By: Kerry Ding
On July 16, 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer, his group of engineers, and some scientists ventured out into the New Mexico Desert to safely detonate their brand-new bomb. It was a fission bomb that would explode from a complex system of neutrons being fired at Uranium or Plutonium. This experiment was code-named “Trinity,” These individuals were working as part of the infamous Manhattan Project. They created the first nuclear weapon so that the US would be protected from Nazi Germany during World War Two. At exactly, 5:29 A.M GMT, the bomb was detonated with the force of 21,000 tons of TNT.
As the Engineers placed the plutonium implosion device into a 100-foot-tall metal tower, no one was sure how powerful the bomb would be. However, the actual explosion surpassed everyone’s estimates. The bomb’s mushroom cloud reached 50 to 70 thousand feet in the atmosphere. To give context, the maximum height for a commercial passenger plane can only go up to 42,000 feet.
However, on Thursday, July 20th, 2023, a new study was published about how much nuclear fallout would travel across the United States, Mexico, and Canada in the days following the implosion. Using a combination of new technology and weather forecasts from 1945, the authors of the study even said that nearly 46 states were affected.
“It’s a huge finding and, at the same time, it shouldn’t surprise anyone,” said the study’s lead author, Sébastien Philippe, a researcher and scientist at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security.
The study also researched 93 other US nuclear tests that were above ground. They even drew a map showing how much fallout was spread across the US within 10 days of the test.
Findings from these tests advocate for more people to be compensated by the government for unnecessary exposure to radioactive fallout. Remember over 230 nuclear bombs were tested above ground by the US government on US soil. The US Government has just started to compensate the people who could have been exposed to the radiation from the test sites.
The crew of scientists and workers probably knew that there was a possible radioactive threat. But they mostly just worried about the area surrounding the blast site. They weren’t concerned with the radiation that would reach far into the Eastern US. They also didn’t consider the damage to the ecosystem or the possibility of a large group of people being affected by low-level radiation.
However, one thing different about studying Trinity today was how little data the project had when it occurred. On top of that, there were no national monitoring stations back in 1945 to measure the fallout, unlike other nuclear bombs in nearby Nevada. “The data sets for the Nevada tests and the available data that we could possibly find for Trinity were not comparable,” Ms. Alzner, an author of the study said. “You couldn’t put them on the same map. We decided to keep pushing.”
However, the authors were determined to understand the world’s first nuclear test. Eventually, they had a breakthrough. Ms. Alzner and Megan Smith, another co-founder of shift7 and a former United States chief technology officer in the Obama administration, contacted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). After that, the senior researcher for the NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory told the team that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts had only a week earlier released historical data that charted weather patterns extending 30,000 feet or higher above Earth’s surface. Since then, the team has been digging up a lot more information about the Trinity test.
The US 1940s census showed that around 500,000 people were living within a 150-mile radius of the site. Evidence now shows that some people could have been living just 12 miles from the test site. However, still, no one was told to evacuate in the nearby area. Considering the number of above-ground bombs that had been detonated in New Mexico and nearby Nevada, many people here could have gotten fatal radiation poisoning.
Sources:
https://www.space.com/what-is-nuclear-fission
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.11040.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/science/trinity-nuclear-test-atomic-bomb-oppenheimer.html