Anniversary of the Trinity Test
On 23 July 2025, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF) and its youth initiative Reverse the Trend (RTT) hosted a virtual event titled "The Trinity Test: Dawn of the Nuclear Age and Its Enduring Global Implications," honoring the 80th anniversary of the first atomic bomb test conducted in New Mexico. This event, moderated by Policy and Advocacy Director Christian Ciobanu, highlighted the intergenerational toll of nuclear weapons testing, the lived experiences of frontline communities, and the urgent need for global disarmament, justice, and environmental remediation. Speakers included: Mary Dickson, Writer and Downwinder from Utah; Esther Yazzie-Lewis, Diné Elder and Co-Author of The Navajo People and Uranium Mining; Susan Gordon, Coordinator of the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment (MASE); Dr. Ivana Nikolić Hughes, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Senior Lecturer at Columbia University; and Anderson Peck, Youth Activist with NAPF and its youth initiative, RTT.
Ciobanu opened the event, echoing the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), that before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. bombed its own people—testing the same plutonium bomb design on communities in New Mexico during the Trinity Test.
Mary Dickson followed with a powerful statement by explaining, “Trinity unleashed the Nuclear Age, an age from which humanity has never recovered.” Growing up in Salt Lake City, she was unknowingly exposed to radioactive fallout from U.S. nuclear tests, having been provided inadequate warning and guidance. “We drank milk delivered to our doorstep… How were we to know a silent poison was threading through our bodies?”
Having grown up in a neighborhood where 54 people developed cancer, tumors, or autoimmune disorders, as well as having her own thyroid cancer diagnosis in her 20s, Dickson has dedicated her life to advocating for justice for radiation-exposed communities. “If we died immediately, it would have been a national catastrophe. Instead, we became invisible.” She emphasized the deep, generational trauma of nuclear testing and urged global accountability: “if we’ve learned anything, it’s this: we all live downwind.”
Esther Yazzie-Lewis of the Navajo First Nation delivered a powerful reflection connecting the 1945 Trinity Test to decades of radioactive harm on Indigenous lands. She explored the hypocrisy of the U.S., benefitting from nuclear testing while passing on the heavy costs to indigenous communities. “We live in a rich country,” she said, “and yet we’re still hauling our water and hauling our wood.” She described uranium mining’s lasting toll—on the land, the water, and Navajo families, including her own brother who worked in the mines.
Critiquing the origins of the Navajo Nation’s tribal government, she asserted, “It wasn’t for us—it was for the development of the corporate world to make money.” On the 80th anniversary, Yazzie-Lewis called for a full reckoning, both political and moral, of the cost of nuclear weapons. She urged the U.S. to acknowledge the people it sacrificed within its own borders to achieve atomic power and military dominance.
Sharing her dismay with the current institutions, Yazzie-Lewis declared, “our government people [tribal government] and the people that regulate the laws and policies are not going to be there to help us. We have to do it ourselves, for our own selves, for our families and our communities. Yet in the midst of this bleak picture, Yazzie-Lewis concluded her segment with a statement of hope amidst an era of growing turmoil. She praised the number and diversity of youth who attended the session and called upon them to carry the struggle forward despite these injustices: “Forge ahead, you young people… Learn their strategies. This grid will fall—return to your roots, your land, and your knowledge to survive what comes next.”
Following Yazzie-Lewis’ remarks, Susan Gordon of MASE, explained in detail the nuclear legacy of uranium mining in Western states. Gordon highlighted the often forgotten radiation exposure to Navajo communities—a result of uranium mines that endangered already established indigenous communities— and also called attention to the 1979 Church Rock Uranium Mill spill, which remains the largest release of radioactive waste by volume in U.S. history.
Happening just three months after the Three Mile Island Accident—a partial nuclear meltdown in Pennsylvania—Gordon noted how the nuclear power industry made efforts to downplay and ignore the impact of the Church Rock Spill. Gordon explained,“I think this happened for two reasons, one, they wanted to promote nuclear power as safe, two accidents that close together would have been problematic. Second, this happened on the Navajo land, land belonging to people of color.”
Sharing with the audience a quote from Edith Hood, President of the Red Water Pond Road Community Association, Gordon recounted, “We have waited far longer than other communities in the U.S. for this poison to be cleaned up. When is it our turn to feel safe? How many more generations have to wait?”
Gordon concluded her remarks by detailing numerous Trump Administration Executive Orders that would increase the risk of uranium exposure by fast-tracking environmental assessment and federal approval—a process that typically could take up to years—to instead take around 20 days without tribal and public input.
Dr. Ivana Nikolić Hughes of NAPF stressed the uniquely devastating nature of nuclear weapons. “The stories you’ve heard are part of a larger tapestry of suffering,” she said, tracing the global spread of nuclear testing from Trinity to the Marshall Islands, where the local Marshallese community members were told to relocate “for the good of all mankind,” Hughes recalled how, just months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear detonations resumed, while the United Nations simultaneously called for complete disarmament.
Hughes went on to explain the current threat that nuclear weapons posed. Today, she warned, over 12,000 nuclear weapons remain—many far more powerful than those used in 1945. “Even a limited nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan could starve billions,” she noted. Hughes emphasized that abolition, not mere reduction, is essential. “We must eliminate, abolish, and prohibit nuclear weapons—before they eliminate us.”
Providing the youth perspective on the Trinity test, Anderson Peck of NAPF and its youth initiative, RTT, explained that the 80th anniversary of the 1945 Trinity explosion as the beginning of the Nuclear Age was the “beginning of a protracted legacy of nuclear injustice.” “How can a country that prides itself on justice ignore the suffering of its own people,” he asked. Amid deepening geopolitical tensions and fragile ceasefire arrangements, Peck called on young people to position themselves as a resource and “denounce the present-nuclear related escalation”.
In preparing for the event, he created an Instagram poll on his personal account asking whether anyone had heard of the Trinity explosion. Nearly 70 percent of respondents, most of them between 18 and 20 years old, indicated they had never heard of Trinity. Peck expressed his concern over such a finding, stating, “too many young people remain unaware of the event which ushered the world into the nuclear age.” Referencing UN Secretary-General Guetteres, Peck closed by expressing the urgency of the present moment: “The 80th anniversary of Trinity gives us an occasion for a much-needed raising of awareness.”
As the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test prompts reflection, voices from frontline communities, scientists, and youth urge a reckoning with nuclear injustice. Their message is clear: remembrance must lead to action. A safer, more just future demands abolition—not only of nuclear weapons, but of the systems that sustain them.