81 years ago the United States bombed its own people in secret

81 years ago the United States bombed its own people in secret.

This was the world's first atomic bomb detonated in a desert basin that was not empty. It was home.

Thousands of people lived within 50 miles of the Trinity site. Hispanic and Native New Mexican families. Ranchers. Children. Communities like Tularosa, 45 miles downwind. Nobody was warned. Nobody was evacuated. An evacuation plan existed and was abandoned, because nuclear secrecy mattered more.

Ash fell for days. It settled on rooftops, on gardens, in cisterns that held the only drinking water. Children played in it and thought it was snow. Families ate food grown in it and drank milk from cows that grazed on it.

81 years later the families and communities of New Mexico - called the Downwinders - who are mostly Hispanic and Native American, continue to live this nuclear injustice.

Marking the anniversary with First We Bombed New Mexico

To mark 81 years since Trinity, the Nuclear Truth Project is co-hosting a screening of First We Bombed New Mexico in Perth Australia with the International Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons-Australia (ICAN) and the Medical Association for Prevention of War (MAPW), a documentary by filmmaker Lois Lipman.

Perth: Saturday, August 1st at 1:00 PM - book your tickets here
The Backlot Perth, 21 Simpson St, West Perth.

In Perth, there will be a double bill with the Australian premiere
of Our Planet, The People, My Blood (2026) 

The film tells the untold story of Trinity: the world's first nuclear bomb, detonated in New Mexico one month before Hiroshima. It is a story of government betrayal, of racism and nuclear colonialism, and of communities uniting to reclaim their own history.

The film centres on seventh generation New Mexican, Tina Cordova who was born and raised in Tularosa. In 1998, the same period she was named New Mexico Small Business Person of the Year, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. She was 39. Her doctor asked whether she had been exposed to high levels of radiation. She already knew the answer, she had grown up downwind of Trinity.

Tina is the fourth generation in her family to have cancer since 1945. Her niece, diagnosed with thyroid cancer in her twenties, makes five.

In 2005, Tina co-founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium with the late Fred Tyler. Their purpose was direct: bring attention to the health effects suffered by the unknowing, unwilling, uncompensated, innocent victims of the first nuclear blast on earth. 

Tina thought at the time that once the government understood what had happened, it would come back and help. It did not. So she kept going. 

Tina began compiling the health data that the government never collected. She testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. She held town halls. She sat with families. She buried friends who started this journey with her.

"Our world stands on a nuclear precipice.  It is urgent that the American public finally know the true consequences of the Trinity Bomb – our world's nuclear origin story – so we are able to demand justice for countless lives lost and destroyed." - Tina Cordova