Bulletin 272: Public webinar Saturday July 25, 1 pm EDT: "What Every Global Citizen Needs to Know About the Decision to A-Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki," discussed by the best scholars; a lot more news

July 24, 2020

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1. Superb historians conducting webinar tomorrow on the decision to drop the bombs in 1945
2. A whole lot of news and analysis, only some given here
3. Please endorse The Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production

Dear friends and colleagues --

We hope you are keeping well, in body and spirit.

TOMORROW, Saturday, July 25, at 1 pm EDT, four historians -- possibly the best who could have been chosen for this role -- will discuss the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a public webinar organized by Peter Kuznick at American University and co-sponsored by many organizations including ours.

Entitled "What Every Global Citizen Needs to Know About the Decision to A-Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki," the Zoominar is open to all at https://american.zoom.us/j/94643113866?pwd=c2VnWmdUR0NuakRDNXY0QjVVZmtXZz09.

Speakers include:

• Gar Alperovitz, formerly a Fellow of Kings College Cambridge, the Institute of Politics at Harvard, and Lionel Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, is the author of Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb. He is currently a Principal of The Democracy Collaborative, an independent research institution in Washington, D.C.
• Martin Sherwin, University Professor of History, George Mason University, is author ofA World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies winner of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relation’s Bernath Book Prize, co-author with Kai Bird of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for biography, and Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, forthcoming in September 2020. 
• Kai Bird, Executive Director, CUNY Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography, co-author (with Martin Sherwin) Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, co-editor (with Lawrence Lifschultz) Hiroshima’s Shadow, and author The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment. 
• Peter Kuznick, Professor of History, Director, Nuclear Studies Institute, American University, co-author (with Akira Kimura), Rethinking the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Japanese and American Perspectives, co-author (with Oliver Stone) of the New York Times best-selling The Untold History of the United States (books and documentary film series), and author “The Decision to Risk the Future: Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb and the Apocalyptic Narrative.”
• Carolyn Forché, whose first book of poetry, Gathering the Tribes, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. In March, 2020, Penguin Press published her fifth collection of poems, In the Lateness of the World. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Press, 2019), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. Her international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.” In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture. She is one of the first poets to receive the Wyndham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and is a University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

We are familiar with pertinent works of the first four authors and could not recommend these people more highly.

There is also available a Zoom recording of a press briefing held yesterday by the first four authors on the same topic moderated by Barbara Cochran, former news executive at NPR, NBC, and CBS and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri, at https://american.zoom.us/rec/share/9ZRsNu2z33tOXp3x7WbUQZIbGo3ceaa80SlI_PZfzB50Vou_zjBNsWgJVy9Eqkhb.

A whole lot of news and analysis

We have been more or less buried in work here, as some of you have been as well. We will just cover a few high points and return for more in the next bulletin, ASAP.

Our June 11 Zoominar ("Plutonium pits, failures of reform, and the war on the poor") was reasonably successful. We have not yet posted the slides. We will. There was some overlap with this May presentation, available at the link.

On July 1 we sent a relatively detailed letter to congressional and other government decisionmakers asking "Why is Congress funding plutonium pit production in the 2020s and thereby squandering billions in yet another gigantic boondoggle at Los Alamos?"

It doesn't include the whole sordid recent history (but contains enough to get the gist) of how Congress came to be buying two pit factories -- one of which (in Los Alamos) is already a fiscal black hole as NNSA itself had more or less predicted it would be in 2017.

We could ask many in the arms control community the same things we are asking Congress. Why is the arms control community standing by holding NNSA's coat while the agency tries to build a pit factory in the old PF-4 building? Why is "the community" pretending to oppose the new W87-1 warhead while enabling the very pit production required to produce it, pit production being the greatest single obstacle to doing so? It's part of a long pattern of bad compromises that have kneecapped opposition to nuclear weapons for the past 25 years.

We wrote the same government actors again on July 8 regarding a deceptive amendment designed to bring the whole pit production mission to Los Alamos that was proposed by House Strategic Forces Subcommittee Chairman Jim Cooper, which passed the Armed Services Committee on a party line vote ("Congressman Cooper's amendment 266 to H.R. 6395, comments, Jul 8, 2020). We hope the Senate will not endorse this language, for the reasons stated. This amendment purports to be a "responsible government" sort of effort. It is anything but, as explained.

On July 23 the Los Alamos Reporter connected a lot of dots in its important article "DOE/NNSA Seeks Office And Warehouse Space To Lease Within 50-Mile Radius Of LANL," which followed our press release of July 21.

If you are skimming this Bulletin, the gist of this press release and article is that Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is formally proposing to expand to multiple campuses in multiple New Mexico counties, as its own facilities -- and the housing stock available, and the road capacity -- are all being overwhelmed by the dramatic expansion of LANL required for the industrial plutonium warhead core ("pit") mission. The second point the article brings home is that the entire process is secret, despite multiple requests from local government to know what the heck is going on.

We followed up yesterday with another letter to Congress, the White House, and other agencies (" NNSA seeks to lease office, light lab, and warehouse space within 50 miles of LANL on urgent basis").

In that letter we note that the estimated initial cost of establishing a 30 pit per year (ppy) capacity at LANL has more than doubled in just three years.The estimated LANL operating cost for pit production has also more than doubled over the past two years, because the staffing estimates have more than doubled. It is this need for so many staff, caused by 24/7 operations, which in turn is necessary to reach even 20 ppy in the inadequate PF-4 facility, which is driving the need for making LANL a regional, rather than localized-in-Los-Alamos, operation.

We had a decent turnout at our socially-distanced demonstration at the State Capitol to mark the anniversary of the Trinity shot (press release, article with pictures "Trinity Site nuclear test remembered, Albuquerque Journal, Jul 16, 2020). Unfortunately we had to compete with an anti-face-mask demonstration at the same time in almost the same place!

Our demonstration asked our Governor to request a Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) for the massive expansion of LANL ("Administration seeks 49% increase in Los Alamos nuclear weapons activities, 33% plus-up for LANL overall," Feb 23).

The many reasons why a SWEIS is needed were summarized in a June 29 letter to the New Mexico Environment Department.

Lydia Clark, our Outreach Director, has published two important recent guest editorials ("Santa Fe shouldn’t become a nuclear sacrifice zone, Albuquerque Journal, July 19, and "Step up against expansion of LANL's nuclear mission, Santa Fe New Mexican, June 27).

There is more news and commentary to be found on our web site, including:

• Luján seeks $6 billion for national laboratories in House bill, Santa Fe New Mexican, Jul 1
• Inequities Edited Out of Los Alamos National Lab Study, Rio Grande Sun, Jun 26
• A Knee On The Neck Of Northern New Mexico, Los Alamos Reporter, Erich Kuerschner, Jun 10

Finally, please endorse The Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production

It seems simple enough, but why don't more people do it? It takes a very short time and costs nothing.

The Call is now open to individuals as well as businesses, NGOs, and religious organizations.

We have not sent this Call to people outside New Mexico before either, though some have already endorsed. Some of the content is local, some not.

We will publish growing list of endorsers' names but not any contact information. We keep all such information confidential.

We will discuss the Call and more about political strategies in the next Bulletin.

Please stay safe everyone,

Greg, Trish, and Lydia, for the Study Group