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August 21, 2022 Bulletin 306: Please recruit allies in 1) the "Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production," 2) our fundraising drive, 3) nuclear careers (ours, not theirs); pitpourri Permalink for this bulletin. Simple home page. Detailed home page. Previously: Bulletin 305: Can we make Archbishop Wester's call for nuclear disarmament real, for us?, Aug 9, 2022 Dear friends and colleagues -- * Please help recruit allies to stand with us and others against the resumption of plutonium warhead core ("pit") production! "We call for sanity, not nuclear production." Many of you have endorsed this simple call against a nuclear arms race and in favor of new national priorities. Some you have reached out to others. Thank you! Resumption of pit production, the mission of the former Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, is by far the largest warhead-related program in the United States. The bulk of these funds are being spent at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where there is a crash program to convert and augment various existing older facilities into a factory complex, supposedly "needed" to produce a new warhead for ground-based missiles in sufficient quantity to be able to load three warheads on each missile as a "bargaining chip" or, in a crisis, as a "signal of resolve." This new mission for LANL requires thousands of additional workers, 24/7 operations, and many new facilities and other infrastructure expansions. The National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA's) own engineers opposed using LANL's existing facilities for a pit production complex. The work at LANL is already falling behind and is beset with challengings. It is particularly important to stop pit production and a new arms race right now, in this crucial decade. We are making a special push this week to recruit more allies prior to a press conference with allied groups in a few days, the exact date and time TBD depending on various schedules. This press conference will be in Santa Fe. We would love to call every potential allied group individually but we are already stretched very thin. So we are counting on you to help with "grasstops" outreach. Despite the hard work of some, there is actually very little organized nuclear disarmament activity or peace organizing going on in the U.S. Most people are struggling to make ends meet, fulfill their professional responsilities, raise children, care for sick relatives and friends, or manage their own illnesses. The once-large middle class has been replaced by a growing "precariat." Many of our own friends, family, and Study Group supporters are struggling. In such a situation, small efforts can make a great difference. Many people have asked, "What can I do?" This is such a thing. Your conversations will help us all. So far there are 75 organizations and businesses and 287 individuals signed on. We hope as many of you as possible will be able to attend. Speakers will be announced later. We'll send out further arrangements early in the week. * Mid-year fundraising drive continues; please help with outreach especially if you can! We really need your help, especially with peer outreach (see Bulletins304 and 302). There's nobody backstopping this organization, and funds are scarce. Billboard contracts and mailings are expensive; so is litigation (cut-rate, but not free!). Educating government officials, journalists, and interns takes time and costs money as well. As noted above, there is actually very little organized nuclear disarmament activity underway in the U.S. and very little funding. And it shows. There is almost no resistance to any of the present administration's nuclear plans. As a result the neoconservatives that inhabit this administration are running amuck. * Vocations, ours and theirs Who will educate the rising generation? We don't see much of that going on, in the disarmament field. Academia largely orients itself to establishment-oriented, empire-friendly careers. We'd love to bring interns on board. There's powerful work to be done, ripe fruit to be plucked, but few to do it. As the inimitable Caitlin Johnstone put it this morning, "They Demolished the Left And Burned the Blueprint." Not quite, however. Not here. Want to make a difference? Think about it. As mentioned recently, LANL is having a hard time recruiting for its pit production mission in particular, and is also suffering from high employee attrition. Many new hires soon leave, as many as 30% or even 50% in certain LANL departments. There are just a lot of other better things for people to do than spend their days (or nights) reaching into a plutonium glovebox. One volunteer is working with us on better outreach to potential hires. We could use a lot more help on this and some other things. * Pitpourri As previously sent, NNSA to conduct fake "environmental impact statement" process to justify decisions, big future expansion, at Los Alamos, press release, Aug 18, 2022. There was some local news about that (here and here). What's important is to not confuse participation in (or criticism of) the fake "environmental impact statement process" with actually preventing the expansion of LANL and its impacts. The whole effort is a red herring, something designed to throw citizens and nonprofits "off the scent" of actually opposing and resisting, educating and organizing. It's easy to participate in this bogus process, with or without whining about it. Both will cost little and accomplish nothing except make NNSA happy about their successful "public participation" effort. Their process is designed to convert your criticism and your offered content (whatever it is, whether critical or supportive) into support for their nuclear weapons plans. The impact analysis NNSA's contractors will do will also be bogus, by the way. It always is. You can count on it. By the way, in October of 2020 the Study Group held its own scoping hearing (announcement with background, letter transmitting video record of testimony to federal and state officials). That was then. State and federal authorities did not deem it necessary to conduct an environmental impact investigation before the decision to build a new "right-sized" Rocky Flats Plant at LANL. Such a process will not stop them now, as we explained three days ago. Or as former Study Group president Peter Neils put it the other day, "Where else in the known universe could spending $18 billion to replace “existing” facilities be portrayed as 'no action'?" *** Our billboards linking New Mexico's "#1 in nuclear weapons" status with the state's "49th" ranking in child well-being are now slightly obsolete, since New Mexico has fallen back to 50th in overall child well-being. We'll see what it costs to put a snipe on those billboards. Ironically, the failure of LANL in particular to provide economic or social development is contributing to LANL's difficulty in recruiting and retaining staff. New Mexico's public K-12 education has been ranked 50th for seven years in a row. *** As mentioned previously, earlier this month we received a so-called "LANL Campus Master Plan" document. (It isn't that plan, but that's another story.) There are still a lot of people (in Los Alamos, no less) who can't imagine it could happen here. This news is for them, and for the people in Washington and elsewhere who think that creating a LANL pit production capability is going to be cheap. It indicates, among other things, that to continue LANL's existing assigned missions more than 4 million square feet of new construction is needed for the main LANL technical area (TA-03) and the western end of Pajarito Canyon, where LANL's plutonium operations are located. "Several thousand" additional new staff members will be needed in Pajarito Canyon.LANL's main plutonium facility ("PF-4") will need to be replaced or augmented with one or more additional plutonium facilities, and the Sigma nuclear facility will also need to be replaced soon. (The cost of a new plutonium facility alone would lie in the $10 billion range, if it is feasible; Senate staff threw out a number twice that high in conversation. The previous effort failed. That and previous failures were described as "Sisyphean" by the Congressional Research Service; see also Bulletin 281: LANL pit production: fifth failure in progress, Jul 16, 2021). LANL will also be building what it calls the "National Energetic and Engineering Weapons Campus" (NEEWC, pronounced "nuke"), a 17-square-mile campus for engineering and environmental testing site for nuclear weapons and high explosives. LANL loves names that build employee identity. We'll say more about LANL's plans on another occasion. The new plutonium facility(ies) and other needed facilities are not yet "costed in." Congress -- and the Pentagon -- have no idea. Yet. Stay well, thank you for your support, Greg Mello, for the Study Group |
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