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August 3, 2022 Bulletin 304: Your support is requested! / "US nuclear weapons since 2020: continuity and change" / Whither disarmament? Permalink for this bulletin. Simple home page. Detailed home page. Previously: Bulletin 303 (7/27/22): Fire safety deficiencies at LANL plutonium facility Dear friends and colleagues -- 1. Your support is requested! To all who have helped us toward our fundraising goals this summer and in prior years -- thank you! We still have a long ways to go. If you haven't contributed yet, there are many ways to do that -- see this page! Thank you! Bulletin 302 provided a brief rundown of our current activities and plans. To reiterate somewhat, our four billboards are fantastically cost-effective per view, but costly overall. We have a sponsor for one of them. Do you know any potential major donor might like to sponsor another one? We really depend on peer-to-peer fundraising. We need to raise about $30,000 for the other three billboards through the end of their contracts. It is far more difficult than it used to be for local media to adequately inform the public of what is planned for LANL. It's just too big a story and too well hidden. We are therefore planning to do a significant mass mailing in the very near future in the Santa Fe area. Each ten thousand simple flats -- large full-color postcards -- will cost about about $3,500, delivered. We'll start with 10,000 or whatever funding may allow, and work up from there. Standard mail, which we hope to use also, costs more. Our double-page ads in the Santa Fe Reporter were very cost effective last year. These cost $2,059 for a viewership of 60,000, with a big discount for a repeated ad. We'd like to get started on that right away as well. Our litigation for what should be public documents is going well and is highly cost-effective, but it's not free either. We can't discuss litigation here, beyond saying that even Congress has not seen what we now have before us, to any real extent. In principle members and staff could get these detailed documents, but unless they are explained to staff and members, the dots are very hard for busy people to connect. As for the public -- well, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) doesn't want the public, local governments, tribes -- even potential employees -- to know exactly what is going on. Going to Washington costs money also. Not very much in the larger scheme of things, but the face-to-face meetings, and the relationships we have there are priceless to us in more than one way. This is not "lobbying" in the usual sense. We have no conventional political power to offer. We offer only the integrity of our work and the openness we bring to the conversation. Many of our contacts there are friends of long-standing, independent of whether they share our views or not. Greg hopes to go to DC again in September. Each trip requires considerable preparation. To repeat, your "word of mouth" support is very important to us. Please share our information with others (forward this letter or share other links you like on our web site) and if you feel so moved, ask them to help support our work. Only you have your friends. We have no way of reaching them. We are not corporate America. We depend on you. We are interested in practical outcomes. We have stopped, or contributed to stopping, several large nuclear weapons projects. It's not because we are so "powerful" that we have done so. It's because the projects are stupid. We were the only ones to stop anything during the Obama administration, when the huge CMRR Nuclear Facility came to an inglorious end as a result of our litigation, extensive analysis, and decisionmaker education in DC. White House and Congressional staff credited us with that victory, which really belongs to our supporters like you. We have defeated pit production facilities multiple times, at LANL and at Pantex in Texas. This monstrosity at LANL is already teetering and will fall if its problems see the light of day. We need your help to make that happen. Finally, we were awarded the highest ("Platinum") level of openness and accountability by the GuideStar nonprofit rating organization. Please call or write us if you have any questions. 2. "US nuclear weapons since 2020: continuity and change" After several covid-related postponements, the 10th Review Conference (RevCon) of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is now underway at the United Nations in New York. As has been the case for many years, the window into this and most other UN nuclear conferences is provided by the "Reaching Critical Will" (RCW) project of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). In preparation for this RevCon, RCW published the 2022 installment of their "Assuring Destruction Forever" (ADF) series, which provides disarmament diplomats an authoritative overview of the world's nuclear weapons programs. Since 2015 the Study Group has written or co-written the U.S. chapter of this publication, as we did for 2022. As we noted in that December 2021 update, little changed in U.S. nuclear weapons policies and programs when Biden replaced Trump. There were however three major changes in the nuclear situation over the first year of the new administration:
Eight months later, there is little out of date in that narrowly-scoped chapter (while a great deal has changed in the overall nuclear situation). With the RevCon finally underway we commend it to you, along with the longer and data-rich May 2020 "Update on US Nuclear Weapons Modernization for the International Disarmament Community," which includes a more extensive discussion of U.S. public discourse regarding nuclear weapons, useful for strategic thinking. Unfortunately, disarmament institutions and convocations like the present NPT RevCon are very much continuing with the same fruitless "business as usual" approaches of past years. We have participated in many RevCons and PrepComs (the meetings of NPT states parties to prepare for the RevCons), in both New York and Geneva. We can confidently predict that, as in the past, there will be plenty of speeches, some controversy, possibly even a toothless resolution that will be soon forgotten like all the rest have been. Many speakers will tell of the dangers of nuclear weapons -- as if we didn't know. It really doesn't matter what is said at these conferences. Being there, as opposed to doing more productive things, is the problem. The continued, florid failure of the NPT nuclear weapon states to fulfill their obligations of Article VI was a major impetus to many of us who came together to create the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The NPT was a bargain, you see: nonproliferation and access to nuclear energy technologies for most of the world, nuclear disarmament by the then-five nuclear weapon states. The latter process never happened and is now much farther away than ever. At this point, we do not think most NGOs should expend scarce resources, incur significant environmental damage by long-distance flights, or even legitimize NPT gatherings, which have become little more than exercises in hypocrisy and geopolitical domination, mostly by the former colonial powers of the West. Sorry, but there's just no nicer way to say it. A few local organizations could attend and report out to the rest of civil society. 