Downwinders

A new exhibit on nuclear weapons opens Wednesday at the University of New Mexico’s Zimmerman Library as part of a nationwide tour. “The bomb” is an immersive multimedia installation created by journalist Eric Schlosser and artist Smriti Keshari.

Local Indigenous communities that have been impacted by long-term uranium exposure will be traveling to Washington D.C. on Sunday to demand that Congress pass a bill that will compensate those exposed to radiation.

New Mexicans who lived near the first atomic blast have never been compensated. All of that could have finally changed last year, as Congress considered an expansion of the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act with bipartisan support. But during last-minute negotiations over defense spending, relief for people in New Mexico and potentially tens of thousands of others nationwide was unceremoniously nixed from the legislation.

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,…