They were twelve girls, about 13 years old, at a tap-dancing and ballet camp near Ruidoso, New Mexico.
At 5:29 in the morning on July 16, 1945, about 64 kilometers away, in the Jornada del Muerto valley, the United States detonated The Gadget, a plutonium implosion device placed atop a tower. It was the first atomic explosion in history, and none of them knew it.
Hours later, white flakes began to fall over the desert. The girls put on their swimsuits and went out to play in a nearby river. They rubbed the snow over their faces and bodies, laughing at an impossible detail: the flakes were warm. It wasn’t snow. It was radioactive fallout from the explosion.
Of those twelve girls, only two lived past the age of 40. The others died earlier, from various types of cancer or other diseases. Nothing, on its own, proves that the cause was that afternoon of play. But the contrast still sends a chill: the laughter of girls beneath a summer snowfall, and the first atomic bomb falling silently on their shoulders.