For most Americans, nuclear weapons live in the abstract: Cold War history, distant threats, geopolitical chess pieces. But for New Mexicans, the legacy of the atomic age is not theoretical, it’s lived, inherited, and ongoing. In this episode of Everyday Ambassador, we speak with Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, about the deep and often invisible impacts that eight decades of nuclear development have had on the state and its people.

Coghlan has spent 30 years working on nuclear policy. The conversation moves from the early days of the Manhattan Project to present-day policy debates, from the lived trauma of uranium miners to the moral and strategic contradictions of modern nuclear modernization.

Coghlan begins where the modern nuclear era began: Los Alamos and the Trinity Test of 1945. He recounts how New Mexican communities, Indigenous, Hispanic, rural, became unwitting subjects of the world’s first atomic experiment. Downwinders, ranching families, the Mescalero Apache, and displaced homesteaders were all affected, yet ignored for generations. Compensation, where granted at all, came far too late and in far too small a measure.

If the Trinity Test was the first wound, uranium mining was the second. Coghlan details the concentration of uranium extraction on Native lands, particularly the Navajo Nation and Laguna Pueblo, and the long-term health consequences for miners who were misinformed, unprotected, and ultimately abandoned.

Hundreds of mines remain open and unremediated, continuing to contaminate water, soil, livestock, and communities. This environmental injustice forms the structural backdrop to New Mexico’s status today as what Coghlan bluntly calls “America’s nuclear weapons colony.”

Conghlan strongly criticizes President Trump’s recently floated idea of resuming nuclear weapons testing. From a national security standpoint, Coghlan argues, testing is self-defeating: it would help rival nations “catch up” with U.S. capabilities.

Coghlan draws a distinction between minimal deterrence, which requires a small arsenal, and counterforce, which requires thousands of weapons designed for war fighting. Despite public rhetoric focused on deterrence, he explains, U.S. policy continues to embrace counterforce planning.

As the strategic landscape shifts from a bipolar world to a multipolar one involving Russia, China, and new technologies like hypersonics and AI, Coghlan warns of escalating risks. Coghlan also describes how he forged a partnership with Archbishop John Wester, a leading moral voice on nuclear disarmament. Coghlan tells the story with humor and candor, reflecting on how secular activism and religious leadership can meet in a shared mission: protecting life. Their work together reframes nuclear disarmament as a challenge to ideological boundaries and partisan assumptions.

Episode Timestamps

00:00 — Introduction: New Mexico at the center of nuclear history01:17 — Displacement and the forced removal of Hispanic homesteaders04:55 — Lawsuits, cleanup, transparency, and the politics of accountability08:03 — The modernization program and the Non-Proliferation Treaty10:12 — Uranium vs. plutonium weapons and how modern bombs work16:51 — The risks of new weapon designs and the push for production22:27 — Should we worry about resumed testing? Short-term vs long-term risks24:19 — Why testing is dangerous: fallout, cancer, global deposition26:49 — Underground tests and venting; why testing still poses risks30:15 — Deterrence, counterforce, and the modern nuclear arms race33:40 — AI, escalation risks, and the importance of human judgment36:52 — Proposals to hand weapons-grade plutonium to private entities41:01 — Nuclear winter and the pro-life framing of disarmament

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