FILE - This July 16, 1945, file photo, shows the mushroom cloud of the first atomic explosion at Trinity Test Site near Alamagordo, N.M. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez and top prosecutors from several other states and the District of Columbia are uniting in support of efforts to compensate people sickened by exposure to radiation during nuclear weapons testing.
AP Photo
AP Photo
FILE - This July 16, 1945, file photo, shows the mushroom cloud of the first atomic explosion at Trinity Test Site near Alamagordo, N.M. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez and top prosecutors from several other states and the District of Columbia are uniting in support of efforts to compensate people sickened by exposure to radiation during nuclear weapons testing.
Airdate: September 25th, 2023
Dr. Mark Kelley mother worked for the Manhattan Project in the head offices in Washington, DC from 1942 to 1946. Her responsibility as a clerical worker was to classify thousands of documents (Top Secret, Classified) passing through General Groves’ office in DC as Oppenheimer and company worked to beat Germany to the atomic bomb. It was his mother’s first job right out of high school, and unlike the young women who worked at Oak Ridge, TN did not know they were part of a weapons project, my mother knew exactly what we were doing and had some terrifying moments along the way.
After the Trinity Test (of the first bomb), someone brought radioactive slag (Trinitite) from the test site to the DC offices in a wooden box, which sat by his mother’s desk for an extended period of time. No one warned the staff of the dangers of radiation, and as a result, his mother died at the age of 59 of the same type of cancer that developed in Japanese citizens exposed to the fall-out from the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
