TBDC is an organization that brings attention to negative health effects suffered by the people living adjacent to the Trinity test site due to overexposure to high radiation.
In 1990, President George W. Bush signed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, and Congress began compensating “downwinders” who lived close to the Nevada test site. TBDC is fighting for the same partial restitution and health coverage.
Currently, the Senate has passed an amendment to RECA with bipartisan support. This amendment will include the New Mexico Downwinders and the post 1971 uranium miners. Also, it will add states including Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona. The House’s bill does not include the amendment. The Senate and House NDAA’s are going through the reconciliation process.
IV.10 “…The State should ensure that its domestic laws, to the extent possible, provide a victim who has suffered violence or trauma should benefit from special consideration and care to avoid his or her re-traumatization in the course of legal and administrative procedures designed to provide justice and reparation.”
RECA compensation will be increased to $150,000. This money can be turned into capital to invest in small businesses, home down payments, retirement income, funds for children, and health care.
Congress approved a defense budget of $50 billion per year to maintain our current nuclear arsenal.
Over the past 30 years, RECA has paid out approximately $2.5 billion, with only $1.2 billion paid out to downwinders.
The effects of uranium mining for nuclear weapons are estimated to have led to some 1,000 deaths in the U.S. from lung cancers, disproportionally affecting Native Americans (including the Diné and Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico). Hundreds of abandoned uranium mines continue to contaminate the Diné homeland.
Many nuclear weapons workers became seriously ill or died from radiation and chemical exposures. Nationwide over 130,000 workers or their families filed claims. Within the boundaries of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, 17,595 claims have been filed for the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) and 6,239 for the Sandia National Lab.
More than 75 years of nuclear weapons research and production at LANL has resulted in about 900,000 cubic yards of radioactive and hazardous wastes buried in unlined pits and shafts. There are no plans for comprehensive cleanup. Regional groundwater has been seriously contaminated with more contamination expected.
Fallout from nuclear weapons testing is estimated to have caused between 215,000 to 430,000 cancer deaths worldwide for those living between 1945 and 2000. It will increase to between 1.2 million to 2.4 million eventual deaths due to long-lived carbon-14 fallout. Trinity Test downwinders in New Mexico have never been compensated.
The U.S. has invested more than $10 trillion into nuclear weapons, with an estimated $1.7 trillion to be reinvested in “modernization” of the nuclear weapons stockpile and delivery systems over the next 30 years. That is money that could be used to better the lives of those who are sick, poor, and vulnerable. The costs of a nuclear war would be incalculable. Radioactive and toxic wastes placed for burial in an unlined pit at LANL.
On top of all this, there is the catastrophic consequence of a long “nuclear winter” after a nuclear war, a topic that has been well examined over the decades. For example, a May 1998 United Nations report concluded, “The direct effects of a major nuclear exchange could kill hundreds of millions: the indirect effects could kill billions."