Fascinating and multifaceted

The design of the front cover of Ty Bannerman’s new book is simple … and ominous. 

The simplicity is in the font of the title and subtitle, “Nuclear Family, a memoir of the atomic west.” 

Ominous because a family of four is in silhouette set against a khaki background. Above them is a curved line suggesting the mushroom-shaped cloud of an atomic bomb explosion. Above them, a black "sky."

The essence of Bannerman’s fascinating, multifaceted, wide-ranging book can be found in this (long) sentence in the preface: “So then, here it is, the story of my family, the story of the nuclear bomb, the story of a fallout shelter for schoolchildren, the story of the Incredible Hulk and all the other monsters and heroes of the atomic age, the story of scientists who pushed too far, who died for their cause, who wreaked havoc upon their children; the story of my father, the story of the birth of the universe, the story of a small adobe house on the edge of the Tularosa Basin, where ash fell like snow on a summer day in 1945 — all the wonder and violence and life and death of it all — a hybrid beast, a mythical creature drawn upon these pages.”

Let this sentence be your guide as you read on. And do read on.

These stories are delivered directly and compellingly through a series of explosions starting with the author’s description of the birth of universe.

The author’s own birth is an explosion. The author’s parents fighting is another. His father’s fatal heart attack is yet another explosion.

The Trinity Test on July 16, 1945, in southern New Mexico is probably the most historic explosion of those enumerated.

Bannerman links the test to an older ranching couple, Monroe and Minnie Ratliff. They lived in a small, remote adobe house in Hoot Owl Canyon, some 20 miles to the northeast of the Trinity site. A grandson was with them for the summer.

Bannerman reconstructed the Ratliffs’ lives on that day.

At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, Bannerman writes, Monroe Ratliff got out of bed and rubbed his eyes. He saw a flash and then a glow in the sky to the southwest, in the Jornada del Muerto.

He didn’t know what it was. Nor did he know that the flaky white powder covering the ground around his house was fallout from the first-ever nuclear explosion.

Bannerman noted that the Ratliffs didn’t leave a written or oral history of what they saw. Only a few quotes from Monroe in the Atomic Energy Commission’s report on the world’s first atomic bomb explosion “and a pile of rubble in a dry New Mexico canyon,” the author added.

Prior to the blast, Manhattan Project scientists apparently didn’t know that the Ratliffs — or anyone — lived in that canyon.

Not until Dr. Louis Hempelmann showed up at the Ratliff ranch the day after the Trinity Test. His job was to determine whether fallout would require medical intervention for the nearby population.

“Here, of all places, in the single most radioactive spot other than ground zero itself, a home,” Bannerman wrote about Hempelmann’s astonishment.

His Geiger reading didn’t show immediate danger. He saw no burns on the Ratliffs. They weren’t nauseous and their hair wasn’t falling out. Ash was still on the ground, and some of their animals had singed fur.

So Hempelmann told the Ratliffs to stay indoors for the rest of the day. He thought the thick adobe walls absorbed most of the radiation, so he decided not to evacuate them.

Bannerman writes that Hempelmann never explained to the couple about the explosion or why he was at their doorstep.

Ash fell for three more days at the Ratliff ranch, and for several months radioactive rainwater fell and seeped into the ground that their livestock grazed on, Bannerman writes.

Over the next few years, Bannerman writes, Hempelmann ordered more medical assessments, but they didn’t go beyond visual analysis.

Here are a few of the other true stories in the book:

— Abo Elementary School in Artesia was the only public school in the country built underground. It opened in 1962 and closed in 1995.

Abo, the book notes, had a second purpose. It was to serve as a nuclear fallout shelter for 2,100 people for some 90 days, if needed.

“Which 2,100 people?” Bannerman asks his Abo school guide.

“It would depend on who got here first,” the guide says.

The school apparently was never used as a shelter.

— Cecil Kelley, 38, worked as a technician at Los Alamos. Kelley died in 1958, 35 hours after he was exposed to a lethal dose of plutonium radiation in an accident at the lab’s Delta Prime Site.

“Somehow, the plutonium had gone critical and Kelley absorbed a fatal dose of alpha radiation,” Bannerman writes.

Kelley’s death produced another issue. His organs were removed and sent out to laboratories for analysis before being buried in lead-lined drums.

Doris Kelley, Kelley’s widow, the book states, said she didn’t give permission for her husband’s dismemberment. Though the government said she did, there are no records to prove it, Bannerman writes.

Thirty-six years later, Clarence Lushbaugh, who had dissected Kelley’s body in 1958, gave a deposition in 1994 in response to a lawsuit over the handling of his remains.

Doris Kelley still wanted to know: Who gave consent for the autopsy or the later use of Cecil’s tissues?

“God gave me permission,” the book quotes Lushbaugh as answering.

— The issue of nuclear armament is raised late in the book. 

Bannerman writes that “we no longer fear nuclear attack like we once did, but the bombs are still there” — 7,700 in the United States, 8,500 in Russia, a few hundred in France, China, Pakistan and India. Total worldwide — 17,000.

The New York Times reported in a Feb. 11, 2026, article that in the five days since the last remaining nuclear treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired, Trump administration officials have made two things clear: The government is weighing the deployment of more nuclear weapons, and it is likely to conduct some kind of nuclear test.

Bannerman said in a phone interview he hopes the U.S. and Russia can “come to a point of responsible stewardship of the weapons. … It seems like a greater and greater concern right now.”

An earlier version of “Nuclear Family” was the thesis for Bannerman’s Master in Fine Arts degree from the University of New Mexico in 2015.

The 49-year-old Bannerman is an Albuquerque-based journalist, and is a writer and editor for the Nob Hill News.

He has a podcast called “City on the Edge,” which is mostly about Albuquerque and New Mexico history. In addition, he has a YouTube series called “Meet Me in Dreamland,” related to Bannerman’s interest in early amusement park history and culture.