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“The stress of thinking maybe my kids will get it, maybe their kids will get it, and not knowing what they’ll get. I think as an adult to deal with cancer or having lost your parents to cancer, it’s bad enough that you lose them to old age as a child, but it’s worse to lose a child to cancer.”
- Jeanne Gutierrez, Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium
For the governments testing nuclear weapons, the test explosion finished just after it began in a blinding flash of light and terrible cloud of radioactive wind and debris. But communities impacted by the tests cannot soon forget them.
Life is a waiting game, not if you and your loved ones will get sick, but when.
Even those born decades after the detonations have ended are not spared.
Bernice and Jeanne Gutierrez are some of the people impacted from the first use of a nuclear weapon- at Trinity on 16 July 1945. Listen to them talk about the intergenerational effects of being exposed to a nuclear blast.
Surviving nuclear testing is a trauma that communities continue to bear, persistent as a cancer.
But survivors are not easily quieted. In spite of the lack of information, recognition and ongoing harms of nuclear weapons testing, survivors advocate for justice for their communities, for recognition, compensation and efforts to address lasting harms.