TULAROSA — Tresa VanWinkle struggled to hold back tears as she glanced at family photos perched on her desk among the clutter of her downtown office.

"I look at what has happened to members of my family, and I wonder if we are the children of the bomb," said VanWinkle, 53, director of the Alamogordo-based Cancer Awareness, Prevalence, Prevention and Early Detection center.

She was pulling up national and state cancer trends on the computer — numbers that she said show spiking cancer rates among families in the sprawling, often wind-whipped and ever-dusty Tularosa Basin north of Alamogordo.

"The bomb" was the 19-kiloton plutonium device nicknamed "The Gadget," detonated just before dawn July 16, 1945, on the northwest end of what is now the White Sands Missile Range.

Jim Madrid, who at age 13 witnessed the blast from his mother's car, still remembers. The fireball produced by the Trinity Site detonation was "the biggest thing I had ever seen in my life. It was rolling, getting fatter and bigger and taller," said Madrid, who now lives in Denver.

"My mother said: 'The sun is coming close. The world is coming to an end.' She told me to drop to my knees, but I kept looking. If it was the end of the world, I wanted to see it. I was waiting for God to come out from around the ball of fire."

The explosion, the product of the Manhattan Project, was the first-ever detonation of an atomic device and is considered the dawn of the nuclear age.

Now, more than six decades after the United States launched what some consider, in essence, a surprise nuclear attack on the citizens of south-central New Mexico, many feel they have been abandoned by their government and left to deal on their own with three generations of radiation-induced illnesses and deaths.

A bomb, Fat Man, of the same basic design and packing about the same payload as The Gadget, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945, killing an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 people that day and twice that over the next few months.

The Nagasaki bombing, coupled with the Aug. 6 nuclear attack on Hiroshima, which is estimated to have killed 150,000 on the day of the bombing and in the immediate months after, prompted the Japanese to surrender, ending World War II.

Though no New Mexicans were believed to have been killed instantly by the Trinity Gadget, many in the basin worry about their health as the cancer and disease toll continues to mount.

In the past 15 years, VanWinkle said, 14 members of her and her husband's family, including two of her sisters, have been diagnosed with a variety of cancers; eight of them, including her sisters, have died.

The losses prompted VanWinkle, a registered nurse, to form her nonprofit agency, Cancer Awareness, Prevalence, Prevention and Early Detection, also known as Capped.



Van Winkle's story of a family devastated by cancers is oft-repeated in the Tularosa Basin, known as the valley of Jornada del Muerto, or Journey of Death. Except for the big hole in the ground (long ago filled in), and a literally nuked area around ground zero, where even the stubborn bull thistle refuses to grow, the valley still looks much as it did before the explosion.

In a modest home a few blocks off N.M. 54, Tularosa's main drag, Rosemary Cordova flipped through a family scrapbook.

Her mother died after suffering breast cancer and a brain tumor; her son, Danny, 47, has a brain tumor; a sister died of breast cancer. Of the nine siblings in Cordova's mother's family, four have or had one form of cancer or another.

"It just goes from generation to generation," said Cordova, 66.

In the family of her ex-husband, Raynaldo, his brother, niece, two uncles, an aunt and grandfather suffered from a variety of cancers, including prostate, thyroid, breast and stomach.

Many of the sick have not had medical insurance, and "many just had to lie down and die," Cordova said.

She recalled how family and friends have held bake sales to pay for pain medications. "There has been so much suffering. It's just not fair. It is unfair that we have been overlooked, and yet this bomb was dropped in our backyard."

A recently formed group known as the Tularosa Downwinders Consortium is attempting to raise awareness of the increase in cancer and autoimmune diseases in four counties adjacent to the Trinity Site (Otero, Lincoln, Sierra and Socorro) — up to nine times higher than nationwide figures — and to push for inclusion of the Trinity downwinders in the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990.

Some towns, including Tularosa, Carrizozo and Socorro, are within 25 to 35 miles, and ranches were scattered as close as 15 miles from the blast site.

The compensation act, initiated in great part by former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, father of U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., offered mea culpas and monetary compensation to uranium miners and residents of Nevada and other Western states who were downwind from above-ground atomic-weapons testing in the 1950s and early '60s.

