Victims hushed up

“Oppenheimer” consists of a “pack of lies”

Louisa Lopez still lives near the Trinity test site in New Mexico.

(Bild: APA/AFP/VALERIE MACON)

Christopher Nolan's atomic bomb drama "Oppenheimer" (see video above for trailer) looks set to win big at this year's Oscars. The historical drama starring Cillian Murphy as the "father of the atomic bomb" has already won several awards at the Golden Globes. Local residents of the test site in the US state of New Mexico, where the world's first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, have mixed feelings about the event.

For Wesley Burris, who witnessed the explosion first-hand, and many other residents of the test site, it was an inexplicable experience with terrible consequences. Many from the surrounding area developed cancer in the decades that followed. 

Burris was a child at the time when the nuclear explosion occurred 40 kilometers from his parents' house in a desert in the US state of New Mexico at 5.30 am. The enormous force shattered the window panes and shards of glass flew around the ears of four-year-old Wesley Burris and his brother. "It was so bright that I couldn't see anything," says Burris. "I remember asking: 'Dad, did the sun explode?"

Cillian Murphy as the "father of the atomic bomb" in "Oppenheimer"

(Bild: © Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.)

Burris is now 83 and still lives just a few kilometers away from the secret test site where nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues built the first atomic bomb under enormous time pressure at the end of the Second World War. While the Trinity test site is depicted as a deserted desert in Nolan's film, in reality, not only Oppenheimer's staff but thousands of other people lived within a radius of just 80 kilometers. 

"We were laboratory animals": local residents Louisa Lopez (left), Wesley Burris and Tina Cordova (right) remember.

(Bild: APA/AFP/VALERIE MACON)

At the time, none of them knew why this giant mushroom-shaped cloud was rising on the horizon. "We weren't afraid of it. Because it didn't kill us directly," Burris recalls to the AFP news agency. In the meantime, the consequences of the radioactive material, which was hurled 15,000 meters into the air at the time and spread over a wide area by subsequent rainfall, are all too well known. Burris' brother died of cancer. His sister and her daughter also have cancer. Burris himself has skin cancer. Despite the obvious connection, the victims of the nuclear test have never received compensation payments.

Louisa Lopez still lives near the Trinity test site in New Mexico.

(Bild: APA/AFP/VALERIE MACON)

"We were laboratory animals"
"We were laboratory animals," says Tina Cordova, who survived her cancer and is fighting for justice for the radiation victims with her organization Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. "But at least laboratory animals are examined afterwards. Nobody cared about us anymore." According to Cordova, Latinos and indigenous people are particularly affected by the consequences.

While the Trinity test site is depicted as a deserted desert in Nolan's film, in reality it was not only Oppenheimer's staff who lived there, but thousands of other people.

(Bild: APA/AFP/VALERIE MACON)

Cordova sees it as positive that the film "Oppenheimer" made millions of people around the world aware of the activities at the Trinity test site. "But it didn't go far enough," she says. Now she is pinning her hopes on the Oscars on Monday night. In Burris' view, "Oppenheimer" consists of "a pack of lies", and the three-hour epic film does not say a word about the many deaths resulting from the nuclear test.

So far only victims of later nuclear tests have been compensated
"Wouldn't it be remarkable if any of them said during the Academy Awards: 'I want to recognize the victims and suffering of the people of New Mexico'," the activist hopes. From Cordova's point of view, this could also increase the pressure on the US Congress to grant compensation to those affected in New Mexico. So far, only those affected by later nuclear tests in the states of Nevada, Utah and Arizona have received support.