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Bulletin 291: Don't enable a crash program for new ICBM warheads! January 26, 2022 Permalink for this bulletin. Please forward! Previously: Bulletin 290: Please help support our work in the coming year; positions available; good news for 2022, Dec 31, 2021 Dear friends -- This Bulletin:
Dear friends -- We hope you are all well. As the days lengthen and brighten -- and a declining omicron pandemic (the BA.2 variant notwithstanding) displaces the delta variant in most places -- we hope your spirits and creativity are finding reasons to rise as well. That said, we need to remind ourselves that business as usual (BAU) is well and truly over. "Normalcy bias" keeps many people from seeing this. Example: many people think that domestic politics as usual, and U.S. imperial bullying around the world as usual, are compatible with progress toward nuclear disarmament. They aren't. We tend to want change without change, or even inconvenience. Not going to happen. Neither can we direct or guide major changes along the lines we'd like. We are going to get major social and political changes. They are underway. They won't be the social movement we want, or we think we want. We will discover silver linings and live on them. We will cover four topics today. There are several more urgent topics which we will get to you in the coming few days, inshallah. 1. We need to remind ourselves that the collapse of a livable climate is a fast process, with feedbacks that will quickly become inexorable without major changes in our societies. This was the topic of Bulletin #280 (01/25/21; "Human survival, and nuclear disarmament, require revolutionary change") and many prior talks and bulletins running back decades. We are just one little group making these observations, which by now ought to be deeply ingrained in our thinking -- and more importantly in our actions and vocations. In general, this hasn't happened. This is an urgent, existential crisis that requires profound changes in our lives, relationships, and society right now. We should be -- and soon will be, whether we want to or not -- re-examining everything. It's all at risk and we have to take effective action now, in the next few years, or the reins will slip entirely from our hands. There should be no thought of "retirement" -- don't we already know it's unhealthy anyway? -- and frankly, no thought of conventional "careers" for young people. In a phrase, the "world" is ending. What are you going to do? Where will your place be? What story will we make of our lives, what example for the next generation, assuming there is one? Among the best analyst-communicators for a lay audience regarding this crisis is the Climate Code Red group in Australia. We invited one its leaders, David Spratt, to speak virtually at the New Mexico Capitol this past Nov. 5 (video). You will know of many others. It's beside the point to talk about the climate impact of the military, etc. Sure, it's huge. What we need to be talking about is how to stop business as usual altogether. Make no mistake: it will stop, and soon. New Mexico plays an oversized role in the climate crisis in two ways. First, New Mexico is home to a couple of the most productive counties in the Permian Basin, which has been singularly responsible for maintaining global oil production over the past few years. Oil is really "The One Ring," the master resource, that keeps BAU going. There are no scalable substitutes for oil, particularly the middle distillate fraction (diesel, jet fuel), at a cost (in either energy or dollars) compatible with industrial society and our "way of life." Second, New Mexico is home to the largest nuclear weapons design, development, and manufacturing complex in the U.S., and the best-funded one in the world. Within this, the new mission of industrial warhead core ("pit") production at LANL is the largest single project in the U.S. warhead program, one which Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) believes will cost $18 billion (B) in this decade alone. It is the bellwether of future U.S. nuclear weapons, and absolutely necessary for the new warheads for the proposed new ground-based missile (see next item). LANL pits are not at all necessary to maintain every other nuclear weapon now deployed. Unless the U.S. can be induced to halt its imperial ways, there will be no real international progress on global warming. The fate of Santa Fe -- to be, or not to be, a nuclear suburb -- is inextricably tied to the new nuclear arms race. If that arms race proceeds, climate progress will be impossible. We have what Arundhati Roy called "the power of proximity:" The battle…has to begin here. In America. The only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society. The rest of us are subjects of slave nations. We are by no means powerless, but you have the power of proximity. You have access to the Imperial Palace and the Emperor’s chambers. Empire’s conquests are being carried out in your name. That power remains largely latent today. This is not NIMBYism at all. We can only act here and now, always. The struggle for the future of our children is taking place now, in the 2020s. The world of the 2030s will be very different indeed. Far too many people of various political stripes think and act as if it will be just like today. They apparently aren't processing events and information outside their professional and ideological bubbles. 2. Organizations Call for Elimination of ‘Launch on Warning’ Land-Based Nuclear Missiles in the United States; Crash Program of Plutonium Warhead Core ("Pit") Production at Los Alamos Predicated Solely on Novel Missile Warheads, in Larger Numbers We thank the Roots Action and Institute for Public Accuracy for organizing the strategy meeting behind this statement, its text, and for pulling together these signatories and subsequent press work. As usual, we have more media and congressional followup to do than we have time for. Our own comments went further. It is best to read them in full. In summary:
An excellent local progressive activist group, Retake Our Democracy, was kind enough to broadcast and extend our comments, adding more. Thank you! Most or all of the organizations which didn't sign the above call to retire the new missiles, despite being asked by Roots Action, also turn out to be organizations actively or passively supporting a new Rocky Flats plant at Los Alamos despite its engineering unsuitability (leading directly to TWO pit factories), its dangers to workers and the public, and its impacts on Native American communities especially -- just to pick a few from the long list of problems. These organizations are enabling a new generation of ICBM warheads and the new missiles, which they claim to oppose. They want change without change. It might be objected that writing one's congressperson, as the Roots Action alert suggests, is generally futile. We agree. More is required, and when that "more" is present, a letter or visit by a delegation you organize can make a big difference. We need to dig in and nonviolently fight for our lives and the future. There will be no road if we don't make one. 3. Can Santa Fe survive as a nuclear weapons suburb? (op ed, Santa Fe New Mexican,Jan 16, 2022) It certainly can, as a kind of nuclear “Pottersville” — a sprawling, increasingly ugly “city” with growing inequality, a vacuum where shared ideals should be, with no real urban center or shared human purposes, its most cherished traditions washed away by too much money given to too few people doing “work” society doesn’t need or want. It would be a city divided against itself to be sure, with plenty of poverty, human tragedy and crime. Local people generally have no idea of the magnitude of the changes LANL seeks. These changes extend from developer John Rizzo's tacky tech ghettos proposed for southwest Santa Fe and downtown Los Alamos, to "man camps" in the Pueblos, to the large fleet of coach-class buses needed to bring 2,000 to 3,000 new staff to within walking or shuttle distance to their LANL workplaces, to the inevitable authoritarian shift in politics and culture such nuclearization would bring. Too many people are asleep, or else think that some generic "antinuclear" sentiment will make a difference. It won't. More is required of us. A few people in Santa Fe and northern New Mexico -- politicians mostly -- actively welcome and benefit by nuclear colonization. Most people know nothing about it. Others passively conform. There is some resistance, isolated in pockets and not yet conscious of its own extent. Now is the time to roar. "The lion roars at the enraging desert." By the way, the true impacts of this expansion will never appear in any environmental analysis written under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), such as (for example) a new Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS). 4. Research Associate position available The Study Group has unique capabilities, experience, knowledge, and relationships. We have a lot to offer those who work with us, and there are now more opportunities -- more "low-hanging fruit" -- than we can harvest. We need help. We are looking for a research associate. We are picky, as the work we do is difficult as well as rewarding. We are literally in the belly of the nuclear beast. Like many other organizations, work with us will begin in a short-term contract or probation period. There is also a ton of work for skilled, committed volunteers. If you are interested, write us, sending your resume. Or if you want to help support new staff or help raise funds to do so, please contact us. Look for more very soon, be well everybody, Greg and Trish, for the Study Group |
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