March 10, 2020

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Please write, call, and/or attend the Santa Fe City Council: "No LANL in Santa Fe"; more

    Action items, this letter:

• If in Santa Fe:

1. Please write or call the City Council (contact information). Messages:
   
1. "No LANL in Santa Fe." Use your words. (Background, talking points on the Midtown project)
2. Adopt a resolution preventing LANL or its parent NNSA from participating in the Midtown project (draft, submitted to Council Feb. 26)
3. Adopt a resolution requesting a Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) for LANL (draft, submitted to Council Feb. 26)
4. Condemn industrial plutonium processing and manufacture of plutonium warhead cores ("pits") at LANL; reject nuclear pork-barrel and its specious "economic development" promises

2. Attend the first part of the evening session of the City Council meeting tomorrow, City Council chambers downtown (map), 7:00 pm, to make these points during petitions from the floor

Wherever you are: call us at 505-265-1200 and volunteer. We have work to do -- good work, for you, with us, if you want to help.

Dear New Mexico friends –

As we have said, what is being proposed for New Mexico is dramatically more than even the level of nuclear military subordination we have experienced up to now. We are being invaded again. Look at the numbers. Look at the plans, to the extent we know them (which is very little).

Many people near and far, including Democrats who consider themselves very "progressive," consider New Mexico's increasing commitment to nuclear weapons and waste to be our state's "Manifest Destiny." They like the jobs. They think it's inevitable. They don't use that term, "Manifest Destiny," and they may not even realize they are endorsing it, but what is happening now is in many ways an extension of what happened here and across the West in 1846 and for a half-century or so afterwards.

These people think, Los Alamos is the natural place for a pit factory -- they already make pits.* [*Reality check: 29 pits in 24 years.]We don't want "expanded" pit production [i.e. production at a non-LANL location]. It goes without saying. New Mexico is after all a kind of "savage reservation" (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World). It is a poor state. It needs economic development and jobs. Those who oppose building a pit factory here are provincial. They are NIMBYs. They are not as enlightened and objective as we of the professional managerial class, we in the "arms control" community, who understand that New Mexico needs to make this small sacrifice for the greater good.

It's bullshit. There's no logic or truth in any of it. It is the language of conquest.

You all know that if LANL can't set up and operate a new "little" Rocky Flats pit factory by the mid-2020s, NNSA will not be able to produce a new warhead for the Air Force's planned new ballistic missile any time soon. It isn't needed, not even to field the new missiles, but all parties want it. As far as new pits any time soon are concerned, that, not the hokey-pokey, is what it's all about. Not pit aging, or any other malarkey. New warheads, with new "features" and much greater accuracy.

If the arms control community truly opposed this warhead, why would they want LANL to make pits for it?

• Today, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) published a draft Supplement Analysis (SA) for pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

Find NNSA's announcement and link to the SA here.

Our comment, which you can mine for talking points: "Failure To Conduct Detailed EIS Process For LANL Is Dangerous Insult To Los Alamos And Northern New Mexico".

We have commented on the need for a new SWEIS many times before, for example here (further links within). The Albuquerque Journal North has editorialized on this recently ("Delegation should support strong review of pit production, , Feb 16, 2020).

Many more shoes remain to be dropped on this issue, a small part of the overall LANL expansion and pit production battle. We are working on concert with others but we need your help. Please call.

• Report on last week's demonstration (noon) and workshop(evening)

There were about 20 people who met with us outside Senator Udall's office to ask the Senator to request a SWEIS. A dozen or so continued with us to Senator Heinrich's, to ask the same thing. Representatives came out to meet with us (federal security being what it is) -- one from Senator Udall's (who did not take notes) and two from Senator Heinrich's office (who did).

To all those who came -- thank you.

We have asked the senators and Governor for their help in getting a SWEIS started many times over the past two years. They have not done so. Hence today's commentary.

About a dozen people also came for the evening workshop and discussion. One person set to work even before she left, and since then we have had an interesting and hopeful report from a conversation with a Santa Fe city councilor. Please do call those councilors!

• Today Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety (CCNS) presented a petition calling for a SWEIS and what is called a "programmatic" (nationwide) EIS (PEIS) for pit production 

We are somewhat supportive of this effort. We would fully support it if it didn't have a call for a PEIS in it, asexplained in our last letter.

This is a much bigger issue than just this petition.

