For immediate release August 3, 2018

"Beyond Hiroshima" discussion in Los Alamos 6 pm Monday August 6 with Godfrey Reggio, Gilbert Sanchez, Carol Miller, Greg Mello, others

Contact: Greg Mello, Los Alamos Study Group, 505-265-1200 office, 505-577-8563 cell

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Albuquerque, NM – At 6 pm on the evening of August 6 the Los Alamos Study Group will host a panel discussion at Fuller Lodge [map] in Los Alamos on the theme of "Beyond Hiroshima."

Speakers will include: Santa Fe filmmaker Godfrey Reggio; San Ildefonso Pueblo leader Gilbert Sanchez; public health expert and activist Carol Miller; writer, educator and mother Marita Prandoni; and Greg Mello of the Study Group.

Monday will be the 73rd anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the first use of nuclear weapons in war. The rallying cry of "Never again!" from the surviving victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks has troubling historical relevance in New Mexico even now, given the continuing mission of New Mexico's nuclear labs.

Just this week, STRATCOM Commander Hyten [recent photo, in the main plutonium facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)] said the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) must resolve its plutonium pit (atom bomb core) production impasse by year’s end. “By about next spring, we have to be on a path to building them [pits],” he said.

Currently and for at least the next decade, LANL is the only place pits can be made.

Two billion dollars in building modifications and new equipment have been approved to prepare LANL for pit production. Extensive new facilities costing many billions more are being considered for possible subsequent expansion. 

Also this week, a new Defense Authorization Act was sent to the President's desk. For the first time it permits the manufacture of low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missile warheads, sought (and opposed) for their greater perceived threat and potential usability against Russia.

The new warheads might be produced as early as late next year. Two or possibly three additional new nuclear weapons are under development for deployment in the 2020s.

Study Group director Greg Mello: "These priorities, part of a more than one trillion dollar plan to upgrade and replace the whole US nuclear arsenal, impoverish our state and our country. Apart from their direct danger, they draw our political system backwards. They capture skills and resources we need elsewhere. They draw our leaders' attention toward instruments of death, not the nurturing of life.

"Possessing nuclear weapons, developing them, threatening with them -- all these are now banned under a new international treaty. This news has apparently not reached Los Alamos. We must pay attention to what the world is saying about nuclear weapons, like a person standing on a railway track with a train coming, oblivious to their danger.

"LANL's mission casts a dark pall of nihilism and despair over northern New Mexico, especially affecting our youth. The moral license to create such weapons, if it ever existed at all, has long expired. Nuclear weapons certainly are 'incompatible with the peace we seek for the 21st century,' as the Vatican said 20 years ago.

"LANL is not about a shining future. It has doubled down on a dark past. LANL may never move on, but New Mexico has to.

"We urgently need to begin a public conversation about our security priorities in New Mexico. What is 'national security,' in this historical moment? What is it to us -- to real people, not defense contractors? What kind of security, or opportunity, are we offering families and children? Far too little."

***ENDS***