be affected, and they're going to go home and Google search," Cordova said. "And they're going to find us." © 2023 The Washington Post. Sign up for the Today's Worldview newsletter here.

Hollywood vågar inte visa Hiroshima och Nagasaki.