Oppenheimer the movie does not tell half the atomic horror
- Long subjected to brutal discrimination, American Hipanics were likely the first victims of the Manhattan Project that produced the bomb
My daughter and I went to see Barbie at the weekend but it was sold out. We ended up watching Oppenheimer. I am glad my daughter wasn’t bored by it. However, I might have enjoyed Barbie more, which I was told is hilarious.
The problem is that at my kid’s age, I had already watched Oppenheimer, the superb BBC-PBS 7-part drama series starring Sam Waterston, who even took on some of the mannerism of the brilliant but tormented scientist.
Except for the cinematic fireworks, the Christopher Nolan bio-pic did not at all go beyond the moral, political and strategic issues raised in the more than four decades old TV series. The latter also has the added advantage of being free to watch on YouTube.
One very important thing I did learn, thanks at least indirectly to Nolan’s movie, is that the first victims of the Manhattan Project weren’t at all known historically.
Oppenheimer: Christopher Nolan’s superb study of atomic bomb’s ‘father’
Most people, insofar as they took an interest, assumed they were the so-called downwinders, a climate reference to those who died from cancers or otherwise suffered lifelong health problems because of the radiation fallouts – due to wind directions – from the Trinity explosion, the world’s first atom bomb test. They weren’t told by their government until they saw what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the first victims might have had their lives and families ruined even before Trinity.
Alisa Lynn Valdés, a respected Hispanic-American writer and journalist whose family was also affected by the Manhattan Project, sent out a tweet on Friday and it has since been viewed 11.7 million times. The truth, it seems, has finally come out. She was responding to a review of the movie in The New York Times.
“This quote, from the @nytimes review of the OPPENHEIMER film: ‘He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico’ … It was inhabited by Hispanos. They were given less than 24 hr to leave. Their farms bulldozed.”
The area in New Mexico where the Trinity bomb test took place wasn’t nearly as desolate as usually assumed to be. Hispanic families lived on those ancestral lands, some dating back to the 16th century. They were land-rich but money-poor. In less than a day, their whole way of life was upended, and their livestock on which their livelihoods depended were slaughtered before their eyes.
Could Beijing hold Washington responsible for South China Sea’s radioactivity?
Internal government documents, according to Valdés, concluded it was OK to carry out the bomb test because there were nothing out there but “cows and Mexicans”; except they weren’t Mexicans but Americans. The white owner of a ranch in the area was compensated by US$275 per acre (0.4 hectare), but only US$7 per acre for the Hispanics, and even then, some were never paid.
Destitute, some ended up working at the Los Alamos laboratory – where Oppenheimer and his crew built the atom bombs – as cleaners and janitors, and were victimised a second time. They were exposed to heavy radiation.
Their white employers knew it because the scientists around them wore protective gear when necessary.
It’s the first time I have heard about them but Valdés’ claims seem credible. After all, the Manhattan Project started at just about the time when the decade-long Mexican repatriation and deportation act ended.
Marshall Islands seeks US apology, compensation for nuclear tests damage
Launched by president Herbert Hoover, up to 2 million “Mexicans” – though many were actually Americans – were sent “back” to Mexico during the Great Depression because they were supposedly taking away jobs from “real” Americans.
Of course, many Mexican labourers and immigrants who supposedly stole American jobs were subjected to delousing with kerosene baths, and later insecticides such as Zyklon B, the same infamous cyanide-laced chemical the Nazis used for extermination in concentration camps.
Valdés has tried for more than 20 years to find a publisher for her research. I hope she will succeed now.
