November 16, 2015

Dear friends –

As we wrote in late October, we are having an important fundraising soirée and discussion in Santa Fe this coming Sunday afternoon, November 22!  We will be meeting in a spacious and lovely private home on the east side of Santa Fe from 4 pm to 7 pm.  Parking on our narrow streets can be tough so we've arranged for valet parking.  And we'll be serving a simple but scrumptious dinner.  This is a private event and our host has asked us to not give out the address except to those who are coming.  The atmosphere will be relaxed and there will be plenty of time to meet new friends and old.

Please RSVP as soon as possible by phone (505-265-1200) or by email and we'll tell you how to get there!

We will be one, or perhaps two, highly-knowledgeable guest speaker(s) via "Skype and screen."  I will let you know more in the next day or two.

This is the most important event of the year for us.  Please consider reaching out to your friends who might help support our work and see if they would like to come, meet, and talk about what we want to do in 2016.  Have your friends contact Trish ASAP.

Nuclear weapons issues are incredibly important in this state, more so here than anywhere else in the U.S.  They nuclearize our intellectual life and they pull us to the political right.  They blight our prospects.  The Study Group is the most knowledgeable and effective organization in this state working on nuclear weapons issues.  We work here, in Washington, and internationally.  We don't see nuclear weapons as isolated from other pressing issues, and we work with many other like-minded organizations.  Nationally, we are a unique organization and we have a fabulous track record.  We hope you will keep supporting us and we hope you will reach out to others on our behalf.  We have a wonderful, supportive group of local donors and volunteers, but we need to expand and stabilize our programs -- and bring in young people.  This takes money, and this is the time of year we have to ask, more pointedly than at any other time.

By the way, and just in case anybody thought it was over, the zombie Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) project is back, in its new abridged edition (which we hope to kill).  Our senior senator counted coup for its inclusion (along with the new B61-12) in this year's National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).  Prospects for success are excellent, but huge projects with political momentum are always hard to kill.  The point is that the U.S. does not need new nuclear weapons, a battle we are fighting in other ways as well.  The U.S. needs disarmament -- to survive.

On another subject we are now very happy to announce that our board of directors has grown to include two of people we already work with closely, in Washington and Geneva.  They are:

• Mia Gandenberger, whom some of you will have met in the summer of 2013 when she was a Disarmament Fellow with the Study Group.  Mia is one of the world's foremost diplomatic correspondents on disarmament issues.  She is the Geneva Program Manager for Reaching Critical Will, a project of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the oldest women's peace organization in the world.

• Robert Alvarez, a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and Professorial Lecturer in the Energy, Resources and Environment Program at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.  Bob's knowledge of nuclear technologies, safety, cleanup, and related public policy issues is legendary.  While a Senate staffer, he played a central role in establishing the DOE cleanup program.  While at DOE, he coordinated the enactment of legislation providing compensation for sick nuclear workers (the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, EEOICPA).  Most recently he has been working on cutting-edge issues in spent nuclear fuel management and investigating extensive contamination from Manhattan Project residues in communities near St. Louis.