Downwinders

On this episode we talk with Lucie Genay, author of “Land of Nuclear Enchantment: A New Mexican History of the Nuclear Weapons Industry.”

There’s a lot of buzz around the new movie “Oppenheimer,” which tells the story of the physicist at the center of the Manhattan Project and starts its run in theaters this week. For some in New Mexico, that story hits close to home.An advocacy group has purchased ad space at five theaters in Santa Fe and Albuquerque to run a reminder of the damage caused by nuclear testing in the Southwest.

As the U.S. prepared to detonate the first atomic bomb in New Mexico in the ’40s, the federal government sought uranium on Navajo land. Decades later,…