The legislation, administered through the Justice Department, authorizes lump-sum compensation payments and sometimes medical coverage to individuals in three categories who contracted any of 27 types of cancer or other radiation-related diseases: uranium miners, millers and ore transporters, who receive $100,000; those present at above-ground nuclear-weapons tests, who receive $75,000 (including Trinity scientists and workers, but not nearby ranchers or townsfolk); and people who lived downwind of the Nevada test site, who can receive $50,000.

Despite numerous amendments and expansion of the coverage over the years, the Trinity downwinders have never been included in the legislation.

"It's appalling that the government did this to us and never came back to attempt to remedy the situation," said Fred Tyler, who co-founded the Tularosa Downwinders Consortium in 2005 with Tina Cordova, Rosemary Cordova's niece.

"After the testing started in Nevada," Tyler said, "they realized that this stuff is dangerous, and 'we should go back and see what we did to New Mexico. ... There are probably people that are sick because of what we did,' but they didn't do it.

"Ultimately, what we want is our federal government to recognize the fact that we should be classified as downwinders, and ... we should be able to share in that funding."

Tyler, 60, grew up in Tularosa but left in 1981 to work in military personnel services around the world.

"When I returned in 2004, I was surprised to how many people weren't around anymore — because they died," he said.

Tyler and Rosemary Cordova, 51, suggested that basin residents might have been left out of the compensation act — while other states' downwinders received help — because they weren't inclined to question the government or to complain about their problems.

Also, many are government employees who may have feared losing their jobs, Cordova said.

The area is home to White Sands Missile Range and Holloman Air Force Base, which together employ 5,660 civilians either as government workers or contractors. The two military installations are home to a total of 4,865 active military, the lion's share at Holloman.

"At the beginning," Tyler said, "(residents) thought that the government must know what they are doing, and we have to trust them." The attitude was, "the government could do no wrong, and whatever they tell us must be true."

In addition, Cordova said, it took years for people to connect the dots between the bomb and their health problems. Many people are only beginning to make those connections now.

Cordova, who grew up in Tularosa and still has many extended family members there, said she began connecting the bomb with community health issues in the 1980s, when she was in medical school, an endeavor she later gave up.

Others in the area have hinted at moves by large landowners and economic leaders to keep the lid on complaints about possible radiation poisoning, lest negative attention bring down property values and discourage investments.

Cordova also laments the lack of concern for the health of the valley's residents.

"It's just sinful that the government has never come back here and even done one single health survey. They have never done any screening. People's lives could have been saved ... if there was adequate screening and adequate care."

Cordova, who operates an Albuquerque roofing company with her husband, Russ Steward, is convinced that even though some of the illnesses may not be directly related to the Trinity explosion, most likely are.

She noted that many of the cancers suffered by residents are among the 27 qualifying illnesses listed on the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, including thyroid diseases and leukemia, and that rates of deaths from cancer and autoimmune diseases in Trinity Site's neighboring counties of Otero, Sierra, Socorro and Lincoln are four to eight times higher than national rates, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Overlay that with the fact that there was an atomic bomb detonated here, and look at Chernobyl and Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the multiple and variety of cancers ... that all speaks to something very different in this population," Cordova said.

"I know five women who have or have had oral cancer," she said. "How many people do you know who have brain tumors? I can name Danny Cordova, Gloria Sainz, Dianna Sainz, Lollie Adamson. There, I named four people right off the top of my head."

Cordova, who has survived thyroid cancer and whose sisters have had thyroid diseases, also noted that residents grew up eating the food they grew on their land, slaughtering the animals and drinking the milk of nearby cows and goats.



Trinity downwinders' fears about immediate and long-term exposure, and anger at lack of concern for their well-being at the time of the blast and since, are bolstered by the CDC in a recently completed study of the effects of the Trinity explosion.

"All evaluations of public exposures from the Trinity blast ... have been incomplete in that they have not reflected the internal doses received by residents from intakes of airborne radioactivity and contaminated water and food," the CDC reported after its 10-year study of Manhattan Project activities — and their impacts — at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The study is known as the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment project.

