November 17, 2015 update

Dear friends –

Reminder: Fundraising soirée and discussion in Santa Fe this coming Sunday afternoon, November 22, 4 pm to 7 pm!

We will be meeting in a spacious and lovely private home on the east side of Santa Fe.  There will be valet parking.  We'll serve 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.

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

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.

Our guest speakers at this meeting will include:

• Robert Alvarez, one of our two new Study Group board members.  Bob is 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.

Bob will speak and take questions on the future of the nuclear weapons complex.

• Dr. Frank von Hippel, a long-time Study Group mentor and friend.  Frank (his bio is here) is probably the single most distinguished arms control and nonproliferation scientist in the United States.  He has played an important role in every single nuclear issue -- nuclear weapons, nuclear materials, and nuclear power -- all of them.  During the Cold War Frank was a leader in developing back-channel relationships with senior Soviet scientists, including Andre Sakharov, involving many dozens of citizen "shuttle-diplomacy" trips to the USSR.  Frank was the point person on the scientific aspects of arms control and disarmament in the Clinton White House.  Frank provided courtroom testimony in Albuquerque in our (ultimately successful, though we lost) lawsuit against a new pit production facility.  Frank's disarmament passion is "bred in the bone:" his Nobel-winning grandfather James Franck chaired a scientists' committee in June 1945 that argued against using atomic bombs in the war, and predicting the nuclear arms race.  Frank is currently working to preventing proliferation of nuclear materials in several countries.  Longtime former Study Group president Zia Mian works in the program Frank started. Greg was a visiting scholar in the program in 2002.

Frank will talk about pit production -- and why it is not needed -- and take questions.  FYI, Frank is also an expert on surplus plutonium disposition and can answer questions on this OTHER big new mission proposed for Los Alamos.