Important upcoming events -- please join us!
May 20, 2016
(Letter to local members only; tell us if you want off this closed list.)
Dear friends --
First, thank you all for your continued support, which is vital for us.
In this letter, I wanted to make you aware of the following important upcoming meetings and events. We very much hope to see you at some of them!
- June 16, Thursday, 1:00 - 5:00 pm: Disarmament Training and Planning, Study Group headquarters, 2901 Summit Place NE, Albuquerque.
We are ready to step up our resistance and we hope you are also. We seek a rich, cross-issue mobilization of society, involving a spectrum of modalities, styles, and leadership roles, against nuclear weapons, anthropogenic climate collapse, and economic injustice, and for justice and an environmentally-sustainable economy. There's a place and a role for everyone. We need everyone.
This training and planning event will be specific to nuclear weapons issues. It will involve factual background (including privileged new information), practice interventions and role playing, and demonstration planning (see June 20-21, below).
The timing of this particular training reflects, in part, what we regard as a fresh political assault on the state in the form of the June 20-21 2016 Strategic Deterrent Coalition Symposium, which as you can see involves the heads of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), the U.S. Global Strike Command, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and others.
The University of New Mexico (UNM), where the Symposium will be held, seeks to be a partner in managing Sandia National Laboratories (SNL). If this came about it would be a further step in the corruption of our leading civil society institutions and our youth.
President Obama is poised to leave office having launched the biggest nuclear arms race since Ronald Reagan. New Mexico is playing a central role in this, both in political support (through our senators especially) and as a design, production, and testing site.
If "modernization" continues as planned, the plutonium warhead core ("pit") production at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) we have been fighting (fairly successfully) since 1989 will begin. Still-secret plans for new underground production facilities are currently slated for initial funding next year, barring successful intervention. The Santa Fe Metro area will soon host the New Rocky Flats, unless we can stop it.
Meanwhile the U.S. is bearding Russia in many ways and places, seeking confrontation and regime change. The military and diplomatic "pivot to Asia" is aimed at containing China (and Russia, also). The risk of great-power war is rising fast and in some ways hybrid war has already begun. Meanwhile the Obama administration has been in "hot" wars -- not counting proxy wars -- longer than any other administration in U.S. history, in multiple countries. Military budgets are at post-World-War II record heights. Militarism within our society is rising. These trends are incompatible with survival, under climate change especially.
New Mexico meanwhile spirals downward in most social, economic, and environmental indicators. Increasingly, New Mexico is being seen from Washington as -- and is offering itself as -- a pliant, nuclear military colony.
Despite all this and in part because of it, worldwide momentum is building for a new treaty that would prohibit the possession, transfer, development, or use of nuclear weapons. We in New Mexico can either join this movement wholeheartedly, or be left behind.
The first part of this event -- the background part -- is open to the press.
- June 16, Thursday, 5:30 - 7:30 pm: Reception, Report, Discussion, "Banning Nuclear Weapons: Worldwide Momentum Builds", Study Group headquarters, 2901 Summit Place NE, Albuquerque.
This reception as you can see follows the afternoon training directly. We will be joined in both events by our summer disarmament intern from Rome, Valentina Bellefante, who will arrive a few days before. Please come and welcome Valentina.
- June 17, Friday, 1:30 - 5:30 pm: Disarmament Training and Planning, Center for Spiritual Living, 505 Camino de Los Marquez, Santa Fe.
See the above description.
In Santa Fe we will be joined by Carol Miller of Ojo Sarco, who will give us an overview of her work in the Peaceful Skies Coalition, including a short report on her (currently) upcoming trip to Washington.
- June 17, Friday, 6:30 - 8:30 pm: Reception, Report, Discussion, "Banning Nuclear Weapons: Worldwide Momentum Builds", RSVP necessary (earlier is better, please!), Santa Fe, spacious private home.
Please come if you can. If you want to bring new friends, or possible supporters of our work, this would be a great occasion to do so. Call or write Trish. Please come and welcome Valentina if you can.
We are planning this demonstration and the one that follows the next day in concert with several other area organizations. They are very important to us and we hope for you as well. Please, please, come if you can to one or (better!) both of them.
- June 27, Monday, 6:30 - 8:00 pm: 350.org meeting, Greg Mello talk and discussion, "The Need for Full-Scale Mobilization," Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice, 202 Harvard SE.
In this talk I will cover some of the key issues that are typically underplayed or ignored in climate policy intervention. The bottom line will be this: we need to talk about a full-scale mobilization, a real social movement involving both determined resistance and the constructive program. The programs and policies offered by Democratic Party politicians and most professional environmental groups will not be enough by far. Scary? Not really. It is time for us to embrace reality and help one another enter emergency mode, which we are fully capable of handling and indeed thriving within.
- July 10, Sunday, 11:00 am: "Journey Santa Fe" talk and discussion series, Collected Works Bookstore and Coffee House, 202 Galisteo St, Santa Fe, Greg Mello: "'Crawl Out through the Fallout, Baby': Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Future of Santa Fe."
Does Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) benefit Santa Fe? If not, could it do so under different policy scenarios? Can Santa Fe emerge from the political and cultural shadow of The Bomb? Who is Santa Fe's real patron saint now, Francesco Bernardone -- or Robert Oppenheimer?
The time has come when Santa Fe must choose. We cannot have it both ways. The state, nation and world face a new set of challenges completely different from those that animated the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Can Santa Fe adapt to this brave new world, or even thrive? If so what might that look like, and what role if any could or should LANL play?
The Obama administration and Congress would like to spend billions of dollars in new construction for industrial-scale plutonium processing, waste handling, and weapons manufacturing -- dirty and risky work, on a scale never seen before in Los Alamos. Is such a future compatible with a sustainable, attractive, and economically resilient "City Different?"
Can LANL ever be "cleaned up?" Can the lab be converted or effectively diversified to new missions? Come and find out!
Greg Mello, long-time director of the Los Alamos Study Group, will share insights on these and other questions from 25 years of policy analysis and advocacy in New Mexico, Washington, DC, and international disarmament diplomacy. Mr. Mello was trained as a systems engineer and regional planner. He worked as a hydrologist for the State and private industry, and led the first regulatory enforcement actions at LANL. He was a HUD Fellow in Urban Studies at Harvard and has been a Research Fellow at the Princeton Program on Science and Global Security.
Thank you for your attention and see you soon!
Greg
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