January 27th is the National Day of Remembrance for America’s Downwinders in the USA. These are people who lived downwind of the Nevada Nuclear Test site, and were exposed to radioactive fallout. Much of that fallout remains radioactive and is now embedded into the ecosystem.
The US government has paid a token compensation to a minuscule portion of this community through #RECA.
"Radioactive Objects Found at San Francisco's Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Raise New Concerns"
"The discoveries raise fresh questions about the city’s plans to build thousands of homes on one of the nation’s largest and most polluted Superfund sites amid ongoing cleanup efforts."
There are two forms of nuclear colonialism. The extraction of natural resources from traditional indigenous and colonized lands. And the colonialism of treating a place as empty, as "no place" where there is "no one" and there are no consequences for nuclear testing. Nuclear weapon states have always very intentionally "selected the irradiated."
Analysis: Russian nuclear test would send warning signal, prompt others to follow suit
"Russian parliament set to revoke ratification of test ban treaty
Putin talks up potential of next-generation nuclear weapons
Test could mark serious escalation in context of Ukraine war
US, China, India and Pakistan could be tempted to resume testing"
Today is the 78th anniversary of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on Earth, the Trinity Test in New Mexico in 1945, three weeks before the nuclear attacks on Japan.
There will be many images posted of the mushroom cloud today, but here is what mattered more, the fallout cloud. Dozens of homes and communities were blanketed with fallout, which which also contaminated fields as far away as Illinois and Indiana.
The fallout from the Trinity Test that landed in Indiana led to the contamination of strawboard boxes, some of which were used by the Kodak Company to ship film. The radiation from the fallout fogged the film, making it unusable. The story made newspapers after the news of the nuclear attacks on #Hiroshima & #Nagasaki.
When nuclear testing started at the Nevada Test Site in 1951, Kodak was given top secret information about the scheduling of tests so that they could protect their products.
The people who lived downwind from the Nevada nuclear tests were not given the same consideration as the products of the Kodak Company.
Castle Bravo (1 Mar 1954) was the first hydrogen bomb exploded atmospherically at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The fallout cloud (that they said they couldn't predict) irradiated four atolls inhabited by Marshall Islanders. They knew. It was a deliberate attempt to study the effects of irradiation across several generations. The US govt has always maintained that it was an accident, but given the perfect case study they managed to cobble together it is clear they experimented on the islanders.
As you wrap your head around particles from wildfires creating risk 1000s of km away, and even on the other side of the world, use this to understand how radioactive fallout particles from nuclear weapon "tests" spread radioactive particles all around the world.
They have been found on every continent, at the poles, in the Mariana Trench, even in #Hiroshima & #Nagasaki.
This is the fallout cloud from the #Bravo test in the Marshall Islands in 1954, taken 15 minutes after detonation. H-bomb tests brought these particulates high into the upper atmosphere where they circled the Earth before "falling out" all across the globe. Many remain dangerous for 100s or 1000s of years.
"$59 Million, Gone: How Bikini Atoll Leaders Blew Through U.S. Trust Fund"
Lines like this: "Recognizing the damage its testing caused, the U.S. government established two trust funds in the 1980s to help pay for Bikinians’ health care, build housing and cover living costs."
Clearly there are problems, and many are tied to post-colonial social disruptions along with permanently irradiated homelands, but this article is an example of victim blaming.