What would happen if a wildfire consumed Los Alamos National Laboratory? Over the last 25 years, LANL has narrowly escaped two major wildfire events. On a warming planet, it may be only a matter of time until the lab's luck runs out, and its almost 30,000 acres of plutonium pit facilities, nuclear waste storage, contaminated canyons, and explosives caches are turned into an atomic incinerator.

You've seen how far wildfire smoke can go, right? 

On this episode of Time Zero, you'll also learn about the radioactive lanthanum (RaLa) experiments, where, prior to the 1945 Trinity event, lab employees detonated dozens of nuclear weapons in the canyons of the Pajarito Plateau—canyons that drain into the Rio Grande. 

You'll meet sculptor Rose B Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo); contemporary saint maker Nicholas Herrera, AKA El Rito Santero; Taos-based ceramicist Serit Inez Kotowski de Lopaz; and artist and educator Nina Elder. Returning voices you'll recognize include scholar Dr. Myrriah Gómez (Nuclear Nuevo México, 2022); longtime activist Joni Arends (Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety); choreographer Yvonne Montoya (Safos Dance); anthropologist Joseph Masco (The Nuclear Borderlands, 2006); and landscape researcher Matthew Coolidge (The Center for Land Use Interpretation). 

Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.

When the Manhattan Project arrived on the Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico, the land was not uninhabited. To establish the highly secretive Site Y, the United States military forcibly removed generations of Nuevomexicano ranchers and blocked regional Indigenous groups from accessing sacred sites. Almost immediately, the lab began detonating massive amounts of explosives, scarring the landscape. Military personnel regularly dumped nuclear waste into local canyon systems that ultimately flowed into the Rio Grande. When World War II came to a close, though, the lab did not. 

More than eight decades later, an apocalyptic weapons factory—Los Alamos National Laboratory—still looms over the Pueblos and villages north of Santa Fe. Ninety miles south, Sandia National Laboratory and Kirtland Air Force Base store thousands of nuclear warheads beneath the city of Albuquerque. Both laboratories are expanding in scope and scale. 

This week, you'll hear from Dr. Alicia Romero, curator at the Albuquerque Museum and part of the steering commitee of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium; Yvonne Montoya, a Nuevomexicana dancer and choreographer; Dr. Myrriah Gómez, a scholar documenting nuclear colonialism in New Mexico; Joni Arends, co-founder and executive director of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety; Archbishop John C Wester, of the Archiocese of Santa Fe; and members of Veterans for Peace. 

Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.

For a deep dive into the impacts of nuclear colonialism across the state of New Mexico, check out (and bookmark) Nuclear Watch New Mexico. 

And visit the website of Tewa Women United to learn more about intersectional justice projects that center northern New Mexico communties. 

This week, we continue our investigation into uranium extraction on Indigenous landscapes across North America, and consider diverse community and artistic strategies for documenting and confronting the ongoing legacies of nuclear colonialism.

It is time to name these monsters. 

In Episode 04: Wastelanding (Part 02), you'll hear from interdisciplinary artists Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European); Anna Tsouhlarakis (Navajo, Creek, and Greek); Mallery Quetawki (Zuni Pueblo); Shayla Blatchford (Navajo); and Bonnie Devine (Serpent River First Nation of Northern Ontario, Anishinaabe/Ojibwa). You'll also meet physician and photographer Chip Thomas, who worked on the Navajo Nation for 36 years. And environmental historian Traci Brynne Voyles (Wastelanding, 2015) returns to discuss the obfuscation of mining in the nuclear weapons and fuel chain, the cultural naturalization of the American Southwest as pollutable, and the empowering capacity of counter-mapping. 

Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.

To support resistance efforts to uranium mining at the Grand Canyon, check out the Indigenous-led activist group Haul No! 

And for a wealth of historical documentation of uranium extraction across the Navajo Nation, dive into Shayla Blatchford's Anti-Uranium Mapping Project, which recently won a major award from Creative Capital. 

The US government knew that uranium mining posed existential threats to workers. But throughout the Cold War, as they bought ton after ton of uranium ripped out of the Four Corners region—frequently on the Navajo Nation—they provided miners, millers, and transporters little, if any, protective equipment or education about the well-documented dangers of radioactive materials. 

In Episode 04: Wastelanding (Part 01), you'll hear from Diné artists Will Wilson and Shayla Blatchford; Center for Land Use Interpretation director Matthew Coolidge; environmental scholar Traci Brynne Voyles (Wastelanding, 2015); uranium researcher Dr. Tommy Rock; and Curtis Francisco and Eldon Francisco, of Laguna Pueblo. 

Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.

And make sure to check out Shayla Blatchford's Anti-Uranium Mapping Project. 

Between 1945 and 1992, the United States detonated over 1,000 nuclear bombs, primarily at the Nevada Test Site and in the Marshall Islands, with additional detonations in New Mexico, Alaska, Mississipi, Christmas Island, Colorado, and in the Pacific Ocean. That amounts to, essentially, setting off a nuclear bomb every two weeks for half a century. The colossal amounts of radioactive fallout produced by these "tests" have permanently contaminated diverse landscapes and harmed generations of communities across the world. 

On this episode, you'll hear from artists Trevor Paglen, Joy Lehuanani Enomoto, Richard Misrach, Cara Despain, and Michael Light; environmental scholar Sarah Fox (Downwind, 2014); downwind activists Mary Dickson and Tina Cordova; nurse practitioner Rebecca Barlow; and Stephanie Wheeler and Melissa Carter of the St. George Art Museum. 

Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.

Read "Witness to the Cold War in the desert" by Terry Tempest Williams for High Country News.

In the early hours of July 16, 1945, the US military detonated Trinity, the world's first nuclear weapon, in the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico. Locals were not warned beforehand, evacuated after the blast, or given any follow-up information. 

On this episode, you'll hear from members of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, artists Joanna Keane Lopez and Eric J. Garcia, and anthropologist Joseph Masco. We'll also consider aesthetic represenations of the Trinity detonation in two contemporary media properties: Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" and David Lynch's "Twin Peaks: The Return." And we'll take a deeper look at the Radiaction Exposure Compensation Act—or RECA—and its recent and surprising return to national politics. 

Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at: timezeropod.com.

On the premiere episode of Time Zero, we look at the ways that the threat of nuclear annihilation has shaped global realities for 80 years—and how contemporary artists, filmmakers, and writers have responded. 

We also consider the nuclear industry's many ecological violences, from uranium extraction, to large-scale atomic energy disasters, to the ethical and engineering failures inherent to the disposal of radioactive waste.

Time Zero aims to make one thing abundantly clear: if we are to imagine any future narrative for our species, we must rethink the nuclear entirely, understanding it not as a technology, but as a monster. 

Learn more, make a donation, or find a text-based version of today's program at timezeropod.com. 

Time Zero is a ten-episode series about the nuclearized world from American writer, researcher, composer, and visual artist Sean J Patrick Carney.

Episode 01 arrives June 25. 

Visit timezeropod.com to get an essay version of every episode with citations, links, and images delivered directly to your inbox.