How nuclear power became this New Mexico journalist's family origin myth

Ty Bannerman is entrenched in New Mexico. He’s a longtime journalist and writer there who hosts KUNM’s “Let’s Talk New Mexico.” But his roots in the state are tied up in a fraught history.

His family moved to Los Alamos in 1952 to build nuclear bombs. His grandparents were part of the government’s secretive Manhattan Project, led by J. Robert Oppenheimer. There, they build the world’s first nuclear weapons.

In his new memoir, Nuclear Family: A Memoir of the Atomic West, he explores how nuclear power has become his family’s origin myth.

The Show spoke with him more about it — beginning with his grandparents, who were recruited from City College of Los Angeles to work in that remote desert town.

Full conversation

TY BANNERMAN: The Manhattan Project took place at multiple locations throughout the United States, but the concentration of the theoretical science and the actual, like, final construction of the Trinity device, that all took place in Los Alamos.

And that was a former boys ranch where Easterners sent their oftentimes kind of sickly children. And one of the one of the children who got sent out there was Robert Oppenheimer. And when it came time to try to find a remote place, to start really delving into this science in a very like controlled environment. He had these incredibly fond memories of of his time at the Boys Ranch.

And so he said, let's go to Los Alamos, and they went there and they took it all over and they established this basically a secret town in the right in the middle of New Mexico. No one was getting in or out without a lot of oversight.

LAUREN GILGER: Tell us about one particular incident in the summer of 1945. You write about where Ash, I think the quote is, fell like snow on a summer day, right? This is, I think, telling of what things were probably like at the time.

BANNERMAN: Right. So that is the aftermath of the Trinity detonation. Early in the morning on, I think it's July 16, 1945, they detonated the device, and it was the first manmade nuclear explosion in history.

They were following it. It was like this literal cloud. And, you know, it's it's raining ash and stuff down. They're going behind it, you know, not getting in the ash themselves, but kind of seeing where the where the radiation hotspots are hitting. And they come to this canyon and it's the most radioactive spot that they've gone to. And they decide that it's not safe for them to go in there.

The next morning, things have settled down a little bit and they return and they find this family, the Ratliffs, a, you know, older homesteading couple and their grandson out there. And yes, ash has fallen on the on the site. It looks like snow. It's singed the coats of some of the animals.

And the Ratliffs have no idea what's going on. And the Los Alamos scientist wasn't allowed to tell them exactly what happened. So he went and he kind of gave them a once over telling him that, you know, it was all some secret. And he saw that there were no visible sores or anything on their bodies, which is a result of acute radiation poisoning.

So he figured it was all good since they didn't have any obvious signs of burns. And so they they he left that day. They came back and checked a few times over the next couple of years, but they didn't see any of the short-term effects of radiation.

GILGER: Right.

BANNERMAN: The problem is that one of the other effects of radiation, the long-term effects, are a lot harder to depend on. It's called stochastic poisoning. And it basically increases your chances for cancer. And they did not follow up with the Ratliffs to determine what those long term effects might have been on them and their family. And they wound up moving and we don't exactly know what happened to them.

But I just think that's a really fascinating story of that kind of it kind of tells you like both there's almost this sort of devil may care attitude toward radiation at that point and a lack of understanding for exactly how things are going to play out in the long term.

GILGER: Yeah, absolutely. And those kind of long-term implications, health implications of radiation have also played out in your family, which, you know, has seen generations of Bannermans working inside nuclear weapons programs. Like this hit you personally as well when you were very young, right?

BANNERMAN: Yeah, when I was 31 years old, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. I mean, the thing is, it's impossible to draw a one-to-one connection. You can't say, well, this was because I lived in Los Alamos the first four years of my life, or there were x-rays that were taken on me. Like, you cannot draw that connection specifically.

But again, I think that is certainly emblematic of the kind of effects that the nuclear defense industry has had on the world overall. Like, a lot of people face higher chances for cancer. Even if you can't say it's necessarily because of radiation in a certain place, you can say, well, it certainly increased your odds.

GILGER: Let me ask you lastly, Ty, about, I guess, the legacy you see here as you wrote this book and tried to kind of track your family's history in this way.

I mean, you say that nuclear power is like your family's origin story, this this place, right? And that's quite a quite a place to be pinned down to. You almost refer to it as a type of religion for your family. How has it shaped you and and your family more broadly, you think?

BANNERMAN: Well, you know, you're talking about it being religious in a way. My father grew up in Los Alamos. He had this, in many ways, at least externally, an idyllic childhood of playing in the Piney Woods in the Jemez Mountains. And, you know, just having this perfect, like it's like the government's idea of the perfect town back in the '60. So it's very like "Leave it to Beaver" almost, except everybody's father is working towards creating these horrific weapons.

When he became an adult, he sort of had this idea that he would just be able to kind of slide into a position at Los Alamos, much like his father. He studied physics, but things had changed. And so instead, he wound up moving the family to Houston, Texas, where he worked first for Xerox and then for a copy repair company.

And I think that he had felt a lot like he had been kind of, you know, back to this religious idea, cast out of the garden. You know, this I think it was extremely frustrating and disappointing to him. And I think he just kind of felt like he never really got his place in the world as a result.

And then I, as a child, kind of took a lot of that on as well, this idea that we were in the wrong place. And I did everything I could once I graduated high school to to come out here to New Mexico. And I went to the university here.

And at that point, that's when my kind of idealized view of Los Alamos began to kind of get eroded. And you really see that, you know, there are a lot of complicated things, complicated problems with with Los Alamos and its role in New Mexico.

And, you know, the kinds of people who live there, they are, you know, families like everyone else with this added aspect of, you know, working on this extremely cutting-edge science, most of it with military applications, and most of it oftentimes feared as potentially bringing about the end of our civilization.

GILGER: That's really interesting. So, I mean, you going back, right, and now writing this book and spending your life there, raising your own children in New Mexico.

Does that feel like a reclaiming to you, like a coming home?

BANNERMAN: You know, it really does. You know, I never moved back to Los Alamos. It's just not the kind of place that really has a place for me.

I live in Albuquerque now, and I've fallen in love with this city. And I find that this has turned into my place. And I try to live my life in a way that's kind of acknowledging the realities of the history of different kinds of colonialism in New Mexico, through reporting and storytelling, addressing those things through my own, through my own perception.