Meeting reminder for Wednesday, July 15

July 8, 2015

Dear friends –

As mentioned in our June 14 letter, our next meeting in Santa Fe is on Wednesday, July 15, at 5:00 pm. (Please note that this meeting is one-half hour earlier than the previous ones!)  We’ll have a little more substantive food and more time to visit with one another.

Please RSVP to this meeting so we can plan, and we will tell you how to get there.  This is not a public meeting, but if you have a friend you think would be interested please give us a call at 505-265-1200 or write Trish.

We will be presenting and discussing some of the results of strategic deliberations we are having with our national and international allies and advisors.  As we mentioned before, tremendous strides have been made internationally toward delegitimizing and prohibiting nuclear weapons, with 112 countries – a majority of countries in the world – having pledged to support a ban treaty just this year.  (Please see Bulletin 206: Desultory NPT conference ends in division, a good thing; 108 countries pledge to help ban nuclear weapons, Jun 9, 2015.)

But as we wrote to you on June 14, New Mexico is pretty stuck, in a country that is stuck.

We are not aiming at a popular movement for nuclear disarmament.  We believe there will be no successful narrow social and political movement for nuclear disarmament in the U.S.  That time has passed forever.  We see rapidly declining economic and ecological prospects for the U.S. and the world.  The stable post-Cold War decades are gone, never to return.  We are in a completely new situation, in which nuclear disarmament is intimately connected with profound economic, climate, and ecological crises and with justice within and between societies, with dignity and our common survival.  We do not see nuclear disarmament as an isolated issue and never have.  It is a fundamental requirement for human solidarity and survival, and can be approached far more boldly than in recent decades.  This is a very different kind of politics than we usually see.

As we see it, the U.S. has embarked on hybrid wars with Russia and China in order to retain U.S. global dominance.  The arms control presumption of gradual nuclear disarmament is being replaced by war, a quite intentional process which will destroy this society one way or another if it is not stopped soon.  I debated U.S.-Russian relations with the senior arms control specialist in the National Security Council last month and heard a far more solidified, obstinate, and uninformed belligerence toward Russia than I expected.  We are in serious trouble.

Speaking of that, I will be co-leading a teach-in on the Ukraine situation at the UNM Law School on Wednesday, July 22, from 6-9 pm.  I will be joined by Steven Starr, Senior Scientist with the Physicians for Social Responsibility.  We expect this discussion to be lively and wide-ranging.

Don’t forget to RSVP for this coming Wednesday’s meeting in Santa Fe.

Greg (and Trish)