December 22, 2019

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• Previous local letters this month:
  
• (12/12/19): No LANL in Santa Fe -- update
  
• (12/07/19): Please come tomorrow to Collected Works Bookstore, 202 Galisteo Street, Santa Fe, 11 am: Developer to present plans for Midtown Santa Fe campus: will they include nuclear weapons research, training, manufacturing, administration?
• (12/02/19): Safety Board: Los Alamos plutonium facility does not adequately protect the public

• Previous Bulletin (11/26/19): Bulletin #264: LANL expansion, new mailing list, staff position available, news and views you can use

• This letter: important meetings January 2 and 8!

Dear New Mexico activist friends –

Warm greetings to all, as the solar new year begins! We hope it is a time of renewal and joy for you, despite the crises our world faces.

For all the support, financial and otherwise, so many of you have provided throughout the year -- thank you!

All of us know that we have our work cut out for us in the New Year. It is a good time to reflect on just how we might most effectively carry forward our responsibilities for the rising generations and this living planet, both profoundly endangered.

This letter is going just to New Mexicans, because we here have a uniquely powerful role to play in the future of nuclear weapons. 

Why? Because Los Alamos, Santa Fe, and the surrounding region are being asked -- right now -- to undertake the industrial manufacture of plutonium nuclear weapon cores ("pits"). Pits are needed only for a new generation of warheads for land-based nuclear missiles (and much later, for other new-generation warheads that might follow).

In the crucial 2020s, a decade of decision for the fate of the earth, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is the only place where pits can be made. No new pits means no new ICBM warheads -- and instead, a profound, devaluing shock to the nuclear weapons enterprise and what it represents.

If industrial pit production doesn't begin at LANL in the 2020s, it may never happen anywhere. In the words of the Institute for Defense Analyses, "...eventual success of the strategy to reconstitute pit production is far from certain [p. v]...A key milestone will be achieving the...goal of 30 [pits per year] at LANL." (p. vii).

We agree.

LANL has not had an industrial pit production mission since the 1940s, and then it was small. (Since then, LANL has made test pits, and did a small pilot production run in the 2007-2011 timeframe.)

The job went from LANL to Hanford at the end of the 1940s, and then in the 1950s to the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver. In 1989, pit production ended when the EPA and FBI forced that plant to shut down.

Now LANL is to become "the dirty lab," as a LANL spokesman so candidly put it to us in private 25 years ago.

We, including many of you, have prevented this outcome -- so far.

Because of the nuclear mission assigned to the greater Santa Fe area, there may be no more powerful place on earth to oppose the new nuclear arms race.

We implore you to join us, however you can.

Starting this month and next, the Study Group is making special efforts to support your engagement and that of others you may bring. We will be resuming regular meetings and will be holding special workshops, starting in January. We have hired one of our long-time board members, the multi-talented Lydia Clark, as a part-time outreach director in Santa Fe to help us, and we will be reaching out to more of you here in Albuquerque, in Jemez Springs, and elsewhere.

Our first meeting in the new year will be a workshop and training on the planned industrial plutonium expansion of LANL, and the possible opening of a satellite LANL site in Santa Fe. It will be held on Thursday evening, January 2, from 5-8 pm, at the First Christian Church (map) in Santa Fe. We will serve soup and bread. Please save the date, and spread the word!

Our aims for this event are to build a broad base of knowledge and leadership in our community as well as mutual solidarity in opposition to this expansion -- which could include a satellite campus on the former College of Santa Fe property, now owned by the City -- and to form action teams for the following week.

Our second meeting in the new year will be at the Santa Fe City Council meeting on Wednesday, January 8 (at City Hall, map), at 6 pm. This will be the last City Council meeting before the City decides which applicants will be the finalists for "master developer" of its Midtown Campus. As we have alerted you previously, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), LANL's "landlord" and funding agency, has formally expressed interest in that role. Meanwhile both NNSA and its managing contractor at LANL, Triad, have expressed interest in being part of other proposals for the site -- and as far as we know, they are.

It is very important to prevent creation of a "LANL II" satellite campus in the heart of Santa Fe, and the time to speak up forcefully is right now, before it is too late.

Happy holidays to all!

Greg, Trish, and Lydia, for the Study Group