We are sympathetic because in 2018 and 2019, we also called for two EIS efforts, a PEIS (or supplement), and a SWEIS. It made sense, we thought.

Now, however:

1. A local EIS is underway for pit production at the Savannah River Site (SRS), but not here;
2. We can better see the great scale of the proposed LANL expansion, including but not limited to pit production; and
3. We see many parties seeking to build a pit production facility at LANL, or passively allowing it, ignoring both our own and NNSA's analysis. It is the default liberal and Democratic Party choice. Facts and engineering realities seem to make no difference for many people. Apparently, if LANL can't make pits these folks would have to come to grips with their own tacit support, or semi-collapsed opposition, to new nuclear weapons. It's too big a step for them. It will cost friends, financial support, and political support. So LANL is the "go-to" place to make pits, the compromise they and their friends can live with, keep their jobs, etc.

In this political environment, so highly prejudicial against New Mexico for these reasons and many others, asking for a PEIS does not make sense any more. Requesting a PEIS means, politically, "Pit production at SRS should be reevaluated, but you can go ahead in my back yard."

By the way, any nationwide EIS (PEIS) on pit production would not address LANL's vast expansion plans in their entirety, just LANL's pit production plans -- and that, without crucial detail and alternatives. So it would be both less broad and less deep than a SWEIS.

It is important to draw a bright line here, and to understand what is going on. Unless the emphasis is changed away from a "nationwide" perspective, those who are seeking (or standing aside for) a pit factory will look at the call for a PEIS and take away just that message, ignoring the call for a SWEIS and anything else -- which in Washington are pejoratively called "local issues." They will not stop or reconsider what they are doing in promoting a pit factory here. Remember, for the arms control community, their funders, the Big Green groups active on nuclear issues, nearly all active Democrats outside this state, and most if not all of the Democratic leadership in this state, LANL is the natural place for pit production, the best political option.

So it is important to resist, to not "get along," to draw a line while we can. It is important to not agree with those who are OK with making a pit factory in NM, with those who unconsciously think it is our "Manifest Destiny" to be colonized by federal nuclear forces. If we don't draw that line our natural social instincts will be used to "socially engineer" us straight to hell.

We know CCNS very much doesn't want LANL to be a pit factory, and that is why they are doing this petition. We are eager to stand with them on this from this time forward, provided they ditch the call for a PEIS.

• We are in a time of revolutionary change. We all must change, and will.

As we said in Bulletin #268, COVID19 is rapidly changing the world. It will change all of our lives. If you weren't convinced, or didn't already realize this, I hope you do now.

Some people think things will return to "normal" after a while -- say, when Trump no longer is president, a vaccine and better treatments for COVID19 are found, the collapse of our climate is "solved," and so on.

That is not going to happen.

Just as regards COVID19, there is no reason to think the US health system is better than northern Italy's. Unless something changes for the better, COVID19 is likely to overwhelm the US health system by roughly late May. Do you think New Mexico is ready? It most assuredly is not, as one supervising physician recently remarked. Meanwhile, much in our social, economic, and political life will change.

But there is more, so much more. Picking up another thread, global production of crude oil (technically, crude oil and field condensate) temporarily peaked in late 2018. Since depletion of existing fields never sleeps, it took massive US fracking efforts to keep world production rising just a little bit until late 2018. Now demand and price have collapsed. US fracking efforts will decline, since even with previous prices the industry as a whole made no profit. "Sweet spots" -- the best spots to drill -- were declining anyway. The Governor and legislature are exquisitely attuned to this, but the plans that have been made to improve New Mexico's social development now have even less chance of success than they did before, which was very little. This Governor has largely sacrificed the environment for a neoliberal development fantasy of plutonium pits, fracking, Facebook, the Space Force, and movies. We are sympathetic; that is more or less the menu of choices our political culture provides. But what about a real social contract and real human and environmental values? What about a future for our young people that makes social, ecological and economic sense for a change?

I could go on, but the point to return to is that big changes are coming -- fast. It is very easy to underestimate that of which we have no experience.

Here at the Study Group, we expect a changed social and organizing environment perhaps as early as by this week's end or next week, simply due to further COVID19 case discovery. We cannot expect to "turn out the troops" in numbers for a while now, nor should we try.

We are living in a revolutionary time. We need to pull out all the stops for each other, for our communities, for the timeless values that really count when the chips are down. Because they are going down. It is a teachable moment. What will we demonstrate, in the time we have?

Greg, for the Study Group