♪ i'm i'm gonna love you anyway i'm gonna love you i'm gonna love you ♪ [ cheers and applause ] tonight -- >> this is a national emergency. >> a covert government project on screen this summer in the blockbuster "oppenheimer." >> why would we go to the middle of nowhere? >> why, why? how about because this is the most important thing to ever happen in the history of the world! >> juju: but that wasn't the whole story. >> what happened here on that day, on july 16, 1945, that huge expanse of land wasn't empty after all. >> there were families living as

close as 12 miles to the test. my brother died of stomach cancer. my mom died of bone cancer. >> i have thyroid cancer. >> one of my sisters is surviving brain tumors. the other one is surviving thyroid cancer. >> we always say, we don't ask if we're going to get cancer, we ask when it's going to be our turn. >> juju: these families saying their disease is no coincidence and they're looking for what they call justice. >> we were the first people exposed to radiation any place in the world as a result of an atomic bomb and we're left out. >> juju: this special edition of "nightline," "oppenheimer: the true story" will be right back. and who doesn't love a good throwback? [sfx: video game sound] new emergen-c crystals. throw it back. - bye, bye cough. - later chest congestion. hello 12 hours of relief. 12 hours!! not coughing? hashtag still not coughing?! mucinex dm gives you 12 hours of relief

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♪ >> juju: thanks for joining us. tonight, the families who say they're the real-life fallout of the famed manhattan project, fighting for what they describe as long overdue justice. decades after the nuclear tests, they believe miscalculations may have left hundreds of thousands of new mexicans exposed to deadly levels of radiation. mariana salinas has their stories. >> so someone who has never been to new mexico, how would you describe it? >> blue skies. i wrote a song that says, "the

sky is so big it wraps you up in blue." that's what i feel sometimes. we used to drink out of the streams and mountains and stuff. never, ever got sick. there was nothing that could poison you or kill you except maybe rattlesnakes and radioactivity. >> reporter: this is about an hour away from any grocery store. so once a week a group called the farmers of rio off fresh produce to food pantries and senior centers in the area. in each bag of food, a flyer from the tula rosa basin downwinders consortium, a group working to spread the word about health risks from the country's nuclear program in new mexico. paul pino has been working with them for six years. >> food is life. and it helps spread the word. it helps gather people. it's kind of like bait.

to give them the information. i didn't really put the pieces together until about six years ago when i saw a presentation by the tula basin downwinders consortium. in two hours it all came -- the truth just came, like, crushing into my life. my brother died of stomach cancer. my mom died of bone cancer. one of my sisters is surviving brain tumors. the other one is surviving thyroid cancer. they're all four that were alive at that time, were affected. and during those two hours of that presentation, i thought, everything just fit together all of a sudden, you know? >> reporter: pinos' family was one of many that lived near cara soso, a bustling railway hub, 35 miles from the first atomic bomb test in 1945. >> his dad witnessed the atomic bomb.

the blast. >> really? >> right here on this street. >> wow. what did he tell you about what he saw? >> well, he just -- he didn't know what was going on. then he went home and went to bed. >> did any members of your family get cancer after that? >> oh, yeah, almost all of them. four of us had kidney cancer. including me. >> including when you? >> a family of 11. >> reporter: locals describe new mexico's role in the atomic program as a cradle to grave process. the cradle, hundreds of uranium mines and mills scattered across the state. after that, the production and testing of nuclear weapons in los alamos. and then, locals say, the grave. low-level nuclear waste is still stored here in underground facilities. >> thank you! >> reporter: cancer is the second leading cause of death in the united states. although radiation exposure is a

known risk, it may be impossible to know how much radiation exposure in this community influenced a person's chances of getting cancer. >> some farmers from the rio grande brought green chimi and onions and beans and information about downwinders. please help spread the word. >> reporter: on july 16, 1945, the u.s. government detonated the first atomic bomb in what was called the trinity test. >> this is a national emergency. >> reporter: the combination of three years of manhattan project research dramatized this summer in blockbuster movie "oppenheimer." >> why would we go to the middle of nowhere for who knows how long? >> why? why? how about because this is the most important thing to ever

