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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 October 7, 2019 If you have been forwarded this message and want to be more involved, and to receive these local letters directly, write. This letter:
Preceding letter (09/19/19): Climate strike starts tomorrow, please GO; briefing slides and report from town hall meeting; memorial for John Otter Sunday Sept. 29, 2-4 pm at The Commons; fall fundraising begins with matching fund Dear friends–
So far there has been no significant concern expressed by any elected New Mexico official regarding Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL's) largely-secret $13 billion expansion and reinvestment plan, despite widespread, excellent reporting. We need your help to change that. Please. LANL's plan is part of what the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) describes as its "staggering goal" (video, key quotes) of hiring 20,000 additional nuclear weapons workers by 2025 to augment the present 41,000-person national workforce at NNSA's sites and headquarters. This includes hiring 1,200 net new staff at LANL over the coming year. As NNSA explained, that means about 2,000 new hires at LANL over the coming year. (First reported on Oct. 3 by Dan Leone, Exchange Monitor Publications, "NNSA No. 2 Discusses Agency’s ‘Staggering’ Hiring Goals," paywall). This is twice the hiring rate LANL said it was aiming for just 2 months ago. The proverb, "A stitch in time..." applies a fortiori to what is planned now in nuclear weapons for New Mexico, which is more than most rational people think anyone could even consider. We'd like you to pester our New Mexico elected officials -- all of them, federal, state, and local (and in every way you can think of, especially publicly) -- with demands for 1) transparency and 2) environmental impact analysis for LANL's plans. Just to make this very clear, LANL's plans are also NNSA's plans, i.e. Trump's plans. We've put together a 2-page summary of some of what's been missing. It boils down to this:
These EIS processes involve public hearings. They are the only citizen hearings available under law for these plans. You might think "Congress" should be able to get these plans. That's not how Congress is working these days. Budget and/or authorization negotiations won't be done until November most likely, and the scope of those discussions is already fixed. Little serious deliberation on these issues may happen until next year, if then. Congress is otherwise engaged. In this oversight near-vacuum, and with Congress at war with itself, the neocons, aging Cold War ideologues, and contractor "lobbyists-in-place" that run Trump's nuclear weapons "enterprise," as it is called, are moving ahead as fast as they can. What they are most afraid of is what you could help create: delay, and accountability. Because their plans do not make sense at any level or in any way. They fear truth. They fear you. New Mexico officials do not have to be against these planned investments to ask what they are for, and what impacts might be reasonably expected from them. Without transparency and environmental impact statements, all parties (including LANL itself) are flying blind. So what we are asking you to campaign for are "good government" measures that were once routine. The New Mexico congressional delegation, specifically Rep. Ben Ray Lujan and the two senators, could ask for these plans and for a Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS), in ways that would make NNSA tremble. So could the Governor. But they haven't. They -- Heinrich, Udall, Lujan, and Grisham -- are allied with Trump's people in this matter, so far. Our delegation and governor know what this sudden surge of money is for. They hope we will all avert our eyes, thinking (as they seem to think) that this is economic-development "manna from heaven." As if the circa $100 billion LANL has spent in northern New Mexico to date has been some kind of economic development boon.
