November 27, 2022

Bulletin 315: Urgent fundraising request, matching grant available! Also: near-daily selected Ukraine updates; updated pit policy recommendations; legislative testimony

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Previously: Bulletin 314: Reminder re next week's antiwar, disarmament, & nuclear safety events: come if you can or tune in, outreach needed; pit interview on KNME tonight 7 pm; fundraising drive continues; erratum [in Bull. 313], Nov 11, 2022. 

This Bulletin in a nutshell:

1. Urgent fundraising request; matching grant doubles donations up to a total of $10,000;
   
2. Near-daily Ukraine war updates, this page;
3. Congressional briefing on plutonium pit policy
4. Testimony to NM legislature on LANL expansion
5. More about the Study Group; our 2023 priorities

Dear friends and colleagues --

We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We are very thankful to have the privilege of working -- for three decades now -- within such a wonderful community of friends and supporters. The "secret weapon" of the Study Group is the strength and selflessness we see in the activities and commitments of people we are proud to call friends.

1. We don't ask very often but we really do need financial support right now, this year.

As we approach the turning of the year it is time to ask those of you who can to help fund the coming year's work, and to reach out to your friends on our behalf, if you can.

You can use the links on this contribute page. As noted there, contributions can be made in many ways.

Thanks to a generous matching donor, all contributions received from today forward will be doubled, up to a total of $10,000. (If you or anyone you know is in a position to contribute another matching grant of this amount or more, please let us know!)

What do contributions pay for at the Study Group? What do programs cost? Very roughly,

• Four billboards, about $65,000 in 2022. These cost about $0.01 per view, so a $100 donation buys about 10,000 views. Two year-long contracts end in January -- our best billboards, LOL -- so we have some near-term choices to make.
• Lobbying Congress, about $20,000 this year. Mostly this is done from our office but in-person trips are necessary and cost-effective. Personal relationships matter a great deal.
• Freedom of Information Act activities and litigation, about $20,000 this year.
• Media education and outreach, ballpark $10,000.
• Research, communications of all kinds including web site, public meetings, roughly $35,000 this year.

We will broaden our outreach modes next year and also bring in new people to help, presumably as paid interns unless major new funding appears.

There are huge opportunities at hand. It's very frustrating to see so much "low-hanging fruit" there is, that we know very well how to pick, but simply have no time to do so!

So yes, we are looking for eager interns!

We usually don't allow donors to choose what they'd most like to fund but at the moment we can make an exception. If you want your donation (those over $1,000 only, to avoid excess bookkeeping) to go to any of the following five programs, let us know:

• Billboards, newspaper ads, and mailings;
• Lobbying Congress;
• Litigation;
• Research and communications of all kinds, including media outreach; and
• Internships.

See 5. (below) for more details.

2. As part of a commitment made to our communities at our November 15 emergency meeting about the Ukraine war, we are posting near-daily updates to this web page.

We have also added a few more "mostly trustworthy sources" in the left-hand column. As you can see, no Western mainstream media made it into the "mostly trustworthy" category.

As always, compare sources -- and think. As we must keep reminding ourselves, we are more thoroughly saturated with propaganda than most people can even imagine.

3. If interested please find this Congressional briefing on plutonium pit policy, updated, Nov 14, 2022.

4. If interested please see "Can we disenthrall ourselves, and save our State?", presentation to the Radioactive &Hazardous Materials committee, NM Legislature, Greg Mello, Nov 14, 2022

As you will see there, I (Greg) warned the legislature that disposal of nuclear waste at LANL might not be just in the rear-view mirror. They paid no attention that I could see.

5. For potential donors (and outreach to them): more about the Study Group

Mission, History, and Importance The Los Alamos Study Group has worked for nuclear disarmament, environmental protection, social justice, and economic sustainability since 1989. Throughout this time, we have contributed leadership on nuclear laboratory and warhead issues, in which we have unparalleled expertise outside government. We have conducted hundreds of public meetings and hundreds of briefings on Capitol Hill. We have wide technical, legal, and public education experience as well as strong academic and work histories in science, engineering, law, and organizing. We are strictly nonpartisan and factual. We anchor policy details in a broad historical and technical perspective. We focus on practical outcomes. 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 been central in halting major warhead infrastructure projects, notably including the facilities needed to produce plutonium warhead cores (“pits”). The resulting two-decade delay in pit production, which we seek to extend, remains a major impediment to a nuclear arms race. 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 have contributed to Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) conferences and other international fora since the 1990s. We were an early supporter of, and active in all the international negotiations leading to, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Greg was a Research Fellow in the Princeton Program on Science and Global Security (PSGS) in 2002. In 2017-2020 PSGS contracted with us for further analyses, publications, and workshops for Congress on the subject of pit production, now the largest U.S. nuclear warhead endeavor since the Cold War.