happen in the history of the world! >> reporter: christopher nolan's film introduced millions of viewers to the story of j. robert oppenheimer, the scientist he recruited for the project. >> they want naive scientists who just didn't think about what they were bringing into the world. they felt they had no choice. >> reporter: the film shows the team of scientists living and working for years in the new mexico desert. at the los alamos national laboratory, around 200 miles from the trinity test site -- which is here in the middle of what's now the 2.2 million-acre white sands missile range. >> the one thing we have plenty of is space. you'll even notice, if you listen, you don't hear anything. >> right. >> not even commercial airliners flying over. >> they're not allowed to fly over? >> they're not. we have controlled air space, surface to infinity. this was part of the alamo gordo

bombing range. by the time they were looking to do the trinity test, this area was under military control and u use. >> reporter: how much did the los alamos team know about the risk of radiation before the trinity test? >> not very much. >> reporter: the los alamos scientists could new radiation could do serious damage to the human body but didn't know it could cause cancer. did they do any testing before trinity to see how far the fallout would travel? >> on may 5th, they had a very large test called the 100-ton test. they had a little more than 100 tons of high explosives. they put a radioactive source in the middle of it. they believe both that test and the trinity test would have a fireball that would rapidly rise to the stratosphere and disperse harmlessly around the earth. they were very surprised to find out it did not do that. when you're close to the earth, you pull a lot of dirt up into the fireball and the fireball doesn't rise as rapidly or as high. >> reporter: despite the surprising results of the

experiment, the trinity tests kept moving ahead as planned. >> from there to july 16th, the monday where they conducted the tests, they did more and more details calculations to try to understand what they weren't getting ride. the night before they thought there would be substantial fallout. they made extensive preparations to evacuate most of the new mexico. they thought, as long as the number didn't go above 750 milliseiberts, people would be okay. we know differently today. >> reporter: under normal circumstances, we are exposed to about 6 milliseiberts of radiation per year on average. >> so you had a 100-foot-tall tower here with the gadget at the top. they had to call it the gadget because they didn't want to refer to it as a bomb in case somebody was listening in. >> inside that huge bomb was the plutonium, and that is what caused so much destruction. >> reporter: the gadget's core

was made of 13 pounds of plutonium, of which only three pounds combusted. the other ten dispersed into the atmosphere. >> an hour after the test the plume began to drift to the northeast off the white sand missile range. >> reporter: manhattan project scientists realized they had dramatically underestimated the amount of radiation. still, no civilian evacuations happened. days later, they found a family living on a ranch nearby. scientists estimated they'd been exposed to 2,000 milliseiberts of external radiation, as much as the most highly exposed person would be in hiroshima or nagasaki. they still weren't told. why didn't they warn people that lived >> per their measurements, it was safe. the other reason why is because this was one of the most secret projects that the u.s. had ever done. >> after the trinity tests, they had a cover story.

they repeatedly have said, trinity was a test conducted on unoccupied government lands. but trinity was also an accident that greatly exceeded chernobyl, fukushima, three mile island. it was the first nuclear accident in history. and the worst nuclear accident in history. >> reporter: after the break, the human cost of the bomb and how the people of new mexico are fighting back. >> imagine our shock when we found out that there had been this fund set up. we were the first people exposed to radiation any place in the world as a result of an atomic bomb. and we're left out?

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♪

i always tell people, this isn't normal cancer history, this isn't normal health histories. it's not. >> reporter: tina cordoba's family lived 40 miles from where the atomic bomb was detonated in 1945. her father was 4 years old. >> my dad started with a cancer at the base of his tongue. he didn't smoke, didn't drink. didn't use chewing tobacco. had no viruses. my dad was fastidious about himself. he got a cancer similar to the one robert oppenheimer had, but my dad didn't chain smoke and never drank a martini. i have thyroid cancer. the really horrific thing in my family is we don't ask if we're going to get cancer, we ask when it's going to be our turn. >> reporter: in 2005 she helped cofound the tula rosa downwinders consortium. >> about two years in our work we found out about the radiation compensation exposure act.

