Living with Kryptonite

2025-01-17

2025-01-16

Swimming Under the Mushroom Cloud

Another truth we were never told

loves me some photographsDec 5

Which innocent first glance photo actually has a really sad story behind it?

A group of thirteen years old girls went camping in America in July 1945. They swam at a river in Ruidoso, New Mexico. The girl in front of the picture is called Barbara Kent. What the girls did not know is that nearby, the Manhattan Project detonated a nuclear bomb as a test…

In an article, Kent described what happened that day:

“We were all just shocked … and then, all of a sudden, there was this big cloud overhead, and lights in the sky,” Kent recalls. “It even hurt our eyes when we looked up. The whole sky turned strange. It was as if the sun came out tremendous.” A few hours later, she says, white flakes began to fall from above. Excited, the girls put on their bathing suits and, amid the flurries, began playing in the river. “We were grabbing all of this white, which we thought was snow, and we were putting it all over our faces,” Kent says. “But the strange thing, instead of being cold like snow, it was hot. And we all thought, ‘Well, the reason it’s hot is because it’s summer.’ We were just 13 years old.”
[1]

The flakes were fallout from the Manhattan Project’s Trinity test, the world’s first atomic bomb detonation. It took place at 5:29 a.m. local time atop a hundred-foot steel tower 40 miles away at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, in Jornada del Muerto valley. The site had been selected in part for its supposed isolation. In reality, thousands of people were within a 40-mile radius, some as close as 12 miles away. Yet those living near the bomb site weren't warned of the test. Nor were they evacuated beforehand or afterward, even as radioactive fallout continued to drop for days…

Barbara Kent and all her friends developed cancer. Every single one of the girls you see in that photo, died before the age of thirty. The only one who lived longer was Kent. And she, too, developed and survived several bouts of cancer. People often forget of the heavy price paid not only by those the atomic bombs were dropped on in Japan, but even by those who lived nearby as they were first developed.

Footnotes

[1]

https://archive.ph/D43o3#selection-4565.42-4565.81