‘Catching it on our tongues’: How 12 girls became the first atomic bomb victims
July 16 is the 80th anniversary of the world’s first atomic bomb test. At 5:30 a.m. on that date in 1945, 12 young girls attending a summer camp in Ruidoso, New Mexico, were jolted out of their bunks by a thunderous noise.
“It was the biggest jolt you could imagine,” recalled Barbara Kent, one of the girls. “We were all sitting there on the floor wondering what [was] happening. …
“We were all just shocked … and then, all of a sudden, there was this big cloud overhead, and lights in the sky. It even hurt our eyes when we looked up. … It was as if the sun came out tremendous.”
As the day went on, the girls encountered a fine, white powder descending from the sky. “It was snowing in July,” Kent remembered. Amazed by the strange phenomenon, they burst out the door of their cabin and down the stairs. “We were catching it on our tongues like snowflakes. Scooping the ash and putting it all over our faces.” The bizarre summer snow that felt hot, not cold, piled up on roads, grass and even the surface of the river that flowed nearby. Excitedly, the girls jumped in. “We were all having such a good time in that river, trying to catch what we thought was snow. … There was a lot, let me tell you.”
The girls had no way of knowing it, but they had just become the world’s first atomic bomb victims. They weren’t the only ones. In all, according to Lesley M.M. Blume, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 19 New Mexico counties were downwind of the test, named “Trinity” by J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. Those counties encompassed about 80 cities, towns, villages and ranches. Radiation levels in some of those locations reached 10,000 times current acceptable limits. Nuclear fallout ultimately spread much farther, across thousands of miles, eventually reaching as far as Upstate New York.
Because the test was top-secret, there was no warning. But Gen. Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project’s director, knew he couldn’t cover up the test entirely. He dispatched one of his army commanders to tell the news media that the explosion was caused by “a remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics.” He made sure to reassure journalists that there had been no loss of life or limb.
The next day, the camp director took the girls to a briefing in downtown Ruidoso that government officials hastily arranged to address people’s anxieties about the explosion. “It was so crowded,” Kent recalled. “Everyone was shoulder to shoulder. … They said, ‘No one worry about anything, everything’s fine, just go along with your own business.’ Everyone was confused. Some people believed it, but some people thought they couldn’t imagine that a dump explosion would do this. They lied to us. I didn’t learn the truth until years later.”
As the years went by, the truth began to sink in. The former campers developed terrible cancers. Kent suffered from skin and endometrial cancer and ultimately had to have her thyroid removed. She was one of the lucky ones. Only she and one other of that group of 12 would live past the age of 40.
Most accounts of the dawn of the nuclear age begin with the secret, herculean effort to build the bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, then draw a straight line to the successful test conducted upon barren, uninhabited land. But that narrative, which is taught regularly in American public schools, ignores the bomb’s impact on human beings who were downwind of Trinity, or the 528 subsequent atmospheric tests carried out by the United States and other nuclear-armed nations.
As the story of the Ruidoso campers makes clear, the Trinity test wasn’t conducted on barren, uninhabited land. Half a million people lived within 150 miles of the explosion, some as close as 12 miles away. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States tested 67 bombs in the Marshall Islands, rendering Bikini Atoll, a chain of 23 islands, uninhabitable. Test survivors there, particularly women and girls, have experienced disturbingly high rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, birth defects and other reproductive problems.
One hundred atmospheric tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site between 1951 and 1962. American soldiers were ordered to observe and record those tests, view them for training purposes, or enter contaminated spaces to clean them. Some civilians, excited to view the sensational explosions, went to designated areas to watch, unknowingly exposing themselves to harmful radiation. Fallout landed on gardens, orchards and pastures that produced the fruit and vegetables local residents ate and sustained cows and goats that produced the milk they drank. Leukemia rates in downwind regions of Utah were nearly five times higher than those not downwind.
Eighty years after the dawn of the nuclear age, it is incumbent upon us to explain the stakes to young people who will inherit the nuclear world we live in. We can do so by joining Nihon Hidankyo in its mission.
In December 2024, representatives of the Japanese organization representing survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for the group’s decades-long effort to tell survivors’ stories and to ensure that such horrors are never again visited upon human beings. At the ceremony, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, explained to a packed audience of global dignitaries: “It is our duty not to forget. It is our responsibility to pass along stories and memories to future generations - including the painful, disturbing ones, which often yield to society’s amnesia.”
The disturbing truth is that the eight-decade-old nuclear age has yielded an untold number of victims around the world. That is the painful story that must be told.
- - -
Eric S. Singer is a cultural historian and author of “Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb,” a young readers edition of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.”