Resist U.S.-Led War Movement | July 16, 2025–

Today, 80 years ago, the US conducted the Trinity Nuclear Test on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert, marking the dawn of the atomic age. The test’s first victims of nuclear fall out were the nearly half a million people, who lived within a 150-mile radius of the detonation. For the Tularosa Basin and Carrizozo communities and the Mescalero Apache Reservation, the blast violently violated the peoples’ sovereignty and land, contaminated crops and water sources, and led to a surge of cancers, radiation sickness, and infant deaths for years. Officials chose not to evacuate the area, nor to warn residents of potential health effects. Residents only learned about the Trinity Test after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

In 1990, the United States passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) to provide money to some downwinders of the Nevada test site near Las Vegas. After 80 years of struggle, the Trinity downwinders have finally become eligible for RECA during its expansion in the recent budget bill. However, the recently passed legislation also guts Medicaid, which covers many residents in New Mexico, including Trinity victims. The RECA expansion also does not include eligibility for people near nuclear testing in the U.S. territory of Guam, parts of Arizona, Montana, Colorado, and new parts of Nevada.

Born from the Manhattan Project, a top secret government operation, this test set the stage for the Cold War, fueling a global arms race that threatened annihilation, in the name of expanding US territorial control of more and more of the world. We must remember this history to ensure such atrocities never happen again.

The only path forward is a mass movement struggling for just peace with a call for the US to dismantle, not modernize and expand, its nuclear arsenal as the cornerstone of the fight for nuclear weapons abolition.

It has been those affected by the decades of testing, mining, producing, cleaning up and dying in the blasts of nuclear weapons who have led the charge for justice, recognition, and ultimately a total change in the US nuclear project.

The US imperialist expansion is to blame for the invention of nuclear weapons, and they must be the first to disarm, if the world wants to ultimately live in peace, free from the fear of a nuclear war.

Take action on the 80th Anniversary of the Trinity Test, HIroshima and Nagasaki Bombings near you in your community, and stay tuned for a global online speak out from Resist US-Led War. 

Never Again! Resist Imperialist Nuclear Weapons Towards Total Abolition!

Learn more about the Downwinders: https://www.trinitydownwinders.com/

Find Hiroshima and Nagasaki Anniversary Events in the US: https://psr.org/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-events-and-more/

Categories: Anti-War, U.S. News