Episode 2: The Atomic Bomb’s First Victims

Beata Tsosie-Pena & Jay Coghlan on Downwinders

The U.S. bombed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago this month. Although nuclear weapons haven’t been used in combat since, they continue to proliferate across the globe. This week, two activists from New Mexico explain the lesser known costs of the production of nuclear weapons, from the devastation inflicted on indigenous communities by impact testing and mining around the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to the risks modernization poses to national security. As the U.S. prepares to embark upon a major nuclear modernization program, will the impact on civilians worsen?

Beata Tsosie-Pena is the environmental health and justice program coordinator at Tewa Women United and a Los Alamos National Laboratory downwinder.

Jay Coghlan is the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico and has worked on nuclear weapons and environmental issues for the past 25 years.

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Archival audio:

GCSE Science: Irradiation & Contamination (10/29/19)
Tree Media: Doctrine of Discovery (9/16/15)
PBS NewsHour: Is cancer the legacy left by world's first atomic bomb test? (7/28/15)
AFP: Radioactive contamination (2/23/15)
Warner Pathe News: Biggest U.S. Atom Blast (1952)
British Pathe: Experiment With Death (1946)

Transcript:

August 18, 2020

BEATA TSOSIE-PENA: There's a misconception that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first victims of the atomic bomb when really it was the people of New Mexico with the Trinity test. When the Trinity test happened, there were close to forty thousand people living adjacent to that bombing.

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HANNAH: My name is Mark Hannah, and I'm your host for None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. We are in season two here at None of the Above. And this month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, we'll be discussing the effects of our nuclear program on an often overlooked group of people: the indigenous people of New Mexico. The native people of New Mexico still suffer the effects from the nuclear tests during the Cold War, even as policymakers today debate a massive nuclear modernization program. Today, we'll be talking to two activists working on these issues. Our first guest is Beata Tsosie-Pena. She is the Environmental Health and Justice Program coordinator at Tewa Women United, which is a local nonprofit organization led by native women in northern New Mexico, where she's been for over a decade.

Our second guest is Jay Coghlan, who is the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Jay has worked on issues related to the United States Department of Energy, including nuclear weapons and environmental issues for more than a quarter century now.

Beata and Jay, very glad to have you with us.

Beata, you advocate for native people who have been affected by the use of nuclear weapons. How were indigenous people affected back then in the 1940s, and how are they affected today?

TSOSIE-PENA: Well, thanks for having me. Just to give you some context of where I'm coming from, I live in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, which is about twenty minutes downwind, down watershed from Los Alamos National Laboratories. When the military came to occupy our ancestral homelands in the Jemez Plateau, where the labs are on top of, it was under the War Powers Act. There was not free informed prior consent given at the time. It was under extreme secrecy with the Manhattan Project. A lot of the communities did not even fully know what was happening until many years later, when a lot of legacy waste time had already taken place. Uranium mining would come to have a big impact on native lands. A lot of our people in the valley were employed there under the guise of service industry and were exposed. So when the nuclear industry was still getting started at the Jemez Plateau, there was a lot of legacy of waste dumping on or near our ancestral cultural sites, including in some of our oldest kivas that were thousands of years old, which is a ceremonial place of emergence and prayer and learning in our traditional ways. But to a person untrained in our culture, it would be a hole in the ground. I know that to my understanding, Area G, where the nuclear waste now sits, was the site of some of our oldest kivas.

HANNAH: Can you tell our listeners about Downwinder communities, specifically in New Mexico, and what that phrase means?

TSOSIE-PENA: A Downwinder community is a community that lives adjacent to a nuclear test site, nuclear facility, or a uranium mine, which are often open killing pits, many times not even cleaned up. It means we're exposed to oftentimes daily environmental releases that, again, are cumulative or multiple exposures, and it’s not just radiation, but also chemicals and other toxins.

It means our reproductive health is often compromised. These are some of the only toxins that can cross placental boundaries. It means there's generational exposure to contaminated sites over hundreds and hundreds of years.

HANNAH: And, Jay, I want to bring you in here. Let's start with a “big picture” kind of comparison of the nuclear weapons landscape today versus the 1940s or 1950s. Why is today better or worse than seventy years ago?

JAY COGHLAN: Your general question is over the ongoing legacy of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings seventy-five years ago. Well, obviously, they were the very beginning. Seventy-five years later, and some twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, we had an opportunity to get rid of these weapons. But yet the negative weaponeers have come charging back, in the case of the United States, with a two-trillion-dollar so-called modernization program that is going to completely rebuild every existing warhead, plus add newly designed warheads and completely new bombers, missiles, and submarines to deliver them. Now, to date myself, I grew up at the height of the Cold War. The Cuban Missile Crisis is an absolutely vivid memory to me—the proverbial duck and cover. I did those things as a schoolchild. What I want to impress upon your young viewers and listeners is that it's back.

