Permalink for this bulletin. Please forward to your lists!
Subscribe or unsubscribe to these bulletins.
Contribute!  Contact us.  Volunteer!
Facebook: Los Alamos Study Group; Twitter: @TrishABQ; Blog: Forget the Rest
Local letters to members (ask if you want to receive these); bulletins; home page
Key resources: nuclear weapons ban, plutonium pit production

December 10, 2017 

Bulletin 239: Excellent Nobel award ceremony video; more

The bomb first was our weapon. Then it became our diplomacy. Next it became our economy. 
Now it's become our culture. We've become the people of the bomb.
– E. L. Doctorow

Dear friends and colleagues –

Normally we don't send key news and related videos around (except to a small inner circle of Study Group activists and leaders). Today's Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony in Oslo (excellent video here) is an exception.

Why? Because most of the audience for these bulletins are Americans, we who have become "the people of the bomb." Watching this might open some mental doors.

The quality of the video is very high. The three speeches were quite good, as were the short musical interludes. Occasional narration was helpful, not intrusive. 

For New Mexicans in particular, a good long look at how the civilized world views nuclear weapons is a salutary exercise in de-colonialization.

As far as mainstream coverage goes, Al Jazeera has the best so far:

• Anti-nuclear group ICAN receives Nobel Peace Prize (3:11 video report)
  
• Nuclear Weapons: In Conversation with ICAN (Al Jazeera interview with Rebecca Johnson, includes background video)
• There was an hour-long Al Jazeera interview today with Reaching Critical Will's (and Study Group director) Ray Acheson, and ICAN's Tim Wright as well as Beatrice Fihn, but it is not yet posted on-line.
  

We hope to see some of you later today at quietly-celebratory get-togethers in Santa Fe (3:15 pm) and Albuquerque (6:30 pm). Talk to us there about some of the next steps in resistance to Trump's nuclear modernization program. (It was and still is Obama's plan, but it might get worse in January and February, so brace yourself -- and join us.)

Other good news of note:

• The national Sierra Club has endorsed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW):

  History proves that the production and testing of nuclear weapons poses grave environmental risks. The cost to human life and health and the environmental devastation caused by the use of nuclear weapons is unthinkable. Sierra Club applauds the efforts of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, and supports global ratification and implementation of a verifiable, binding UN treaty with the goal of reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons.

Here in New Mexico we look forward to working with the Rio Grande Chapter on the essential work of ending the production of nuclear weapons components at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), and their subcontractors.

• The Mexican senate has unanimously ratified the TPNW. We are now at 56 signatures and 4 ratifications.
  

• As noted in Bulletin 237, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) doubts LANL can do the pit production mission. So do we. Lest there be any confusion, we also think this mission is unnecessary. As I wrote to a congressional advisor this morning, "We need not credence folly, greed, and the lust for domination, which are the triple bases of this [mission]. There is nothing sane about it."

• In truth we -- each of us, and all together -- are the good news, if we would but accept it.
  

More another time, meanwhile best wishes to all,

Greg and Trish, for the Study Group