Reminder! Get-together at CloudCliff today, 5:30 pm

March 19, 2015

Dear friends --

You are reminded! 

Senators Heinrich and Udall both support expanding Santa Fe's plutonium and nuclear waste industry -- already the metro area's biggest manufacturing industry in dollar terms, I'm sure.  But how to pay for it all?  By cutting programs for poor Americans, of course.

1. "House GOP budget cuts $5.5T in spending, balances in nine years," The Hill, March 17, 2015.
2. House Republican Budget Overhauls Medicare and Repeals the Health Law," New York Times, March 16, 2015.
3. "Proposed Medicaid Block Grant Would Add Millions to Uninsured and Underinsured," Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 17, 2015.
4. "House Republican Budget Whacks Food Stamps And Medicaid," Huffington Post, March 17, 2015.

We need to build a sufficient movement to block and reverse the proposed increases in military and nuclear spending.  A contact in government just sent me a 19-page list of weapon systems now being purchased, including but not limited to nuclear weapon systems, with a total price tag of $1,642,000 million, i.e. $1.6 trillion.  Ouch! 

The new plutonium infrastructure proposed for LANL would be the largest public works project in NM history in constant dollars, except for the three interstate highways.  It would dwarf everything else.  Its shadow would fall over Santa Fe for the rest of this century. 

It's really in our power to stop all this. 

We are looking forward very much to seeing you.

Greg and Trish and the rest of the gang

Get-together at CloudCliff this Thursday 3/19, 5:30 pm

March 16, 2015

Dear Santa Fe friends --

The Los Alamos Study Group is having an important get-together, update, and discussion this coming Thursday, March 19th, at 5:30 pm, hosted by Willem Malten in his residence adjacent to the CloudCliff Bakery in Santa Fe, at 1805 2nd St.

We aren't sending this note to everybody, just to about 10% of our broad Santa Fe membership.  Our goal is not a general public meeting where we have to start "at the beginning" on the issues we work on (here, in Washington, and internationally), but rather a more action-oriented discussion which will hopefully be very useful and inspiring to all who attend. 

We won't be serving dinner this time but there will be snacks.

Our topics will include:

• The status of the Obama Grand Nuclear Modernization Plan.  Good news: some of it is delayed so long it is really canceled.  Stick a fork in it.  Bad news: the rest is continuing.  Good news #2: there isn't enough money for it all, so something has to give.  Bad news #2: DoD hopes to take the money from a "reassessment of our national priorities."  And it goes on like that.  We're in a real struggle for the future, with Santa Fe -- the #1 metro area in the world for nuclear warhead spending, having wrested the title back from Albuquerque this year -- in the crosshairs. 
  
• The very encouraging status of international efforts to ban the bomb and what they could mean for Santa Fe and for all of us. 
  
• The latest plan for restarting plutonium warhead core ("pit") production and how you can help us defeat it.  We're back to a stealth multibillion-dollar plan, again. 
  
• Global hybrid war and what we can collectively do to stop it.  It's coming to Santa Fe, via plutonium, not even counting the rest. 
  
• Your fundraising ideas.  This is not a fundraising meeting per se but we are interested in your ideas.  
• We are always recruiting and we want you to think about that too.
  
• Fresh new opportunities opening up (as in, starting next week). 
  

This is really going to be a discussion, not just a presentation, so bring your thinking caps!

We don't put a lot of strategy into our Bulletins, due to their very broad subscriber universe.  Last week a VP of Sandia signed up.  Senior government people in DC get it.  So meetings like this are where that strategy can happen. 

Right now, powerful people in DC and here believe that New Mexico, and Santa Fe, want to be a plutonium-oriented place, a nuclear-military playground.  There have been personnel changes at NNSA and just as before, they do not remember what happened 5 years ago, or 10 years, or 25 years ago.  What happened is that every single plan they have put forward has been defeated -- about 5 at Los Alamos alone.  The newbies think the state is a political doormat for nuclear weapons, which would be their natural starting assumption, reinforced by our senators.  As Willem emphasizes, we've got to change that. 

See you Thursday we hope,

Greg, Trish, Willem, Lydia, Tom, and the rest of the Study Group