HANNAH: For a lot of college students, their entire experience of American military might has been somewhat limited to these two inconclusive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those have been the headlines for as long as they can remember. Why should they care about nuclear weapons? They're probably taught in a lot of classrooms that having a strong nuclear arsenal can actually deter conflict.

COGHLAN: Well, first of all, the policy basis that the American public has always been spoon-fed for the existence of the American nuclear weapons stockpile is, “deterrence.” We've heard that. I've heard it all my life. Note the appropriate acronym MADD, for mutually assured deterrence. And indeed, it is a mad, irrational policy.

HANNAH: Destruction, right? Was it mutually assured destruction?

COGHLAN: That's correct. It was the mutual threat of total annihilation. Now, I want to submit that the reality is kind of a hybrid. Yes, there is a deterrence, but at the same time, there was a nuclear war fighting doctrine that a nuclear war can be fought and won. And to get to the bottom line point—to get to the numbers—that is why we have some 4,000 operational nuclear weapons and approximately 1,500 of them on ready to launch within twenty minutes. But that is why we have thousands of weapons instead of the few hundred needed for mere deterrence. Now, don't take my word for it. I can actually cite a high level policy document from the Defense Department that came out in 2013, I believe. It explicitly states, “Minimal deterrence is not our policy. Our policy is one of counter force.” Now, that is jargon for attacking the adversary’s military assets. That is to say, fight nuclear war. And this is what is propelling this two-trillion-dollar nuclear weapons modernization that will do nothing to protect us from COVID-19, nothing to protect us from climate change, and will detract from public health and environmental protection.

HANNAH: Beáta, what does the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings mean to you and people in your in your community?

TSOSIE-PENA: You know, when I moved back to my homeland in Santa Clara Pueblo, what brought me into environmental justice work was experiencing the high explosives testing and disposal at the labs on almost a daily basis and hearing those explosions rumble through our landscape. The first thought that popped into my head when this kind of veil was lifted, “Oh, that's what they're doing up there.” After having this kind of growing up in silence around this place, my thought was if it's that traumatic for me to just hear this and feel that vibrational impact, imagine being the women and children and families at the receiving end of these weapons. It can bring me to weeping to think about the suffering that communities have endured. I have met with people from Japan, and there's no question that it's just evil. But then I also think there's a misconception that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first victims of the atomic bomb when really it was the people of New Mexico with the Trinity test.

Interlude featuring archival audio

TSOSIE-PENA: You know, when the Trinity test happened, there were close to forty thousand people living adjacent to that bombing who have not received compensation or health care.

HANNAH: Can you talk about some of the health effects of that test on those forty thousand people?

TSOSIE-PENA: So, again, like New Mexico, we’re land-based communities, which means we get a lot of our food off the land. We're ranchers, farmers, and we make traditional pottery. We hunt. We fish. We harvest rainwater. We breastfed our children and still do. These are all things that set us up for increased exposure or a cumulative and multiple exposures over long periods of time. You really have to look at the intergenerational health impacts. And it's hard to say what those impacts are because we've never had health studies. The National Cancer Research Institute is just completing their first study of the impacts of the Trinity test seventy-five years later, when the majority of those elders have already passed. There's also a generational impact of autoimmune diseases, of learning disabilities, and of weaker immune systems in my community. We have seen rampant cancer. All my elders have died of cancers. I've seen rampant miscarriages. And these are all things that are basically our word against these industries’, because there's also a level of scientific racism, in which the perspectives of the people living off the land are not valid unless backed up by scientific studies. Or the harm that we see happening on a daily basis is not backed up unless we have long term health studies, which are expensive and which are not funded. And the burden of proof falls on impacted communities.

HANNAH: I'm going to kick it to Jay and mention that a lot of people listening who know the United States hasn't really conducted a nuclear test in decades might assume that because of that, the environmental or health impacts from our nuclear program exist in the past. And obviously, what we're hearing from Beáta is a very different story. So, you know, there's an intergenerational harm that happens in communities like the Tewa community. Why do these harms persist so long?

COGHLAN: It's simply because of the fact that programs for nuclear weapons research, development, and production continue. And a recent example, within the last couple of months here in the area surrounding the Los Alamos lab, the lab proposed to intentionally release 100,000 curies of tritium, which is a radioactive gas of a hydrogen isotope, meaning it produces radioactive water. And something like ten percent of gaseous tritium is assumed to condense out as tritiated water vapor that bioaccumulates right up the food chain.

Interlude featuring archival audio

COGHLAN: So, you can end up having water uptake from a massive release of tritium. And again, the lab proposed to release some one hundred thousand curies of tritium as a so-called normal operation and its annual radioactive releases. And further, it had to apply for approval from the EPA, which the EPA rubber-stamped. Well, we were able to break the news of this. That release has been postponed. But again, I'm citing this as a very current example of the ongoing environmental threat posed to the human population by continuing nuclear weapons programs.

