July 26, 2022

Bulletin 302: Mid-year fundraising drive: please help support our work!

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Previously: Bulletin 301: (05/16/22) Oppose the war! Demand and create accountability for lawmakers who fund and promote more war in Ukraine

Dear friends and colleagues --

We ask for financial support only a few times each year. This is one of those times.

We are completely dependent on the generosity of individual donors and members, like you, for everything we do.

So if you can, please help us do more in-depth analysis, more congressional, news media, and public education, more litigation and advertising, and more issue training for those who want it.

And if you can, please help us reach out to others who might want to support the Study Group's work. Peer-to-peer fundraising is critically important for groups like ours.

I am happy to report that we're making progress.

• Regarding the National Nuclear Security Admininistration's (NNSA's) program to accelerate plutonium warhead core ("pit") production by building a new factory at Los Alamos, the tide is turning (see below). We've only been to Washington for one week this year but have kept in touch with key staff by phone and email. It's definitely a tough slog and we definitely need help, but we see progress. There is now little doubt that pit production at Los Alamos is failing. But as failures become apparent, will NNSA just keep doubling down? They might want to do just that.


• Our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation is bringing forth shocking new information as yet unknown to Congress and the public, while also reestablishing important principles of public access to information. Stay tuned, more is coming.


• Our four billboards, seen by a half-million pairs of eyes every four weeks, cost us an average of just one cent per view. They are building local awareness about the crash program to build a plutonium bomb factory in Los Alamos and the leadership failures it represents, while also encouraging debate about the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. These issues, as readers of these bulletins know, are closely linked. The Los Alamos bomb project has nothing to do with maintaining a nuclear "deterrent" so-called, and everything to do with providing the option for a "triad" of independently-targeted warheads for the new silo-based missile. That, and the further growth and maintenance of the nuclear production workforce acrosss the country.


• Despite a lack of journalists and the widespread ignorance and groupthink in the remaining U.S. news media and various audiences, our information and perspectives were featured in about 30 news articles so far this year, some with wide circulation, along with various radio programs. A Searchlight NM articlewas featured in USA Today and other papers, garnering millions of views. One in-depth interview on the Ukraine war has been seen over 50,000 times. There's a real hunger for truth out there and at least some attitudes are changing, with a majority of Americans now opposing the Administration's Ukraine policies.


• It's important to build an educated core group of fellow citizens and to be accountable in our communities. To that end we've held 9 public discussions this year in New Mexico. We also keep an inner group of about 30 people up to date on the most important overlooked developments bearing directly and indirectly on nuclear weapons policy on a daily basis.

We're proud of our track record in helping halt stupid nuclear weapons projects, which frankly has no parallel nationally.

It's critically important to change priorities in this decade, as we are now entering a recession from which the economy will not recover, if for no other reason than depletion of cheap energy resources. Overall, we face a converging "polycrisis" far beyond the capability of central governments to manage. There will be massive changes in how we organize our lives as our economies willy-nilly "degrow." What will happen is unclear, but we and our children are all going to be deeply involved in this transition whether we want to be or not.

Plutonium pits have a longer shelf life than the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, or the age of cheap oil, or a livable climate on earth. Inflation will eat nuclear weapons budgets just like it is eating ours.

So how far down the road of militarized squalor will the United States go? Will some feckless leader start the ball rolling faster toward nuclear apocalypse, say by sending NATO troops or planes into Ukraine? Nuclear war could be right around the corner. Can we wisely end the empire, before it ends us one way or another?

A few words about pit production

Congress and the uniformed military are beginning to understand that Los Alamos can't make enough pits to support a nuclear arsenal.

They do not however see the horrific price tag for two pit factories -- although they can certainly add just as well as we can -- and what that implies for the old, small, inadequate, explicitly unsafe factory-to-be at LANL, with its inadequate support facilities, inadequate housing and transportation, inadequate staffing -- its inadequate everything.

A lot of people think LANL has a pit production facility that "just" needs to be upgraded, modernized, and expanded. These little adjustments will "just" cost at least $16 billion through this decade and will go on up from there with no apparent endpoint, as first one and then another expensive new facility is going to be required.

Barring a miracle, getting back to the production level of 10 pits per year (ppy) that LANL had 10 years ago -- less than one per month -- is going to take at least a year longer than previously anticipated because, according to LANL documents in our possession, LANL accomplished only 7 months of work toward the 10 ppy goal over the 20 months that ended in September 2021. (How well they have done since, we do not know.)

Well over a billion dollars was dissipated in those "lost months," with little to show for it. Even more than that will be required to get back on schedule, LANL says -- if that is even possible.

Meanwhile the production capacity of LANL is zero, as it has been since 2013.

As of late last year the probability of meeting the 2026 production goal was officially "To Be Determined." That is a euphemism.

LANL is therefore in a race to get as much built, and as many people hired as possible, before influential people figure out what a boondoggle it all is.

As noted previously, LANL has already "depleted the local talent pool in northern New Mexico" (p. 25). Some hiring continues, but LANL considers the local labor market "tapped out" -- which no doubt it is.

The long and short of it is that the United States has no coherent or even viable pit production strategy at this time.

As long as NNSA depends on LANL to make pits on an industrial basis, as opposed to just running a demonstration and training program at LANL, the U.S. will be building TWO new pit factories, one of which -- LANL's -- will never make pits for less than $50 million apiece, to the extent it makes any significant number of them at all.

As one Pentagon analyst put it last year, "a dollar spent on pit production at LANL is a dollar wasted." Indeed.

Meanwhile northern New Mexico, and perhaps New Mexico as a whole, will not survive as a remotely democratic entity if NNSA continues pouring $1.5 or $2 billion per year into it for a plutonium pit factory, overshadowing every other investment.

Greg Mello, for the Study Group