All the girls in that photo got cancer.

 

Very, very sad. In July 1945, a group of 13-year-old girls went camping in the United States. They swam in a river in Ruidoso, New Mexico. The girl in the front of the photo is named Barbara Kent. What none of the girls knew was that nearby, the American military was testing a nuclear bomb as part of the Manhattan Project.

Barbara later spoke about what happened that day:

"We were all shocked... then, suddenly, a large cloud appeared above us and strange lights in the sky," she recalled. "It even hurt our eyes to look up. The whole sky looked strange, as if the sun had suddenly appeared, but very bright."

A few hours later, white flakes began to fall from the sky. The girls were excited. They thought it was snow. They put on their swimsuits and went back to the river to play. "We grabbed that white stuff and put it on our faces," said Barbara. "But instead of being cold like snow, it was warm. We thought it was warm because it was summer. We were only 13 years old."

But those flakes were radioactive dust—remnants of the nuclear bomb test. It exploded at 5:29 a.m. atop a 30-meter tower, about 65 kilometers away, in the Jornada del Muerto valley. The location was chosen because people thought it was far from where anyone lived. But thousands of people actually lived nearby—some as little as 19 kilometers away. No one warned them. No one was instructed to leave before or after the test, even though the radioactive fallout continued for days.

All the girls in that photo got cancer. They all died before the age of 30, except Barbara. She lived longer, but she also got cancer more than once. People often remember the horrific effects of the bombs dropped on Japan, but many forget what it cost those who lived near the first tests in the US.

One man, Dapo Michaels, was fascinated by science and worked on the project. He didn't grasp the full impact at the time. But when he did, it haunted him. He felt deep guilt and couldn't forgive himself. He became mentally ill and had to live in a hospital. He died there a few years later.

The same thing happened in Maralinga, Australia. Many Aboriginal people likely died of cancer caused by nuclear testing, but no one recorded it, and we may never know how many there were.