University of New Mexico student Madi Figueroa stands in front of a colorful model in the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque.
“We are standing in front of an ultra-safe thorium molten salt reactor,” she explains. “It looks like a children’s toy.” Figueroa is an officer with the Albuquerque chapter of the national nonprofit Students for Nuclear Disarmament. However, she never envisioned this would be the line of work she’d be in.
Growing up in Las Cruces, Figueroa didn’t pay much attention to the missile range at White Sands, just 30 minutes away. However, she was very aware of the general issues of nuclear war.
“My whole life, I’ve had this very irrational fear of nuclear weapons,” Figueroa said. “I have OCD, so I was kind of just scared of the world ending, and I felt like nuclear weapons were like the fast track to the end of the world.”
Figueroa had to take an honors class and was late to the jump for registration. The only one left was “Nuclear Bomb Culture.”
“And at that moment, I thought, ‘there’s absolutely no reason why I should be in this class. It’s everything that scares the hell out of me,’” Figueroa said. “But I had to take it, and I did, and I found that a lot of other people were just as scared as me — but they were doing something about it.”
Figueroa said that class changed her whole outlook on nuclear weapons.
“It’s better to be active about something than just sit there and be scared,” she said.
Another member of the class was planning to start a UNM chapter of Students for Nuclear Disarmament and reached out to Figueroa. The nonprofit organizes young people to advocate against nuclear war and for anti-nuclear weapons policy. Figueroa and the UNM chapter focus mainly on art as activism to bring awareness to the issue. They have tried to branch out, Figueroa said, but have faced several hurdles.
“We have tried to get involved in local politics and that has proven to be extremely difficult,” Figueroa said. “I think that a lot of people and political leaders in this state are pro-nuclear just because of the money that the labs bring.”
When it comes to nuclear weapons, Figueroa takes a maybe surprising stance.
“I think that it is not really realistic to believe that the world will completely get rid of nuclear weapons,” Figueroa said. “I think that, since they’ve been created, they cannot be completely destroyed. But I do think that there are smaller things that we can do for humanity that prevent other issues that stem from nuclear weapons.”
After college, Figueroa said she hopes to continue advocating against nuclear weapons.
“I’d like to go to law school and hopefully come back or travel to defend people whose families have been affected by nuclear testing or by production, like mining,” Figueroa said.
A whole career in nuclear advocacy ahead of her, all sprung from a fear of warheads and a last-minute class enrollment.
