To acknowledge the recent world-wide Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, we will fly a banner at the entrance to Trinity Site on Highway 380 in New Mexico on Thursday January 21^nd, 2021 at 9:30am.  We will then proceed to the town of Chupadera and display the banner there. We will upload photos. 

I am Paul Pino, a New Mexico Downwinder, raised 33 miles from the world’s first nuclear bomb explosion at the Trinity site on July 16, 1945.   Victor Padilla will be on hand and his family is from Chupadera.  The radiation from that bomb went around the world.   The government calculated that some New Mexicans received 10,000 times the allowable amount of radiation. That was 75 years ago and the government has neglected to provide any medical care or death benefits for the resultant casualties.   Half of my family has been affected by cancer or tumors.  Two have died and two have thus far survived.  It is no wonder New Mexico is poverty stricken.   Nothing is more expensive than health care.  Not only were we exposed to fallout from the Trinity test, but we were also exposed to fallout from the aboveground nuclear weapons tests in Nevada.

If the federal government cannot be trusted to help their own citizens whom they have harmed by fallout from nuclear bombs, tell me why the federal government should be trusted to create more nuclear bombs,,, tell me how they can be trusted to safely bury nuclear waste in our midst?  In my estimation this is all a “bombs for profit” scheme parading as national defense.   For instance, a company I never heard of before, Huntington Ingalls Industries, reportedly makes $28,870,000  building bombs, and then millions more are spent dismantling those same bombs a few years later, over and over, with no agreed upon location for safe disposal of the wastes generated. What a deal. We do need to defend ourselves against all enemies but any fool can see we do not need 1,200 nuclear missiles in order to do that.  Imagine the benefit of utilizing that tax money coupled with all the knowledge in Los Alamos and Sandia Labs to fight cancer instead.   

Let’s ask our elected federal Senators and Representatives to re-direct tax money away from nuclear weapons and toward improving the health of its citizens impacted by cancer and overexposure to radiation.