Even though the Trinity bomb detonated 200 miles to the south, Albuquerque has always been a nuclear town — first silently, then unmistakably. The city’s ties to the U.S. nuclear complex date back to World War II, when the Army chose New Mexico’s deserts as a site for testing and developing bombs. After the war, Sandia National Laboratories grew out of the engineering branch of the Manhattan Project. Built next to Kirtland Air Force Base, it became one of the nation’s key weapons campuses. Since the early Cold War, Sandia has been responsible for the engineering and integration of every nuclear warhead in the U.S. arsenal.
However, this legacy of scientific advancement has come at a human cost. The July 16, 1945 test of the world’s first atomic bomb — the Trinity test — generated radioactive fallout that spread well outside the Tularosa Basin in which it occurred. Albuquerque wasn’t “ground zero,’’ but it was still within the “dust footprint,” the area exposed to radioactive material from the atmosphere. For decades, the federal government denied that New Mexicans had suffered any harm from the blast. No health studies were conducted. Residents were not warned. No compensation was offered.
“At first, I thought, once the government knows about this, they’re going to come back and take care of us,” said Tina Cordova, the co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. “But we were really naive.”
A cancer survivor and fourth-generation New Mexican, Cordova has spent the past two decades organizing survivors and advocating for legislation to expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). RECA, passed in 1990, offers meager compensation to uranium and atomic workers for diseases developed from potential radiation exposure. But this policy left out the majority of New Mexicans, despite the Trinity test occurring inside the state. This exclusion is now a rallying point for a new generation of organizers, especially in Albuquerque, where the bomb’s legacy is interwoven into the shape of the city.
It was money from the federal government, allocated for defense work, that radically transformed Albuquerque after World War II. In 1940, the city’s population was 35,000. By 1960, that number had risen to over 200,000. There was nothing coincidental about the expansion: it followed the construction of Sandia Labs as the Kirtland base was growing. High-paying engineering and defense jobs drew families to the desert.
By 1970, Albuquerque boasted the highest number of PhDs per capita in the country — a fact that was often touted as evidence of the city’s success. But it also revealed something deeper: Albuquerque’s profound connection to the manufacturing of nuclear weapons which the city’s physical growth reflected. Whole neighborhoods sprang up to service the labs and the base, with housing developments fanning eastward into the desert. White, wealthier workers settled closer to Sandia, while redlining concentrated working class and Hispanic residents to the city’s center and the South Valley. Many employees of color at the lab had worked in security, janitorial services, or waste disposal — jobs that are often neglected and involved greater radioactive exposure. The fallout wasn’t solely radioactive. It was economic, geographic, and generational.
Despite the wealth being generated by Sandia, the city was far from economically secure. The Albuquerque economy was — and remains — dependent on a single industry that could not be publicly or politically challenged. Today, Sandia has over 14,000 employees, and Kirtland remains one of the nation’s largest military installations. Billions of dollars flow from these institutions into the local economy. But this dependency comes with consequences. The same infrastructure that sustains Albuquerque’s economy constrains its future. Public investment is channeled to the military rather than issues such as community health. A transient, security-cleared workforce continues to exert pressure on the housing market. Children are still guided on paths to work for Sandia — but not learning about what transpired at the Tularosa Basin in 1945, or in the subsequent years.
Many concerns surround Albuquerque’s economic dependence on the nuclear weapons industry. It is a commonly held belief that disarmament is conceivable only when alternative industries — such as renewable energy, health, education — are fully funded and community controlled. Otherwise, the nuclear economy keeps places like Albuquerque bound to a system of high-risk labor, lack of accountability, and quiet complicity.
For decades, Albuquerque’s political leadership was silent about the city’s atomic entanglements. That changed in March 2024, when the city council unanimously passed a resolution urging the federal government to extend RECA to cover downwinders in all of New Mexico instead of in specific areas. The resolution, drafted by Councilor Tammy Fiebelkorn, was historic for local governments. “Everybody in New Mexico is a downwinder,” said Fiebelkorn.
The bill aligns Albuquerque with the Back from the Brink campaign — a national campaign urging local governments to support nuclear disarmament. But symbolism is not enough for many of these organizers. They want novel legislation for reformed infrastructure and reparations. In the months following the resolution’s passage, Albuquerque experienced a more broad cognizance of Sandia’s detrimental impacts and a resurgence of anti-nuclear organizing.
With the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test taking place this past year, New Mexicans are hopeful for what might yet emerge from its aftermath.