Bulletin 274: Please support our work! Zoominar Monday, Dec. 7, 3 pm MST: "Pits and warheads, in Congress and otherwise"

December 3, 2020

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Dear friends and colleagues --

We hope this note finds you, and your families and friends, well in every way.

1. Please support our work financially

As we approach the new year, it is time for me to ask you to please support our work financially. What we can do next year largely depends on fundraising success -- on all of us, in other words. We cherish the solidarity and moral intent expressed in the smallest donations as well as the latent power of large ones. To succeed we need both.

For those of you who already support the work we do together -- thank you. The many kind notes you send give us wings. Those praises are rightly directed to our entire community of activist-members, near and far.

There are many ways to contribute. The simplest are to mail a check to our office (Los Alamos Study Group, 2901 Summit Place NE, Albuquerque, NM, 87106), or to contribute by credit card through the PayPal Giving Fund. No fee is deducted. Or you can --

• donate stock (thus avoiding capital gains and the associated taxes), or
  
• become a sustaining donor, contributing a specified amount each month, or
• donate old cars, boats, or real estate, or
• make a contribution directly from your traditional or Roth IRA of up to $100,000, if you are age 70½ or older, without it being considered a taxable distribution, or
• remember the Study Group in your will or estate planning.

Some employers will match their employees' contributions.

Importantly you, our loyal friends and members, are the only ones who can reach out to your personal connections and email lists. We all get dozens of unwanted calls and hundreds of unwanted emails every week -- I get a dozen or so unwanted emails every hour. We cannot easily or cheaply penetrate all this noise for fundraising purposes, which remain essential, except via our friends. For all of us, friends have never been more important. For the Study Group, a society and its environmental relations based on mutual aid are both a goal, and a necessary means.

For those unfamiliar with this organization -- some of your friends, perhaps -- please see the postscript to this message.

Meanwhile:

2. Please endorse the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production!

This is not a petition in the usual sense, but rather a register of resistance, the importance of which is rapidly growing as the incoming Biden administration takes shape. It is open to individuals as well as businesses, NGOs, and religious organizations in New Mexico and across the country -- and beyond. (Some of the content is -- or rather seems -- local. The fact is that national policy takes place in, requires, and impacts specific places and specific people. It's not just abstract. Our powerful central government tends to forget this. The people whose land or lives or political sovereignty have been taken or ruined, and those who are targeted or bombed, do not.)

Please endorse the Call! It costs nothing. For a number of reasons the list of endorsers has grown slowly, but now at least the vast distraction of the election is almost behind us. Across the country, in many new as well as old ways, dissenting views -- peace views -- are being excluded and crushed. We really need to stand up together before it is too late. (Cynics may say it is already "too late." Hogwash. It's a process of national and local exclusion, loss of democracy, and degradation. Yes there's been damage of all kinds, but nothing like what will happen if everybody sits on their hands.) 

3. We will host a Zoominar to discuss issues relating to plutonium warhead core ("pit") production this coming Monday, December 7, 3 pm Mountain time.

As it turns out, pit production provides a powerful lens with which many aspects of U.S. nuclear weapons policy and practice can be brought into practical focus. There is, right now, an opportunity to roll back commitments to two new warheads, with much broader ramifications for the future of U.S. nuclear weapons. This battle is very much joined, and not just in New Mexico and South Carolina. It concerns the whole country.

In this Zoominar we will also begin what will no doubt be an ongoing discussion of the nuclear policy opportunities and dangers presented by the incoming Biden-Harris administration -- above all, what we can most conjointly and powerfully do.

This will be not be a lecture. Our goals are 1) to answer any and all questions you may have to the best of our ability and 2) to discuss what citizen activists and NGO leaders might do, regarding which we will offer some proposals.

Here are the Zoom coordinates:

Topic: Los Alamos Study Group national & international discussion of plutonium warhead core (pit) production & its policy ramifications
Time: Dec 7, 2020 03:00 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87273936580?pwd=NmZEQllIMU1ZYTdZakZVa0tuZFhjQT09

Meeting ID: 872 7393 6580
Passcode: 040601

Right now I am anticipating we will be meeting by Zoom every week, through the holidays and beyond. We will send notices to you accordingly, in the Bulletins to follow.

There is much more to say. This particular bulletin began with pages of outlines and text. I am going to have to parcel that out over time, with some going to wider publication.

Those of you on this list may wish to peruse some of the more detailed content sent to our New Mexico list. We generally do not duplicate that in these Bulletins, although much that is said there pertains to national issues.

Stay well and keep sane,

Greg Mello, for the Los Alamos Study Group

Postscript: A description of the Los Alamos Study Group taken from a grant proposal last year, with light edits to bring it up to date.

Since 1989, the Los Alamos Study Group has worked for nuclear disarmament, environmental protection, social justice, and economic sustainability – mutually-reinforcing aims that map directly onto the converging crises we face, regionally, nationally, and internationally. Throughout this time, we have contributed thoughtful popular and policy leadership on Department of Energy (DOE) and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) weapons laboratory and warhead issues, in which we have considerable – in some respects unparalleled – expertise. We have conducted hundreds of public meetings and over five hundred briefings and other meetings on Capitol Hill. We are strictly nonpartisan and factual, and we anchor policy details in a broad historical and technical perspective. We focus on practical outcomes. We have wide technical, legal, and public education experience as well as strong academic and work histories in science, engineering, law, and organizing. We draw on a wide range of other experts as needed. We have been quoted in thousands of newspaper articles and interviewed on hundreds of radio and TV programs. We have won environmental, civil rights, and freedom of information lawsuits. We have blocked major nuclear warhead infrastructure projects at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), in which efforts we have had to work against the arms control community and the New Mexico delegation. We were named one of the nation’s “top ten small green groups” in 2011 and one of eleven “favorite groups” in 2013 by Counterpunch. Our analyses of U.S. nuclear weapon modernization have been significant contributions at Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) review and preparatory conferences and other international fora since 2015. We were early supporters of, and significant participants at and between, all international fora leading to the successful creation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

We have led dozens of public workshops on energy and climate policy and related economic viability issues, and in 2017 devoted much of the summer to training young people in energy and climate policy intervention. Everything we do, in Congress and elsewhere, is informed by these concerns and our expertise in them. We seek to further leverage our knowledge, government access, and media relationships in these pressing national security issues.

Today our independent, nonpartisan, principled, broadly-informed voice is more important than ever as our society attempts to navigate through unprecedented political and environmental upheaval. This will intensify. The previous “normal” order will not return. We began with a mission of assisting in the reordering of nuclear weapons policy after the Cold War. A new Cold War is now underway. We seek to help end that war, in the context of preserving human society and a living planet. To do this, considerable leadership and training from outside the present centers of power appear necessary. We can, and to the best of our ability will, provide this.