Bulletin 270: Thursday, June 11, (formerly June 9), Zoominar: "Plutonium pits, failures of reform, and the war on the poor" (RSVP for details)

June 6, 2020

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Dear friends and colleagues --

On Thursday, June 11, 2020, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm we will have a Zoom seminar on plutonium warhead core ("pit") production in its wider context, entitled "Plutonium pits, failures of reform, and the war on the poor." We will have plenty of time for Q&A.

Everyone who is interested is welcome at this virtual meeting, but we'd like folks to RSVP by writing us. Then we'll send the meeting ID and password to you. Please do not share these meeting coordinates, especially on social media, but meanwhile do ask others whom you think might be genuinely interested to write us for what amounts to a virtual "ticket." We have space for 100 people.

To repeat, all genuinely-interested parties are welcome, no matter what your political or national security views. After the meeting, we will publish the briefing slides and any other materials but not an audio recording.

Our apologies to those who RSVP'd to our initial, more local announcement: we originally advertised this event for June 9, but important family matters intervened and we need another two days to prepare while attending to these and other responsibilities.

On May 19 we conducted a previous Zoominar on part of this topic ("LANL’s proposed expansion and plutonium warhead core (“pit”) plans in context," briefing slides).

In the upcoming Zoominar we will focus more on how arms control and Democratic-led "reforms" are leading -- largely unwittingly by most NGOs and activists, but consciously by Democratic leaders -- to jump-starting pit production in one of the riskiest and most unjust places imaginable, meanwhile greatly increasing budgets and enabling new warheads for the Air Force and Navy.

Such an outcome -- currently endorsed by every single member of Congress, but still highly uncertain for reasons we will discuss -- would be the latest in a long string of failed compromises advanced by liberal reformers since the end of the Cold War (see "Stewards of the Apocalypse: an abridged history of U.S. nuclear weapons labs since 1989," May 18, 2016 for some of the highlights; or "Co-opting the Anti-Nuclear Movement," Darwin BondGraham, Counterpunch, 22 Jul 2010). These failures have led to considerable confusion. In the pit production context, we attempted to address part of this in a recent letter to activists ("Letter to "NukeNet": concerns about organizational sign-on aimed at focusing pit production at LANL," May 30, 2020), but the subject is much bigger than just pit production, arms control, or disarmament activism. We are in the midst of an enormous historical change -- literally, the decline of an empire, a civilization, and of living nature, with profound impacts on all of our institutions -- so all of us can see only "as through a glass, darkly."

As we see expressed in the current wave of protests and riots, liberal reforms in race relations, police reform, and economic justice over the same period have also led nowhere -- or rather, in economic justice, backwards. We see no signs of improvement in current events. As expressed in the spare, opinionated, but often-prescient prose at the Moon of Alabama blog, "Little Was Changed By The First Round of The Civil Wars Of 2020," June 5, 2020). Meanwhile, "Millions Of Americans Skip Payments As Tidal Wave Of Defaults And Evictions Looms," (NPR, June 3, 2020). So stay tuned. Prosperity is permanently declining -- very unevenly, and that is just the beginning. It will get darker -- far darker -- before the dawn (Paul Gilding, May 26, 2020). As Gilding notes,

Having a global pandemic with devastating economic impacts used to be one of these predictable  1 and catastrophic ‘black elephants’. Then it arrived – but we had chosen not to prepare. The others are now stampeding toward us, including climate change  2 , the collapse of the fossil fuel industry  3, social and economic inequality  4 , ocean and eco-system collapse  5, famine  6, mass refugees  7 and others. As well as their direct economic impact, many will also drive social instability, civil unrest, nationalism, debt and credit crises  8, protectionism, geopolitical realignment and military conflict  9 – further magnifying the economic consequences.
...
I don’t want you to think ‘We always figure these things out.’  I want you to face reality. We won’t act until we shift to what activist and writer Margaret Klein Salomon calls “Facing the Truth”. When we face the truth about the state we are in, what’s at risk and how bad it could get – we will act. But that moment is not here yet.

The vast U.S. global threat industry, centered in but extending beyond its gargantuan, globe-straddling military, has to be seen and understood as a present and very real threat to our societies and communities, but especially to all those who are vulnerable -- that is to say, almost by definition, the poor. The present Obama-initiated effort to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, now with its pell-mell rush into pit production, is just a small part of this overall policy of greed, lust for power, and predation.

In a recent paper we wrote for the NGO and diplomatic community at the United Nations at the request of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom ("Update on US Nuclear Weapons Modernization for the International Disarmament Community," May 13, 2020), we touched upon some of the fallacies and fantasies that haunt nuclear disarmament activism, and what we think can be done to surmount them. We will connect some of those dots, as best we can, in the upcoming Zoominar. Nuclear disarmament efforts will fail unless its leaders are able to overcome their gullibility and naive hopes, and shake off the influences coming directly and indirectly from the US national security state.

Thank you for your attention, and please write us if you want to "attend" on June 11,

Greg Mello, for the Los Alamos Study Group