A Public Service of Santa Fe Community College
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

KSFR's 'Trinity at 75' Series Wins Award For Broadcast Excellence

July 16, 1945 5:29:45 a.m. | Trinity Site, Alamogordo Test Range, Jornada del Muerto desert | Yield: 19 - 21 Kilotons

It’s award season for journalists, and KSFR is happy to announce that our very own Dennis Carroll has won an award from the New Mexico Broadcast Association for his “Trinity at 75” series.  

At first celebrated as the destruction of the Japanese war machine and the end of World War II, more than 75 years later attitudes toward the July 16, 1945 detonation of the Trinity test have slowly, sometimes agonizingly so, changed. Some now see the test as a surprise nuclear attack on the citizens of New Mexico, others have come to regard it as the world’s first and worst nuclear accident. 

In KSFR’s “Trinity at 75” series, we hear the accounts of citizens who say they suffered same-day injuries from the detonation, countering official versions that no residents were hurt. 

We also hear from nuclear scientists, experts well-versed on the details of the detonation, and their accounts of bad science and false narrations that together with witness accounts lay out what appears to be the true story behind decades of illnesses and deaths apparently caused by radioactive fallout from the Trinity test. 

The series goes at length to follow victims’ and their advocates’ years’-long struggle for a modicum of acknowledgement and compensation from a federal government they feel has abandoned them. 

If you haven’t had the chance to listen, check out the 3 part series that dives headfirst into the legacy the world’s first successful nuclear detonation left behind.

Related Content