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                     Our last Bulletin (368): Fundraising reminder, new "advertorial" (Dec. 9, 2025)

Dear friends and colleagues -- 

With Christmas almost upon us (and for fellow northern hemispherians, the winter solstice just past), a short update is in order. 

A new infomercial

Since December 17 we have had another 2-page infomercial splashed across the center of the Santa Fe Reporter. It will continue to be available free on newsstands through the end of the year. 

It's titled "Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. Subtitle: "Transcend your political tribe. Understand the Other. Work for the common good. A few of you may want to work with us," 

It showcases fundraising, what you can do (tailored for local audiences), provides some quick issue updates, and briefly discusses our greatest concern as the year ends. This is the last ad in the current series. Please read it when you can! 

Previous ads are available here. We put a lot of effort into simplifying and focusing issues as accurately as possible in these ads, which do cost money even though they are very cost-effective (about 3 cents each for 60,000 copies with wide distribution in Santa Fe). 

We bought these ads because there is a real scarcity of useful, thoughtful journalism about nuclear weapons, as we say in this most recent ad. The sound of silence has become deafening.

But don't we really get the media we deserve? Aren’t our own disengagement and passivity really the deeper sources of the problem -- and also the parts we ourselves can remedy? 

"I don't want to get involved"

As we say in that ad, isn't the "I don't want to get involved" attitude we so often encounter more akin to Orwell's 1984 than it is to a vibrant democracy? Or to our own freedom?

Here at the solstice, when the old year dies and the new year is born -- and at Christmas, which commemorates the birth of Jesus of Nazareth -- we celebrate the arrival of something wonderful and new. Let's not skip over this. Awareness of what is fresh can be deeper and stronger than the weary cynicism and despair our age finds so common. 

Hannah Arendt, in a passage from the Human Condition that became a central part of Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, wrote about freedom as the capacity to act -- which is to say, to begin something: 

It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings and in all origins. Thus, the origin of life from inorganic matter is an infinite improbability of inorganic processes, as is the coming into being of the earth viewed from the standpoint of processes in the universe, or the evolution of human out of animal life. The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it can be truly said that nobody was there before.

I have always thought that Arendt has been neglected in the activist world. 

In a technical and lobbying vein

We recently wrote a letter to many people in Congress, the Administration, and elsewhere in Washington DC in response to a fairly dreadful letter written (supposedly) by Senator Warren and Representative Garamendi about plutonium warhead core ("pit") production. As we said, "[w]hile some parts of the letter are true enough, I am sorry to say that overall, it is logically confused and omits key facts. It has a veneer of scholarship but that's all. There is almost no analysis in it. Its faux objectivity undermines what good might have come from parts of it."

I won't repeat or re-summarize our critique of the Warren-Garamendi letter here, but will say that the idea that the pit production factory at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) should go forward as the nation's sole pit factory, making pits for warheads for the new Sentinel missile as soon as possible, is apparently a required conclusion of Democratic-Party-oriented individuals and organizations, regardless of facts.

As discussed in that letter, there are some new legal facts on the table regarding pit production, which were part of the recently signed FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The new language says: 

In carrying out subsection (a), the Secretary of Energy shall—

1. ensure that Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, has the capability to reliably produce no fewer than 30 war reserve plutonium pits annually; and

2. ensure that the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site, Aiken, South Carolina, has the capability to reliably produce no fewer than 50 war reserve plutonium pits annually.

It does not say that pits must be produced at these levels, but it does say that each of the two pit production sites must have the capability to do so. 

This, and the overwhelming political reality that President Trump is not going to halt a huge “gigaproject” in Lindsay Graham's state, should end the efforts by Garamendi, Warren, and some NGOs and academics to force LANL to make all the pits said to be "needed" by (invariably hawkish) U.S. nuclear weapons authorities. By the time Trump leaves office, the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) will be mostly complete. This is not a moral or policy judgment. It is a reality. 

At LANL, the new law unfortunately also provides yet another legal rationale for continuing with the transformation of LANL into a production agency. But it doesn’t make LANL’s serious impediments go away. At LANL, failure is always just around the corner. We must help. 

Fundraising reminder

We in New Mexico have a uniquely powerful location at the center of the U.S. nuclear warhead complex. There are more nuclear weapons here, and more nuclear weapons spending, than anywhere else in the world. In the fight against nuclear weapons and war, we have the privilege – and the responsibility – of proximity. In 2026 we intend to use that position powerfully, as we have done up to now but also in some new ways. Stay tuned and help as you can!

Thank you everybody, and wishing each of you a Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year,

Greg Mello, for the Study Group