Twice a year thousands line up—many before dawn—in the middle of the New Mexico desert, just off of U.S. Highway 380. On July 16, 1945, the U.S. military detonated the first atomic bomb over this stretch of desert in New Mexico—a 24.8-kiloton blast code-named Trinity. It was the culmination of the Manhattan Project, an all-out World War II effort by the U.S. military to build an atomic bomb before Germany did. Although it was top secret, the blast could be felt 160 miles away.
New scientific research shows that the fallout contaminated local residents, and spread radioactive particles across the U.S. and into Canada. Soon after the test, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people. The war ended just days later. But there are some here who are still dealing with the fallout of the Trinity test today. They say that radiation from the blast has caused cancer for generations of their families. My mother died of metastasized cancer. My sister died of the same. Dad died of leukemia