Please join us on Friday evening, August 23, at 6 pm at the Kit Carson Electric Coop in Taos, 118 Cruz Alta Road (map), for a lively discussion of LANL’s expansion plans and the critical role New Mexicans can play in halting the new nuclear arms race

Aug 17, 2019

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This letter:Please join us on Friday evening, August 23, at 6 pm at the Kit Carson Electric Coop in Taos, 118 Cruz Alta Road (map), for a lively discussion of LANL’s expansion plans and the critical role New Mexicans can play in halting the new nuclear arms race

Preceding letter (important!): August 15, 2019: More details of LANL's regional plans; EIS (national and local) needed; we crave your help

Recently to our larger list, of which this is a subset:

• Bulletin 262: New Mexico Democrats push Trump nuclear weapons agenda regardless of environmental costs, Jul 24, 2019
• Bulletin 261: Public discussion: “The Steepest Time: Youth and Crisis at the End of an Age,” Thursday July 25, 2019, 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm, Phil Space Gallery, 1410 Second St, Santa Fe, Jul 19, 2019

Dear friends on our New Mexico activist list –

As you now know, LANL is planning $13 billion in new construction over the coming decade, anchored by an expanded plutonium complex to produce the cores (“pits”) for a new generation of warheads.

Our congressional delegation has succeeded in creating a legal mandate to "implement surge efforts" to produce more than 30 pits per year (ppy) at LANL and to plan, as we explained, for an average production rate of more than 100 ppy using round-the-clock labor shifts. The construction plans referenced in our last letter reflect an attempt to build the physical capacity to handle plutonium shift changes involving hundreds of people.

No environmental impact analysis is planned.

LANL even wants new highways and a new bridge across Rio Grande to support this expansion.

The new contractors at LANL apparently understand that they must overcome LANL's geographic isolation -- one of the site's main virtues in the eyes of Manhattan Project planners -- and its dependence on northern New Mexican labor markets to succeed. They seem desperate.

By comparison, expenditures by the Manhattan Project at Site Y (Los Alamos) and the Trinity Test Site through 1945 totaled just 2.07 billion, in 2019 dollars (Atomic Audit, p. 59). LANL and Sandia each spend much more than that -- a little under $3 billion, or possibly over $3 billion in Sandia's case, the intelligence budget being elusive -- every year. LANL's planned construction program alone would cost six times the total spent by the Manhattan Project in New Mexico.

Both New Mexico senators and Congressman Lujan have been pushing hard for this expansion, which will also dramatically increase transuranic waste production at LANL, with dramatic consequences for legacy waste shipments from LANL and further impacts nationally.

We believe LANL will fail in this new pit mission, provided it gets some "assistance." And surely a new bridge across the Rio Grande is, well, a "bridge too far."

The crucial question is: when will these plans fail? And with how much more damage to our institutions, public culture, and environment? How long will New Mexico's politics, society, and economy languish beneath the mushroom cloud (or upas tree), co-opted and corrupted, addicted and vastly unequal, wasting the waning opportunities available in our declining empire and warming world?

And LANL might not fail. We are in a brave new world of rampant extractivism in this state and " deep state" dominance nationally. Our democratic institutions are hollowed to paper thinness. Propaganda is pervasive. If a politician fully buys into the logic of neoliberalism and growth for growth's sake, and if enough money is spread around, environmental destruction, inequality, and declining security can look like progress. To many influential eyes in this state, what LANL wants is inevitable. They've lost the ability to imagine anything else.

Our current senators haven't met a nuclear weapon or nuclear weapon dollar they don't like and support, if it is spent in New Mexico. They're true believers.

Please come on Friday, 6 pm, and tell your friends. We've got work to do, together.

Best wishes,

Greg