HANNAH: I want to drill into this topic of modernization because, you know, as a lay person, as somebody who doesn't specialize in these particular issues, when I think of modernization, I think of: the risk is going to be minimized.

I remember a 60 Minutes episode in which they were showing that our nuclear launch codes were on old five-inch floppy disks, and it looked really outdated and outmoded. And I thought to myself that they needed to modernize our nuclear weapons because it seems really risky to have it on old software. What is the problem with modernization?

COGHLAN: The first problem—there's many problems; I'll try to quickly tick them off—I'll go back to the fact that it's going to cost two trillion dollars, and that's before the usual cost overruns—the what I would call inevitable cost runs.

HANNAH: And two trillion? I just want to get that on the record. You said two trillion with a T?

COGHLAN: With a T. With a big old capital T. And that money could be gone. Where's our personal protective equipment against COVID? Where is our universal COVID testing? Where's our combating global climate change? I would submit that money could be better spent. But here's the crucial part: we have an extensively tested existing nuclear weapons stockpile on the order of 1,100 full-scale tests, almost more than all other countries combined. My point is we have a tried-and-true and reliable existing nuclear weapons stockpile. What is the last thing you want to do to something that is trusted and reliable? The last thing you want to do is intentionally introduce uncertainty into it. That's exactly what we're doing, especially with present plans to produce heavily modified plutonium pits in the future. And that's pits like the core of a peach, not a hole in the ground. But plutonium pits are the bomb cores, the fissile bomb cores that are the most critical component of a nuclear weapon. A problem with that is we cannot test them nowadays—full scale test—in reality, because of the current global testing moratorium. Or alternatively, it could prompt us back into testing, after which all these other countries would surely follow and test, which would create proliferation nightmares. Ironically, so-called modernization may actually undermine national security by introducing uncertainties into our reliable stockpile or alternatively, causing all of the world to start testing all over again.

HANNAH: I recently read a story about a recent Supreme Court decision that returned land to indigenous people in Oklahoma. Does that give you any hope that the land which was taken for nuclear sites might be returned?

TSOSIE-PENA: Yeah, it gives me a lot of hope that's possible and also that we can live within indigenous governance. It offers an alternate political reality to white supremacy because we're the ones that have an actual political claim to land that scares the heck out of colonizers. I think there's a lot of work to do on looking at—even the doctrine of discovery is still being used to deny the return of native lands as recently as, I want to say 2017, when First Nations peoples were denied weapons because they were citing the doctrine of discovery as a legal precedent.

Interlude featuring archival audio

TSOSIE-PENA: The whole premise of that is also white supremacy, you can't justify any kind of continued harm reduction or… There's just no way of justifying this ongoing harm.

HANNAH: We've got a moment here for a round of extraneous and miscellaneous questions for which we expect spontaneous answers from you both.

I'll start with Jay. One book about America and the world that you would require both presidential candidates to read?

COGHLAN: Counsels of War by Gregg Herken. It is not well known. It's about the evolution of the American nuclear weapons policies.

HANNAH: And Beata: the worst American foreign policy blunder of the past hundred years is…?

TSOSIE-PENA: NAFTA and School of the Americas.

HANNAH: One piece of professional advice you wish you received as a kid, Jay?

COGHLAN: Follow your heart and do what you're really interested in—not the money, but what you're really interested in.

HANNAH: Beata, professional advice?

TSOSIE-PENA: Don't be afraid to speak truth to power.

HANNAH: I like it. A role model for the work that you do, Beata?

TSOSIE-PENA: I think my colleague Dr. Corrine Sanchez, who has been doing advocacy with nuclear resistance for their lifetime and has mentored me quite a bit.

HANNAH: Wonderful. Jay, do you have a role model?

COGHLAN: Frederick Douglass.

HANNAH: Nice. Because?

COGHLAN: Because of the current national reckoning over racial injustice. And he was clearly a highly principled man. He never wavered from his principles.

HANNAH: Impressive. Jay, a publication you read every day?

COGHLAN: This isn’t every day, but I typically read four newspapers every day—New York Times, Washington Post, Albuquerque Journal, and Santa Fe New Mexican.

HANNAH: And Beata, what is your regular source of news

TSOSIE-PENA: The Mayan calendar.

HANNAH: Great, where can people find that?

I want to thank both of our guests, Beata Tsosie-Pena and Jay Coghlan, for joining us this week.

I’m Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to give a special thanks to our None of the Above team who make this all possible. Thank you to our producer Caroline Gray, our editor Luke Taylor, our sound engineer Zubin Hensler, and EGF’s summer research assistant Keenan Ashbrook.

Did you enjoy what you heard? We would appreciate you subscribing on Google Play, iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Please rate and review us. If there is a topic you want us to cover, shoot us an email at info@egfound.org. Thank you for joining us. Stay safe out there, and see you next time.

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