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August 11, 2020 The tide is turning; updates; next zoominar this Thurs, 13 Aug, 4 - 6 pm MDT Permalink for this letter. Please forward as desired. Prior letters to this list. Dear New Mexico activist leaders – 1. Next zoominar this Thursday, August 13, 4 - 6 pm MDT, assuming enough people register to attend by tomorrow at 5 pm. If we have to postpone I will notify you by 5:30 pm tomorrow, Wednesday. This meeting will feature:
I know it is late notice, but we have been drinking from a fire hose here and I had greater aspirations for this letter -- topics that could not be covered quickly. (Given the absence of pertinent, useful news reporting on our issues -- something that has gradually come to pass, but which has now led us into a qualitatively different world -- I am considering a daily or semidaily news blog at Remember Your Humanity. I already do most of the work for the use of our staff, board, and close advisors. But things always take longer than they ought to take. If you are potentially interested in this please write me or mention your potential interest in Thursday's zoominar.) These zoominars have opportunity costs for all of us, but the payoff in terms of real nuclear disarmament is potentially huge. To make them worthwhile for all concerned we need to see at least 30 registrations by Wednesday 8/12 at 5:00 pm. Since sometimes conflicts arise at the last minute, experience suggests we will need about this many registrations to bring at least 20 guests to the virtual room. Friends, 20 people is more than enough to accomplish a very great deal. So please register as soon as you can, assume the event is going forward unless you hear otherwise Wednesday by 5:30 pm MDT, and we will see you Thursday. Register in advance here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcucOmqqj0tH9TJfzVssK0AcQdZ4rdu0hhQ. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email. Our last zoominar (Wednesday 8/5/20) was reasonably successful. In addition to Study Group staff and board we had 18 guests, including some new people. There were a lot of good questions and we covered a lot of updates on the status of nuclear weapons, Los Alamos, plutonium pit production, and related topics, which hopefully was helpful to those who attended. We did not prepare slides but focused instead on answering as best we could any and all questions attendees brought. For those who came last time -- thank you for your investment of time. We are eager to work with you in any of several possible ways (see below) -- and sometimes in other ways specific to your unique context, skills, contacts, and so on. As explained Wednesday, Lydia Clark is our primary outreach coordinator (505-501-2606, in Santa Fe) but you can also reach Trish or I in our Albuquerque office (505-265-1200) or by cell (Trish 505-577-3366; Greg 505-577-8563). 2. Useful developments Over the past few days there have been many interesting and useful developments bearing on the "peculiar sovereignty" that invaded this state 75 years ago.* *"Peculiar sovereignty": "The Manhattan District bore no relation to the industrial or social life of our country; it was a separate state, with its own airplanes and its own factories and its thousands of secrets. It had a peculiar sovereignty that could bring about the end, peacefully or violently, of all other sovereignties." (Herbert Marks, general counsel, Atomic Energy Commission). The tide is turning. We feel it here. Here are some visible indications, besides those we brought up in the last letter: • A majority of Americans support phasing out ICBMs, modestly cutting nuclear weapons budget, and deploying low-yield sub warheads (which has already happened) press note, Aug 10, 2020 Yes, Lawrence Livermore -- which has no high-hazard nuclear facilities -- is getting a Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) but LANL -- which has plenty of high-hazard nuclear facilities -- is not. Yes, the Savannah River Site (SRS) is getting an EIS for industrial pit production, but LANL is not, despite the vastly greater impacts planned to occur here. There is a published plan for pit production at SRS. A copy is in this computer. There is no published plan for pit production at LANL. In fact there is no signed plan at all. Just a "proposal," which is stamped "UCNI" -- Unclassified Controlled Nuclear Information. You can't get it. It cannot be discussed in democratic fora. Are you outraged yet? You should be. 3. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversaries There has been a torrent of excellent historical material published over the past week regarding the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The 15-part Consortium News series, for example, was excellent. The webinars organized by Peter Kuznick were, we heard, excellent (July 23 Press Briefing: "What Every Journalist Needs to Know About the Decision to A-Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1)"; July 25 Public Webinar: "What Every Global Citizen Needs to Know About the Decision to A-Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki"; July 28 Press Briefing: [same topic]). All told, hundreds of articles and videos came to our inboxes, a lot of it quite moving I am sure. Everyone needs to understand that the "myths of August" -- to use the title of Stewart Udall's book on the subject -- were frauds perpetrated on the American people for nationalistic and personal reasons. What the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings -- being single, localized explosions which were relatively "small" as nuclear weapons go -- do not really provide is any sense of what a nuclear war would be like today. In fact the backward, often sentimental emphasis on those events to the exclusion of today's existential situation, which demands our closest attention and action, can be, in some writers' hands, all too precious. Most important, what was generally missing in most of the material published over the last week were practical steps as to how to achieve disarmament, mitigate the rising tsunami of extinctions (which might well include humankind), and transform our lives and communities. I didn't say "nuclear disarmament" because that phrase is unlikely to describe the path that leads to that end, either domestically in the U.S. or internationally. It's too narrow. Domestically, it will be easier to transform the entire set of national security priorities -- a process which is nearer than many think, and inevitable over the coming years -- than it would be to pluck out nuclear weapons and eliminate them. That said, there is already no popular barrier to eliminating land-based ballistic missiles, as a recent poll found.* *(Not one news outlet has yet covered that important result, despite close alignment with a sector of elite national security opinion. National security news is dominated by stenographers for the military-industrial-congressional-academic-think-tank-complex, such as this pitch yesterday by a possible Biden pick for Secretary of Defense for more acquisitions to halt "erosion" in U.S. "deterrence." These writers couldn't care less what "the people" think, even when it is presented to them by elite academics. Not yet anyway.) Internationally, nuclear disarmament will not advance far until the U.S. empire dissolves, because it is the overwhelming existential threat to other states that emanates from the U.S. and its allies which requires effective deterrence, as we discussed in a recent paper for the diplomatic community. As regards the recent anniversaries, it's important to not be too distracted by pious platitudes, of which this field has plenty. One might think that generalities would proceed to crucial specific commitments, but this seldom happens. What happens instead is that pious platitudes allow the speaker to harvest all the virtue signalling with none of the commitment -- not even a commitment to understand the present situation. At the same time, the dreadful confusion in our political culture between mere opinion and practical action is deepened. Platitudes have been the political norm for most of U.S. history. Obama got a Nobel Prize for clever nuclear platitudes, and then ordered up modernization or replacement of every single nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal. 4. More on the recent contamination incident at LANL In our letter of August 3 we discussed the recent contamination events at LANL. As we said, the NNSA investigation report for the June 8 incident at the Main Plutonium Facility (PF-4) involving 15 people (see the red box, right column, home page) has been completed. A fairly shocking summary was published yesterday by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), which generally confirms the perspective offered in our July 9 comment on the New Mexican web site. As explained in the last letter, this is not any kind of little "gotcha" concern. There are always going to be minor problems. This incident is quite different, especially when seen alongside so many others and in light of the causes NNSA has found. It is an indication of deep problems that have not been solved over decades and will not be solved any time soon. More next time, thank you for your attention, and don't forget to register for Thursday's zoominar and tell your friends and potential allies about it. Stay safe, be encouraged. Greg, Trish, and Lydia for the Los Alamos Study Group |
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