By: Brayden Yin

In July of 1945, just a month before the infamous bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Robert Oppenheimer and his team dropped a plutonium implosion bomb in the New Mexico desert. Having little knowledge about how large the blast would be, the resultant explosion defied expectations, and the radioactive mushroom cloud went higher in the atmosphere than scientists predicted, radiated fallout reached 46 states of the continental US and reached Mexico and Canada in less than 10 days.

On July 16, the team set off the test bomb, code-named Trinity, atop a hundred-foot metal tower, and the following blast incinerated the metal tower, and turned the surrounding sand of the desert to green glass, now known as trinitite. The mushroom cloud reached heights of up to 70,000 feet in the air, where wind blew the irradiated particles of the cloud all over North America.

A new study released on July 20 revealed that the fallout and the cloud went much further than the team at the Manhattan project originally thought in 1945. State-of-the-art modeling software and historical weather data showed that radioactive fallout from the Trinity test reached every state of the of the contiguous US excluding Washington and Oregon, and parts of Canada and Mexico.

The first hint that nuclear fallout might be spreading came from the Eastman Kodak company. Eastman Kodak manufactured cameras and film. When radioactive particles hit the light-sensitive film, the batch of film was all but ruined. The fallout had floated from New Mexico all the way to Rochester, New York. An envelope containing contaminated film was sent to the team at the Manhattan Project, and that was their first hint that the fallout was spreading.

Those who lived in New Mexico at the time of the test who had received a dose of radioactivity may receive financial compensation.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/science/trinity-nuclear-test-atomic-bomb-oppenheimer.html