Oppenheimer's other victims

 they are releasing a movie about Oppenheimer. 

well, that story of developing the atomic bomb is one of the dark secrets of World War II. 

Harry Truman did not recognize the dangers of radiation and saw the Atomic bomb as just a big bomb, just more efficient in destroying Japanese cities than the fire bombings that killed tens of thousands in Tokyo (and Hamburg and Dresden). 

considering the horrors of Japanese atrocities in World War II and willingness of the Japanese government to insist civilians die rather than surrender, as happened in Saipan such willingness to kill civilians is in bombings rather than have a lot more civilians be killed in an invasion is understandable.

 most American soldiers and sailors facing death in an invasion such as some of my cousins thought correctly that the bomb saved their lives.

The real question is not that the US used a dangerous weapon (they didn't appreciate the dangers of radiation so were willing to do such things), but why the US insisted on unconditional surrender of Japan.

But one of the side issues in Oppenheimer saga will probably be ignored in the film that sees him as a hero persecuted for his leftist sympathies: a typical case of loving mankind but being blind to the ordinary folk affected by your actions.

he and the other scientists who were aware of the problems of radiation exposure causing disease failed to warn those who might be affeced.     And this callus disregard of civilians near atomic test sites continued long after the dangers of fallout were known.

You know, we once lives near Trinity site in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was tested.

Trinity site is only open one day a year, so no although we passed by we never visited the site (not even the gift shop near the turn off road to the site).

But we did see a lot of cancers in our Apache patients that made us wonder if some of these cancers had been induced by radiation when they were children.

LATimes article about this 

“They’ll never reflect on the fact that New Mexicans gave their lives. They did the dirtiest of jobs. They invaded our lives and our lands and then they left,” said Tina  Cordova, survivor and founder of a group of New Mexico downwinders, said of the scientists and military officials who established a secret city in Los Alamos during the 1940s and tested their work at the Trinity Site   some 200 miles away.

Cordova’s group, the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, has been working with the Union of Concerned Scientists and others for years to bring attention to what the Manhattan Project did to people in New Mexico.

this video is from 7 years ago:

other areas were also damaged by radition, of course. One of the most notorious sites with a cancer cluster was St George Utah, which had a high cancer rate, and is notorious in Hollywood history because they filmed Ghengis Khan there, and later many of the people who worked on the film, including John Wayne, developed cancer.

this report of what happened is from the UKGuardian:

This is a story about cancer. About how the United States turned swathes of the desert radioactive during the cold war and denied it, bequeathing a medical mystery which to this day haunts Hollywood and rural Mormon communities and raises a thorny question: how much should you trust the government?

 sigh.

But one lesson the government did not learn is tht you can't coverup the distortion of truth forever: be it civilians dying of cancer from atomic bomb tests or the suspicion that the government is using of a covid epidemic to push the schemes of those in power.