Tag: Bikini atoll

Just 70 years ago, on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated at the Alamogordo Nuclear Site in New Mexico. Trinity was the name chosen by J. Robert Oppenheimer, who later recalled that the explosion had reminded him of a line from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The terrifying destructive power of atomic weapons was to haunt many of the Manhattan Project scientists for the remainder of their lives.

Due to San Francisco’s housing crunch, Treasure Island became a repository for low-income families and people at risk of homelessness. Consequently, the Navy’s ad nauseam public reassurances to largely poor and people of color at Treasure Island that no dangerous levels of radioactivity now exist imparts a suspicious race and class taint to its minimizations and denials.