November 29, 2019

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• Previous local letter (10/07/19): So far, elected NM Dems support new ICBM, warheads, pits, huge expansion of N-weapons production, with NO transparency and NO environmental analysis for NM
• Previous Bulletin (11/26/19): Bulletin #264: LANL expansion, new mailing list, staff position available, news and views you can use

This letter: PLEASE COME: City of Santa Fe considering subsidizing "Rocky Flats South" by opening NNSA/LANL satellite in Santa Fe -- developer to present Sunday December 8, 11 am

Dear friends – 

Mr. Affeldt, the developer who is the main source of the article ("A new urban center for Santa Fe?," T.S. Last, A. Journal, 11/24/19) discussed in Bulletin 264, will present his group’s plan at 11 a.m. on Sunday, December 8 at Collected Works Bookstore, 202 Galisteo Street (map) under the auspices of Journey Santa Fe.

If you live in the area, please come to this presentation if you can.

More background

Further information about this development competition was obtained by reporter Teya Vitu at the New Mexican ("Developer proposals hint at what’s in store for city-owned midtown campus"). Many concepts have been submitted by the many partnerships. Vitu's article sheds important light not only on the big picture but specifically also on NNSA's proposal as "master developer:"

The National Nuclear Security Administration, which administers the Los Alamos National Laboratory management and operating contract, submitted a master developer proposal to build an open-campus environment with administrative offices, sustainable green spaces, engineering space, light manufacturing, training facilities and research and development. There would be no radiological or hazardous activities performed at the midtown property, said Al Stotts, an NNSA spokesman in Albuquerque.

“Details regarding any movement of personnel are premature as we continue exploration of Midtown as a viable option for LANL,” Stotts said in an email. “LANL is undergoing unprecedented growth and expects to hire more than 1,000 new personnel annually for the next several years. Having a new campus — midway between New Mexico’s two national laboratories — to house professional staff, scientists, and engineers in partnership with the city of Santa Fe — would be very beneficial.”

Important further background is available in Maire O'Neill's article of 11/27/19 ("RCLC Quizzes LANL Deputy Director Of Operations On Future Lab Plans," Los Alamos Reporter). Taken as whole, this article can be seen as a further explanation of just how hard the plutonium pit mission is for LANL.

The simple truth is that LANL has already failed at this mission, as explained here (published today in the Journal apparently, though I don't see it on line yet).

Entertaining these plans makes the City complicit in creating a new "Rocky Flats South." And should they reach fruition in any form, the City and its taxpayers would be helping pay for the satellite campus that will house non-hazardous activities so that LANL proper, and the regional road system and housing markets, can better handle expansion of LANL's hazardous missions.

Los Alamos County, the LANL site, and the greater Santa Fe metro area, pose many problems for industrial plutonium missions. NNSA and Triad more or less understand this. To succeed, NNSA and Triad need to transform how the region functions for them and for employees, both on a practical day-to-day basis and politically.

That proposed political transformation can best succeed if wrapped in en vogue narratives and interwoven with other agendas and material interests, as for example in the proposed "innovation triangle."

If neoliberal corporate development is political heroin for our political leadership, nuclear-military development is "political fentanyl" -- deadly to the body politic even in very small doses, especially if there are other "political opiates" or "democracy depressants" present in the body politic. Which there are, aplenty.

Don't kid yourself: building and operating a factory for weapons of mass destruction in the greater Santa Fe area will destroy all prospects for real responses to the climate crisis and to our social crises for a multitude of reasons both local and national. This is an inherently fascist industry, an emergency alliance of corporate and state power set up during World War II without the usual protections for citizens, workers, or taxpayers, which never returned to peacetime norms. Nuclear corporate paternalism will not solve anything for New Mexico. Quite the reverse.

Herbert Marks, the first general counsel of the Atomic Energy Commission, observed that this industry was "a separate state, with its own airplanes and its own factories and its thousands of secrets...a peculiar sovereignty, one that could bring about the end, peacefully or violently, of all other sovereignties." This is the process we are witnessing.

The event on Sunday, December 8th, is the first opportunity to register concern about these alarming new plans. It is a golden opportunity. The sooner this is stopped, the easier and the better it will be.

Greg Mello