3. So -- whither disarmament? The present historical moment is one in which radical changes are occurring in almost every sphere -- geopolitical, economic, environmental, political. We face a "polycrisis" that is rocking our world, a "Seneca Cliff." To face this new situation properly, we must lift our eyes from narrow perspectives and habits of the past. Much is unknown, and all conclusions will be tentative. Most of us will be living provisional answers before we fully comprehend what is really happening. This requires greater boldness, and greater tolerance from us, than we may be used to. In our view, most U.S. and international arms control and disarmament efforts are now badly wrong-footed. Most of these efforts proceed in tracks laid down decades ago, tracks which go in circles or don't go at all. Many, like Rip van Winkle, are "sleeping through a great revolution," in Martin Luther King's words. Many disarmament advocates are repeating yesterday's platitudes, which remain "virtuous" in principle but not as relevant as they once were, i.e. not so virtuous in practice. There is a tendency to base activities on political assumptions with little basis in current realities, thereby cutting we the actors off from history and the vital questions facing our communities today. We will not be able to say all that needs to be said today. Consider this an introduction, and one with fewer references than we'd like to provide. Time is limited. As we warned last December (when we wrote the above chapter), war between the U.S. and Russia did indeed break out before the NPT Review Conference. It is not just a proxy war, which would be bad enough (especially for Ukraine, and for Europe's economies). It is more than a proxy war. The U.S. and its NATO allies are now directly at war with Russia on the territory of Ukraine, supplying vast stores of weapons, training Ukrainian forces in-country and elsewhere, with skilled U.S. "advisors" and "volunteers" on the ground in Ukraine. The U.S. is supplying real-time targeting and reconnaissance information in addition to financing the war, and is providing vast propaganda support. U.S. space and cyber resources are engaged. Economic and political sanctions have been tightened against "The Enemy" far past the point of self-harm, especially for Europe. All that "Ukraine" is providing at this point is human cannon fodder to be cut up by deadly Russian artillery and missiles, terrain in the right location, plenty of vulnerable civilians and infrastructure to hide amongst, and lots of propaganda. At no time up to its start did the U.S. take any step to prevent this war -- quite the opposite -- and at no time has the U.S. taken any action to end it. Again, quite the opposite. Unfortunately (and with outstanding exceptions) the U.S. peace movement has not found a collective voice against the war, even though a majority of the U.S. citizens now oppose it. As noted previously in a letter to some of you, the details of this majority lack of support (p. 22) are interesting. Democrats, liberals, college graduates (especially white), and older people are more supportive of Biden's war policies, which have been extremely provocative and militaristic. Those of lower income and those without a college degree are the most "antiwar" of the groups interviewed. The situation vis-a-vis Taiwan is of a piece with this, absent the carnage thus far. We can expect that soon enough, if U.S. policies don't change. Under these conditions, preceded by two-plus decades of NATO expansion, installation of ambiguous intermediate-range missile systems within striking distance of Moscow, systematic dismantling of all but one remaining arms control treaty, and intentionally creating an existential crisis for Russia in as many ways as possible -- whither nuclear disarmament? The answer is simple: it is now irresponsible to use phrases like "nuclear disarmament" and "nuclear abolition" unless they are logically secondary to halting war and the preparations for war with Russia and China. In New Mexico, where there is a crash program to build a replacement for the former Rocky Flats plutonium weapons core ("pit") factory, it is irresponsible to use these phrases unless they are secondary to halting construction and operation of this pit factory. In New Mexico, talking about "nuclear abolition" instead of working hard to stop this pit factory is like going to a human rights convention in Dachau in 1939. Everybody is against nuclear weapons -- officially, even the United States government. And nobody wants a nuclear war. Saying one is in favor of "nuclear disarmament" or "against nuclear war" is not saying much at all. It's like motherhood and apple pie -- a risk-free, virtue-signaling, vacuous political posture. As we approach the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there will be plenty of statements against nuclear weapons and nuclear war. They are boring. The goals and actions of peace- and disarmament-oriented people need to be a lot more specific to be fruitful. The U.S. and Russia together possess 87% of the world's nuclear weapons. NATO members UK and France hold a combined 5% more. China, another 4%. So fully 96% of the world's nuclear weapons are implicitly involved in the today's war with Russia and today's near-war with China, both situations gratuitously inflamed by the U.S. and its allies. If you want nuclear disarmament, and we all do, we have to stop these wars and near-wars, and build back normal diplomatic relations. That is not going to be easy. Relations with Russia are likely trashed for a generation. Russia no longer considers the U.S. "agreement-capable," for structural as well as political reasons. These recent comments from Medvedev are typical not just for him but for many if not most Kremlin leaders. Disarmament advocates need to understand that the U.S. has destroyed prospects for arms control and disarmament for the foreseeable future. China is now rapidly increasing its nuclear forces, in response to U.S. aggression and stated U.S. aims. It simply will not do for civil society to blather on about "nuclear weapon states" generically, in the language of the NPT, implying a false equivalence. There is only one would-be global hegemon. As we note in our piece for this RevCon, U.S. military spending is more than twelve times Russia's, in dollar terms (not purchasing power). NATO's military spending is more than the entire rest of the world combined. There will be no nuclear disarmament until Russia's security needs, as Russia perceives them, are met. This is just elementary diplomacy, but somehow many of us have lost sight of it. With no modus vivendi, how can there be nuclear disarmament? We need to talk about this. Greg Mello and Trish Williams-Mello, for the Study Group |
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