The Bombing of New Mexico
Trinity Site Downwinders deserve federal compensation.
Oppenheimer, a 2024 Oscar nominee, tells the story of the man who oversaw the creation and detonation of the first atomic bomb. The bomb’s creation took place on the Parajito Plateau in north central New Mexico, in what is now called Los Alamos. It was detonated at the Trinity Test Site nearly 200 miles south of Los Alamos in the northernmost part of the Jornada del Muerto Basin (see map below), a desert that is virtually undeveloped and uninhabited.
The Parajito Plateau, on the other hand, had been home to Puebloan, Tewa, and other native people for 11,000 years and is sacred to the local Tewa people. The land was granted to Hispano settlers under Spanish colonial rule, then to both Hispano and white homesteaders after the US occupied the area following the 1846 to 1848 Mexican-American War.
One of these homesteaders, Ashley Pond, founded the Los Alamos Ranch School, which included 54,000 acres, 27 houses, dormitories and other living quarters and 27 miscellaneous buildings. On November 25, 1942, the US Department of War exercised eminent domain over the Ranch School and other homesteads on the Parajito Plateau.
Emminent domain allows the government to take private property for public use without the owner’s consent, and the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution…
