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December 31, 2023 Bulletin 338: If you haven't done so, please consider a one-time or monthly donation to the Los Alamos Study Group! Permalink for this bulletin (please forward). Simple home page. Detailed home page.
Previously: Bulletin 337: Please oppose producing new-design ICBM warheads and the new arms race, by (at least) endorsing the "Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production", Dec 21, 2023 Dear friends and colleagues -- We hope you all are well -- or at least recovering (as we know some of you are -- get better quick please!). We wish each of you a wonderful new year. Obviously, it is going to be "tough sledding" in the domestic U.S. political sphere, and of course unspeakably worse for those beneath the bombs in Palestine, or in the deadly trenches of the stupid U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine. Hopefully none of this will dismay us. Let's face these and other crises with energy, sincerity, and equanimity, for ourselves and for our country, and help each other as we go forward. The Study Group is entering 2024 in good shape, with plenty of room to improve to be sure, but also with quite a few good new people joining our work. We hope you will actively join us to the extent you can. We aim to win. We want you on our team. Again, thank you all for your help with what we have accomplished this past year and in previous years. (Speaking of that, as far as we know we are the only organization since 2008, large or small, which has actually stopped a major nuclear weapons project. As you can see, it took a lot of work. It's not that we're so great, but we did pick the right side and we kept at it -- we and our friends and supporters.) We look forward to a busy and productive 2024, in what we are calling the "Year of Resistance" -- and to success, inshallah, in stopping production of entirely new nuclear warheads before production starts. To do that, we must stop Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) from successfully becoming a bomb factory. To do that, we must reawaken rationality and prudence in a few minds in Washington, and overcome colonial habits of submission in a few minds in New Mexico. Both awakenings require a quantum of moral courage, in ourselves first and foremost. It has been a busy year for us. You can see some of our work on our detailed home page and in the news articles posted there, nearly all of which quote us and/or were fostered by us (a few are posted so readers can readily see our published commentaries). We also (invisibly) helped several journalists get better grounded in nuclear issues, with mixed success. Some podcasts hosting us have been widely viewed; we hope to do more. We've organized and led a number of local and national on-line briefings and discussions. We've been to Washington DC on three week-long trips to meet with nuclear officialdom, congressional and White House staff, etc. On those trips, we learn along with those we meet with. We continue to pursue (and share the fruits of) Freedom of Information Act inquiries and litigation. We are basically a truth-seeking organization, in the broadest sense. We continue to post curated updates of Ukraine war and related news, sometimes with comments. Taken together, these are a valuable compendium for activists and journalists. As we have written, it is now irresponsible to talk about "nuclear disarmament" without addressing the mess the U.S. has made of relations with our only nuclear peer, the Russian Federation. (And yes, we would put it just like that.) There will be no arms control now for a long time to come, let alone disarmament, but for those who care about such things -- and everybody should -- our Ukraine page and its links is an excellent contribution to personal or group understanding, and rebuilding. We are happy to discuss these things in any venue. We are fortunate to have with us a new part-time staff member, Bex Hampton, who among other work is helping us connect with many new faces here in New Mexico, some of whom are enriching our work (qualitatively and quantitatively) with their volunteer efforts. Thank you! Jessie Smith has also helped us with part-time work when she can. For the first months of the year we maintained our billboard campaign on New Mexico highways, such as this one, but billboards are basically unaffordable these days for us, and also less valuable. That latest billboard campaign of ours was timely and did its work of basic local awareness-building, we believe. Now, what is affordable (and needed) are full-page ads in one or more free, widely-circulated, weekly magazines. This month we have run two double-page (centerfold) ads in the Santa Fe Reporter (here and here), which together comprise accessible and up-to-date summaries of some of the issues involved in LANL's proposed bomb factory. We commend them to you, whether you are new to these issues or a professional in the field. In the absence of in-depth reporting (which has been rare to nonexistent in recent years for structural as well as political reasons), we are able to reach tens of thousands of people with these relatively-inexpensive, in-depth ads. (Please send those links widely!) All this costs money. We do a lot with a little, but we'd like to do more. If you haven't done so, please help! It is the last day of the tax year, obviously. There are many ways to contribute. Thank you! Trish adds: "Blessings to you all -- our wishes join yours for our world to have as happy a new year as we can make it -- by all of us working together to stop the bombs and end the wars!" In peace, Greg, Trish, Bex, for the Los Alamos Study Group community |
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