We have led dozens of public workshops on energy and climate policy and related economic issues, and in 2017 devoted much of the summer to training young people in energy and climate policy. Everything we do is informed by environmental concerns and our deep expertise in them. We wish we could do more.

The Study Group is a 501(c)(3) public charity under IRS regulations. Guidestar.org has awarded us its highest (“Platinum”) status for transparency. Over three-fourths of our income comes from smaller public donations (contributions less than 2% of our income).

The Study Group’s principled and broadly-informed voice is more important than ever as our society attempts to navigate through unprecedented political, environmental, and social upheaval, now including an escalating war against Russia and rising tensions with China.

We have been a voice against the Ukraine war since the U.S.-orchestrated 2014 coup and we will continue to speak out. Nuclear disarmament now depends first and foremost upon halting this kinetic, economic, and cultural war before it spreads further, and then finding a mutually-secure and mutually-respectful modus vivendi with Russia, China and other leading states in the coming multipolar world. To do this, leadership and education from outside the present centers of power are necessary. We are helping to provide this.

The Study Group currently consists of two staff and five board members, an informal advisory and occasional volunteer pool of about three dozen, an emailing list of about 1,600, and a large number of professional contacts we can call upon as needed. We are actively recruiting.

Proposed themes for our 2023 programs; activities will be scaled to available resources

As noted above, we focus on achieving practical outcomes, rather than empty expressions of self-proclaimed virtue. Further strategic details and specific initiatives are available upon serious request.

1. We seek to extend, by about a decade, the current 33-year pause in industrial production of plutonium warhead cores (“pits”). We believe this is the best policy available to the U.S. government. It serves nuclear disarmament because delaying pit production in this way delays any altogether-new warheads beyond current planning horizons, exposing these unnecessary programs to multiple political, fiscal, and supply-chain risks. Realistically, we cannot halt pit investments altogether right now, as this would be tantamount to an immediate declaration of unilateral disarmament, which is not in the cards. We can win because pit production is not needed to support all currently-deployed U.S. nuclear weapons until at least the late 2030s. The current crash program centered at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is therefore as unnecessary as it is expensive ($14 billion over just the first decade). The former LANL "sustainment" program has been enlarged and accelerated far beyond fiscal, managerial, and environmental sustainability. It has been and still is being sold to Congress on the basis of half-truths and deceptions.

2. We seek to cut U.S. nuclear weapons programs and spending as part of a larger effort to help steer our society’s responses to the interlocking crises now rising. The recently-released, hawkish Nuclear Posture Review displays the failure of 30 years of inside-the-Beltway arms control. Now, supported by unprecedented funding, NNSA’s ambitions are exceeding the capacity of its sites, its management structures, and its prospects for staffing. An internal agency review reveals a widespread lack of confidence that NNSA’s programs can succeed under present conditions. We anticipate more difficult fiscal, economic, and supply chain conditions in the near future. We are uniquely capable of articulating these realities in ways that can help downscale misguided programs.

3. We will help catalyze civil society efforts to end the U.S.-Russian conflict in Ukraine. Every organization should be doing this. It is urgently important to halt the escalation of this war by halting further U.S. investments in it. The danger of a wider war, possibly including nuclear war, is great. Without peace in Ukraine there will be no disarmament -- or progress on any other critical global issue. Peace in Ukraine, which requires a realistic accommodation of Russian interests, is critically important to domestic social goals in the U.S. and (especially) Europe.

4. We will help train a new generation of peace and disarmament activists. It is critically important to nourish, outside the Beltway, a rising generation of peace activists.

5. We will continue to use public information laws and other means to provide transparency to U.S. nuclear weapons programs. Near-total opacity is being used to hide critical truths about U.S. nuclear weapons programs and related activities. We will continue and strengthen our efforts to obtain, analyze, and publicize the basic information needed for public and congressional engagement and resistance.

6. We will continue and strengthen our advocacy of community resilience efforts. These constructive efforts are complementary to federal policy efforts. Given the above commitments we usually cannot lead, but we can and will ally with and assist other organizations, as will be increasingly necessary given the ongoing government failures we see.

The above themes are part of a necessary – and soon force majeure – reorientation of national security. We don't have to create the circumstances needed for radical change. They're here.

Thank you, and very best wishes to all,

Greg, for the Study Group