As the annual Academy Awards prepares to honor a movie on the life of physicist Robert Oppenheimer, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) hopes people who run the Hollywood movie business might also focus some attention on radiation victims from the Manhattan Project’s nuclear testing program.
“The Oppenheimer film tells a compelling story of these test programs,” Hawley said in a Jan. 26 letter to governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “But it does not tell the story of the Americans left behind—still reckoning with the health and financial consequences of America’s nuclear research, after all these years.”
Hawley has been at the forefront of a bipartisan effort to reauthorize the Radiation Exposure Compensation Program but was unsuccessful last year in attaching it to the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.
Last week the academy announced its annual Oscar nominations and the film “Oppenheimer” received the most nominations, with 13 in a variety of categories. During the World War 2 era Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was director of what is today the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
“Across the nation, thousands of Americans currently suffer from cancer and other debilitating medical conditions, brought on by long-term radiation exposure. In places like my home state of Missouri, the radioactive waste of the Manhattan Project was never fully cleaned up,” Hawley said in the letter.
