Reminder of critical upcoming events

June 5, 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. We deeply appreciate and crave your participation, which is giving our work wings.

Here in New Mexico we are faced with especially great opportunities and dangers. We will either enable nuclear weapons policies which if continued will destroy us and others, or we won't. New Mexico has an outsize role in that choice and its consequences. So we are mobilizing.

In a letter of May 20 and in Bulletin 219 we alerted you to important upcoming events.

Those events are on this calendar. Please refer to that May 20 letter for details and also see below.

Please, please come to one or more of these events if you can, especially on the 16th in Albuquerque (there are afternoon and evening events of different types), on the 17th in Santa Fe (again, there are afternoon and evening events of different types), and on the 21st in Albuquerque (there are two events in parallel to the Doomsday Forum that start at 8:00 am). Participants at these training events and demonstrations will make a real contribution to the cause, build bridges with other organizations, and will come away with the tools and experience to be powerful advocates.

Space could become limited at the private reception in Santa Fe on the evening of the 17th. We need you to RSVP for that event as soon as possible.

There are two new events on the calendar:

• The first is on June 10 at 9 am: the University of New Mexico (UNM) Regents meeting in Ballroom C of the Student Union Building (SUB). This is a time for those of us who live in Albuquerque or have a special interest in UNM to let the UNM Regents and the student body know what is at stake when the state's largest university seeks to design and produce nuclear weapons of mass destruction. This is one of the worst mistakes UNM and New Mexico could make. We briefly wrote to you about this issue on May 24.

• The second is a teach-in on June 21st from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm co-organized by the Study Group, the UNM Peace and Justice Studies Program, and SOAP (UNM "Students Organizing Actions for Peace") in the UNM SUB, in rooms Lobo A&B (upstairs from the Doomsday Forum).
  

A small update on pit production (see May 25 letter): Rep. Garamendi's office wrote us to say that contrary to press accounts there was a roll call vote after all, and "the plutonium pit amendment got 126 votes in favor, including Adam Smith (ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee) and Eliot Engel (ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee)." This is quite good, especially given that there was so little time for lobbying on this amendment. Knowledge of how dumb it would be to expand LANL pit production is spreading but we have a long way to go. Without that expansion, the proposed new warhead program partially collapses. That is partly why this Doomsday Forum is being organized -- and why we are mobilizing as well.

Disgustingly but expectedly, the entire NM delegation voted against Garamendi's amendment.

Our friends at Stop the War Machine created a Facebook page for the Doomsday Forum. Watch the Study Group's Facebook page for developments on these events and other issues. 

Most people do not yet understand the significance of New Mexico in enabling our trillion-dollar nuclear makeover. That proposed makeover, and the policies and appropriations it requires, would further militarize this country and more so this state. If that process continues we can expect civil society to be further coopted and crushed, with dismal implications all around, including for climate and energy policies. Udall and Heinrich are now especially important enablers on this downward path. Udall alone, voting with Republicans, saved the infamous B61-12 precision-guided nuclear bomb from fatal cuts in the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations subcommittee.

Thank you for your attention and see you soon!

Greg