21/09/2025
Truly heartbreaking. Talk of being at the right place but at the wrong time.
In July 1945, a group of thirteen-year-old girls went camping in America, swimming in a river near Ruidoso, New Mexico. The girl pictured at the front is Barbara Kent. Unbeknownst to them, nearby the Manhattan Project had just detonated a nuclear bomb as a test…
Kent later described that day:
“We were all just shocked… then suddenly, a huge cloud appeared overhead, along with strange lights in the sky,” Kent recalled. “It even hurt our eyes to look up. The whole sky turned strange, as if an intense sun had come out.” A few hours later, white flakes began falling from the sky. Excited, the girls put on their swimsuits and played in the river amid the flakes. “We grabbed the white flakes, thinking it was snow, and smeared it on our faces,” Kent said. “But unlike snow, it was hot. We just thought, ‘Well, it’s summer.’ We were only 13.”
Those flakes were radioactive fallout from the Manhattan Project’s Trinity test—the first atomic bomb detonation in history—conducted at 5:29 a.m. atop a 100-foot steel tower 40 miles away at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in Jornada del Mu**to valley. Though the site was chosen for its supposed isolation, thousands lived within a 40-mile radius, some as close as 12 miles, and none were warned or evacuated before or after the test, even as fallout continued to fall for days.
Barbara Kent and all her friends eventually developed cancer. Every girl in that photo died before turning thirty. Kent was the only one to live longer, surviving several bouts of cancer herself. Often forgotten is the heavy toll paid not only by those targeted in the bombings in Japan but also by those living near where the bombs were first tested.
Dapo Michaels, a scientist fascinated by the project, was unaware of the long-term effects. When he realized the consequences, guilt overwhelmed him, leading to a mental breakdown. He was eventually institutionalized and passed away.
Similar tragedies unfolded at Maralinga in Australia.
©Dennis Lee