>> reporter: the government has listed 19 different cancers associated with high-dose radiation. since 1990, the radiation exposure compensation act, reca, has been paying out lump sums to people who have gotten radiogenic cancer and can tie it to nuclear testing covering people who worked in uranium mines before 1971, when the u.s. government stopped being the major purchaser of uranium. it covers residents of so-called downwinder communities in nevada, utah, and arizona. but it doesn't include new mexico. >> imagine our shock when we found out that there had been this fund set up. we were the first people exposed to radiation any place in the world as a result of an atomic bomb. and we're left out? >> reporter: is that the obstacle, money? >> that's the obstacle they place in front of us, money. they counted on us to be uneducated, unsophisticated, unable to stand up for ourselves. we're not those people anymore. we know what we know.

the fund has paid out $2.5 billion over 30 years. our government spent trillions of dollars developing and testing nuclear devices in the american west. now they want to count pennies? >> reporter: for the last few years, the group has been collecting health surveys from people in the area. >> we lived 18 miles from where the nuclear test was. my father, my mother both died of cancer. all our cows. their backs turned white. >> reporter: census data show over 500,000 people lived within a 150-mile radius of the trinity test site. it's impossible to know how many of them were affected. in the mountains above tula rosa is the apache reservation where he grew up. >> there are other apache tibal members that have had cancer that is unexplainable, but i think partly because of the culture, the mores of the tribe, it's not looked into like it should be.

>> reporter: beloved language preservationist dies? >> there were three distinct dialects of apache and my father was trying to preserve those dialects. >> when your father passed from cancer, did you have any idea where it came from? >> no. >> reporter: your mother did also? >> it was devastating. my dad was my idol. he was very quiet, a very soft-spoken man. he would stand his ground. he would mean business. and i firmly believed he was going to walk out, you know. >> reporter: both your parents were children during the time of the trinity test? >> yes. i think everything that was happening during that time was blown in this direction. alma gordo, tula rosa, and up. i was in the u.s. army. and i loved every minute of it. and i've tried to have faith in our government. anything that they do. but it is disheartening when you

learn of something like this. >> reporter: what makes this different from the nevada test site downwinders? >> we're primarily hispanic and native american. and they are not. >> reporter: bernese gutierrez has been working with tina cordova and the consortium for years. she says she believes they were left out initially because of environmental racism. >> the nevada test site downwinders were given compensation based on assumption. it was assumed that they were exposed, and that's why they got compensation. they've asked us to prove it. how do we know it was true? but there's no way on god's earth that we can explain all the cancers that we've had any other way. >> reporter: without government assistance, residents like gutierrez have been left to do the digging. you've done a lot of research on infant mortality during that time. what have you found? >> i got online, and i checked every death certificate for

every county that existed in 1945 in new mexico. many, many, many babies died. and a lot of the deaths could be related to the atmosphere, the radiation exposure. morassmus, enteritis, congenital deformities -- those are things that could very easily be related. >> reporter: the 1945 uptick in deaths shows clearly on this 1965 cdc report on infant mortality. but with current information, it's impossible to clearly link it to radiation exposure. gutierrez herself was among those potentially exposed babies. >> i was 8 days old. 8 days old. there was no reason to suspect that the government was lying to us. they said it was an ammunition dump explosion. and that's what came out in the newspaper. but it wasn't until later when my family started getting cancer that i started wondering about

that. >> reporter: altogether, 41 members of her family across five generations have gotten the disease. >> the government never came back, to our knowledge, and did any water testing or soil testing, nothing. and now people on their own are coming and doing these things and finding out, 78 years later, what should have been done then. >> reporter: this summer, though, it seemed like the downwinders were finally gaining some momentum. in july 2023, the senate passed an expansion of reca as an amendment to the defense spending bill which would cover new mexico's downwinders. but it still hasn't been proposed in the house. so this fall, gutierrez along with cordova and other members of the consortium travelled to washington, d.c. to advocate for themselves. >> so i'm not an elected official, but the people of new mexico have joined with me and sent me here to be a voice for them.

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♪ what would justice look like for you? >> we just need for them to finally give us our due. you know, martin luther king once said, justice delayed is justice denied. and i feel that that's what has been done to us. been denied. to the next. did they even send my lab work...? wait, was i supposed to bring that?