July 10, 2024

Bulletin 347: Plutonium pit/Sentinel warhead overview and discussion by Zoom 7/15/24, 1 pm MDT // NNSA/DOE Santa Fe Town Hall July 22, please come

Permalink for this bulletin (please forward!).
Simple home page. Detailed home page.
Press releases. Bulletins. Letters. Plutonium pit production.
Ukraine war updates, analysis.
Contact us. To subscribe to this list send a blank email here. To unsubscribe send a blank email here.
To subscribe to our New Mexico Activist Leaders listserve send a blank email here.
Please endorse the "Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production" if you have not done so (check the list of endorsers!).

Previously: Bulletin 346 (06/16/2024): Momentous events, and two op-eds

Dear friends and colleagues --

(Those of you who are on our local activist list have already gotten an announcement of the July 22 Town Hall. This Bulletin, which goes to a wider list, repeats that announcement and also announces a Zoom presentation and discussion this coming Monday.)

First, there will be a joint National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) / Department of Energy Environmental Management (DOE EM) Town Hall Meeting near Santa Fe on Monday, July 22. The Town Hall will be held from 6-7:30 pm MDT at the Hilton Santa Fe Buffalo Thunder (map), 13 miles north of downtown Santa Fe on U.S. 84. It will be hosted by NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby and DOE EM's Candice Robertson.

If you are local or in the region, we hope you will join us in person at this meeting, bringing as many others with you as you can, to protest the creation of a plutonium warhead core ("pit") factory at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). LANL's pit factory, if it is ever completed and operated, will produce all the pits for the new Sentinel ICBM warhead, the W87-1.

This is a really, really important opportunity for those of you who are local, which is why we are mentioning it first in this Bulletin despite it coming second on the calendar.

If you can come, please bring a sign. Cloth signs may be best, as sticks may not be allowed inside.

The single, core message we want to get across to national and local audiences alike is the depth and breadth of opposition to pit production at LANL. It is likely that very few people will be allowed to ask questions or make comments at the microphone as the meeting is designed to be brief, so we must be prepared to communicate effectively in other nonviolent ways, such as by our presence, and with the signs we bring.

We will be happy to work with you (and your group, as applicable) on preparations for this meeting. Write or call us.

This meeting is really a terrific opportunity to reach audiences who up to now have supported pit production at LANL, or who are on the fence about it, or who haven't thought about it much for one reason or another. If we can sufficiently broaden the movement against the crash pit production program we will win, and there will not be a new nuclear arms race. Pits -- LANL pits, specifically -- are needed for the new arms race neoconservatives are promoting -- and which the rest of us loathe.

Second, we are going to have a Zoom seminar and discussion on pit production and the Sentinel warhead this coming Monday, July 15, at 1 pm MDT. I (Greg) will present and lead an ample Q&A session. We will post background material in response to questions as needed. We will present a range of materials that will be accessible and hopefully interesting to everyone from students, to citizen activists, to professionals in the field.

You must register to attend. Here are the Zoom coordinates:

When: Jul 15, 2024 01:00 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada)

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZckcOyhrD4jEt1VOo1_NeIkZv8AuiB8SBQ3

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

As some of you already know, the sole production mission of the LANL factory complex is to make pits for the all-new "W87-1" warhead, which will be used to augment the existing stock of (roughly 530) modern W87-0 warheads available for the proposed "Sentinel" intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). According to Dr. Hruby, the pit factory under construction at the Savannah River Site (SRS) will not make pits for W87-1 warheads. Only LANL will do that.

LANL pit production is thus part of the Sentinel warhead supply chain.

These additional LANL-enabled warheads are "needed" only to be able to put multiple super-accurate warheads on the Sentinel system. There are already enough existing W87-0 warheads to outfit all the planned Sentinel missiles with one warhead per missile. The LANL warheads are "extras," available for building out the U.S. nuclear arsenal in what is rapidly becoming a (hopeless) arms race against Russia and China.

Each new LANL pit will be the core of a circa 300-kiloton warhead. That is 20 times the explosive yield of the Hiroshima bomb. LANL has promised to make at least 30 of these per year -- in energy terms, the equivalent of at least 600 Hiroshima explosions.

LANL's production, if successful, would help enable a truly vast nuclear rearmament effort, going beyond Sentinel.

Thank you for your attention and best wishes,

Greg