A Deadly Experiment! Heartbreaking!
The smiling teenage girls you see in the picture could never have imagined their tragic fate.
The time was July 1945. A group of 13-year-old friends went camping in New Mexico, USA. The girl in the front of the photo was named Barbara Kent.
They had no idea that just 40 miles away, scientists working on the Manhattan Project had carried out the world’s first atomic bomb detonation. Barbara later recalled, “Suddenly, we saw an intense flash in the sky followed by a massive column of cloud. A short while later, white particles began to fall from the sky.”
Overjoyed, they thought it was snow, playing with it and even rubbing it on their faces. But the particles were not cold—they were warm. They assumed it was because it was summer.
In reality, those particles were deadly radioactive ash from the Trinity Test explosion. Neither before nor after the detonation were the thousands of innocent people in the surrounding areas warned or evacuated.
The consequences were devastating. Barbara Kent and all her friends developed cancer. Every girl in that photo died before reaching the age of 30. Only Barbara survived longer, battling cancer for many years.
The horrors of the atomic bomb were not confined to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
Due to such tests, countless citizens of the United States itself suffered. Western nations, including America, rarely speak of the damage inflicted on their own people.
In Maralinga, Australia, nuclear testing caused the deaths of many Indigenous people from cancer. France also conducted multiple nuclear tests in its colonial territories in Africa, killing large numbers of local residents. Much of this history remains unknown to many.