"Because (The Gadget) was detonated so close to the ground, members of the public lived less than 20 (miles) downwind and were not relocated, terrain features and wind patterns caused 'hot spots' of radioactive fallout, and lifestyles of the local ranchers led to intakes of radioactivity via consumption of water, milk and homegrown vegetables; it appears that internal radiation doses could have posed significant health risks for individuals exposed after the blast."

The report also suggests that even though Trinity project managers knew of the possible dangers of the exploding Gadget and evacuated their own sites and took added precautions as radiation levels rose, "members of the public did not realize that changes in their behavior were prudent, and project staff did not call for the evacuations or protective measures even though predetermined tolerances for exposure rate and projected total exposure had been exceeded."

An account by two researchers involved in the study, Thomas E. Widner and Susan M. Flack of the scientific consulting firm ChemRisk, published last year by the Health Physics Society, is particularly telling. It relates to the discovery of at least two occupied ranches just north of the Trinity Site.

"Although concern was voiced for the health status of at least one family, no evidence was found of steps being taken to reduce exposures to ranchers who continued to live in the fallout zone after July 1945," the researchers wrote.

This was "in spite of the fact that soil and the grasses eaten by grazing livestock were particularly radioactive. ... In retrospect, (Louis) Hempelmann (the Trinity project's medical services and monitoring director) acknowledged that 'a few people were probably overexposed, but they couldn't prove it, and we couldn't prove it. So we just assumed we got away with it.' "

Widner and Flack also noted that the information obtained in the historical-documents study brought into question the accuracy of field-monitoring instruments, putting in doubt the project scientists' conclusions about the direction the radioactive cloud took, where radioactive fallout was deposited, and how much danger it presented.

Cordova and Tyler of the Tularosa consortium recently have begun pressuring lawmakers to incorporate Trinity downwinders into the compensation measure.

Last week, Sen. Udall, supported by Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., introduced a package of amendments to the compensation act that included adding Trinity downwinders, providing them with $150,000 in compensation as well as medical coverage. As proposed, all of New Mexico would be given downwinder status. The amendments were assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Udall introduced similar legislation last year that went nowhere.

Downwinders worry that even though favorable legislation has finally been addressed, there may be little actual effort to push it through Congress.

Tyler said even though some records of the day indicate the radioactive cloud moved generally east and northeast (Tularosa lies to the southeast), all the rainstorms that occurred soon after the blast would have washed the fallout that settled over the area into the Rio Grande, and from there into the Elephant Butte and Caballo reservoirs.

"This is where everybody irrigated from. That's where they got their water for their cattle and dairy farms," especially in Sierra County, Tyler said.

Cordova, Tyler and others recounted stories of schoolchildren being bused out to the site only weeks or months after the detonation. Many gathered up the small green rocks and pebbles — rocks that had been turned to radioactive glass by the blast — and took them home.

Ann Hawkes, 55, a native of Alamogordo, recalls trips to ground zero as a child — the 51,000-acre area was declared a national landmark in 1965. "One time we took a school bus. Another time it was a big open-house kind of thing."

She said she and her sisters would gather up the explosion-formed glass pebbles, put them in cigar boxes and take them home to place under their beds because they glowed in the dark.

Over the years, Hawkes said, she and two of her sisters developed numerous cancers, as well as bone and thyroid diseases.

During the visits to ground zero, "I can remember the adults talking and walking around and us kids playing in the dirt with the greenish-colored glass. ... There was no supervision from anybody. It was sort of like a picnic. No one ever made a big deal out of it."

Hawkes estimated that 95 percent of the girls she went to school with in Alamogordo eventually contracted some form of cancer or thyroid disease. "I hope somebody pays attention to what's (been) going on," Hawkes said.

Because there was never any assessment or cleanup of the off-site areas from the missile range, Cordova and Tyler fear that residents of such communities as Tularosa, Carrizozo, Socorro and others could still be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, plutonium and other toxins from the bomb six decades later.

"I don't know of anything that has been done that can assure us that there is still not radiation there," Cordova. "There is nothing that has been done that tells me that the exposure is over."