News flash: plutonium isn't manna, economic or otherwise, and it isn't from heaven. So what is it for? The crash program NNSA and LANL are beginning is first and foremost designed to meet an (arbitrary) Air Force deadline to begin deployment of an (unnecessary) brand-new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), dubbed the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD). GBSD is expected to cost $85-140 billion, plus the new warheads (about $20 billion), plus the new plutonium and uranium parts for the warheads (about $9 billion for the plutonium cores -- the "pits" -- alone, which NNSA didn't count in its token analysis of alternatives). All told, GBSD is a $100-180 billion program, one for which LANL has been assigned what is arguably the dirtiest and most dangerous job. It is that job -- making the pits -- which is the locomotive pulling the LANL expansion and reinvestment plan. In NNSA's plan, LANL and the Savannah River Site (SRS) will both make pits, with the larger SRS facility starting production after LANL but largely dependent on LANL for transmission of pit-specific know-how to hundreds of new workers. Making pits is hard. There's tacit knowledge involved and tricky, artisan processes. GBSD is in turn just one element in the roughly $500 billion, 30-year Obama-Trump nuclear weapons modernization plan. (The total cost of nuclear weapons over the coming 30 years is close to $2 trillion, including environmental cleanup.) Leaving out detailed arguments, the "use-it-or-lose-it" GBSD system is "necessary" only because the U.S. is in most respects a national security state, not a democracy, and because big defense contractors and the Air Force generally get what they want. GBSD is about empire, not security, including the empire of defense contractors (like Triad LLC, the LANL manager, and Northrup Grumman, the largest GBSD contractor) over us. Without GBSD the U.S. would still have 1,200 deployed nuclear weapons and about 1,600 more in the so-called reserve or "hedge" arsenal, plus about 3,000 intact warheads and bombs awaiting dismantlement (including 800 or more ICBM warheads), not to mention the more than 5,000 modern, usable pits currently being kept in reserve. In 2017 U.S. nuclear weapons spending was larger than the total military spending in all but 10 countries. Yet nuclear weapons comprise only a few percent of U.S. "defense" spending overall, which comes to $8,084 per U.S. household, or $3,005 per capita. You think this country is going to have a "Green New Deal" at the same time as a $1 trillion/year "defense" budget that consumes most of the discretionary budget of the U.S? Silly you. The bottom line is that the political values, priorities, and spending involved in the proposed LANL expansion are part and parcel of those which are fatal to all progressive hopes for a better country and a better world, full stop. Climate protection will not move domestically -- nor, given the dominant U.S. place in the world, will it move internationally -- unless the U.S. dramatically changes its defense and foreign policies. Get it? If you stop or delay pit production at LANL you stop or delay it at SRS also. If you stop or delay pit production you stop or delay GBSD. Delay of pit production and GBSD would be a major dose of reality to U.S. imperialists. I want to clear up something. LANL is not some sort of general scientific laboratory, capable of a wide variety of work. Some cling to the slender reed that expansion of LANL might be good, somehow -- you know, for "research"...into...something good. So we have to ask ourselves, what is LANL? LANL is the best-funded center for nuclear weapons research, development, testing, and production in the world. Nuclear weapons were and are its raison d'etre and have made its identity and culture. Nearly all of LANL's programs serve its nuclear weapons mission or are derived from them. Take a look:
For the first time in 70 years, LANL's identity is shifting, away from research. Production is becoming a major focus and the leading source of its planned growth. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California is the lead design lab for the next two warhead upgrades that are planned. LANL's job is to produce plutonium warhead cores ("pits") for LLNL. That is, LLNL is to be the "clean" lab, and LANL the "dirty" lab. LLNL is in a Bay Area suburb, where NNSA can't get away with crapping up the environment. They can here. They have. Unless you can help us change their minds, our politicians are about to let them open up a small "Rocky Flats South," without so much as an EIS. How small? Bigger than most people, including most Democrats in Congress, think. There is no reason to think LANL could or should become a civilian research facility. We've written about this extensively, but former LLNL physicist put the issue most succinctly in a letter to the Santa Fe New Mexican several years ago, quoting and rebutting someone (rather naive) in Santa Fe: The "brilliant minds" and "use[less] infrastructure" of the nuclear labs are incapable of "work the world needs." That these nuclear weapons playpens might be "useful" to civilian purposes is a great misconception widespread among the public. Certainly, some of the individuals in these labs could apply themselves to "useful" work, applying technical skill to improve social conditions, if they were placed in the right setting (and in rare cases, on their own as lone scientist-inventors). But, such people are the exception. The vast majority are unable to conceptualize actual social needs, and few have technical expertise that is applicable to "real world" problems. Most of these "brilliant minds" need massive high-tech resources to work on arcane details of exotic physical situations with no relation to the experiences and problems that face most of humanity. Also, most of these "brilliant minds" expect lots of money for their work, and would not be cost effective to projects aimed at improving social conditions. Just like an old battleship is useless for passenger or cargo or fishing or ocean research purposes, the nuclear weapons people are similarly useless outside their niche. The only way to make the battleship useful for peaceful ends is break it up for scrap metal. Similarly, the only way to get "usefulness" out of nuclear weapons experts is to put them into civilian occupations at an entry level, and let them start over in a new "peace" mode. Few will show themselves to be brilliant.
Thank you so much for your support up to now. As we mentioned in our 9/19 letter, a generous donor offered the Study Group $5,000 in 1:1 matching funds. These are almost two-thirds matched! As before, we need to leave further details until the next Bulletin to our main mailing list. You'll get that. Thank you, Greg and Trish, for the Study Group |
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