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July 12, 2020 As long as New Mexico sleeps, plutopian plans will advance. "Rise, like lions after slumber!" Permalink for this letter. Please forward as desired. Prior letters to this list. Dear New Mexico activist leaders – We hope you all are staying healthy in body, mind and spirit. Trish and I are fine, if very busy. We've been largely focused on government these past few weeks and have not been able to keep more than a few of you in the loop. It's long past time to catch you up. We need your help! Small efforts from you right now can make a big difference. In this letter we are:
We have too much to relay in just one letter. More will follow. A lot of the story will go to our general email list, which all of you are on also. We in New Mexico have particular opportunities which others elsewhere do not -- hence this letter. These stem from what Arundhati Roy called "the power of proximity." Conversely, our passivity is required to enable the truly massive "plutopian" plans which are now on the move. These plans are as fragile as they are false. Experience shows, time and time again, that a little local opposition is fatal to them. We have the power to stop those plans, and we have the need. Let's "step up against expansion of LANL's nuclear mission" (Lydia Clark, Santa Fe New Mexican, June 27). Why do we need to do this? Because if we allow LANL to build and operate a pit factory here, all hopes for a green, just, democratic future in this state will be lost, while nationally the whole warhead enterprise will be "lit up" with brand new unnecessary warheads, all for the greater glory of deluded persons like Liz Cheney, Jim Inhofe, Martin Heinrich, their allies, and their corporate sponsors. If this gigantic nuclear plan for the region goes forward over the decade there will just be too much nuclear money, too much nuclear influence, and too much nuclear corruption for New Mexico to ever break free of nuclear-military control -- especially in the context of economic decline and emerging Southwestern megadrought. "There is such a thing as being too late," Martin Luther King said. It's not a matter of this issue vs. that issue. All the important issues are really one issue: our own level of awareness and willingness to engage. Shelley's influential stanza is apt: Rise, like lions after slumber As said in our previous letter we've arranged a few powerful, focused ways to engage, which follow. We particularly want your help in convincing local and state government officials to request a Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) for the proposed expansion of LANL, including but not limited to the proposed expansion of plutonium missions, from the Department of Energy (DOE). We've gathered some of the main talking points as to why a SWEIS is needed in this Letter to NM Environment Department re: Need for SWEIS at LANL (June 29). Here's what you can do:
At present, there is very little awareness and opposition to the truly huge plutonium plans being hatched for northern New Mexico. The newspapers have been very reluctant to publish what is known, or to probe the abundant mysteries. We know that as of July 3 LANL's plan (which would cost at least $6.4 billion over the next five years) had not been signed by NNSA. They have been "winging it," in other words. The last thing they want under such circumstances is a SWEIS. The public would see the Big Board. As we said in February ("Administration seeks 49% increase in Los Alamos nuclear weapons activities, 33% plus-up for LANL overall"), NNSA's plans for LANL -- or are they LANL's plans for NNSA, or DoD's plans? -- are vast. Both the House and Senate armed services committees have now authorized the entire Trump nuclear weapons budget. Heinrich: Senator Heinrich again supported full funding to secure Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) role as the nation’s Center of Excellence for Plutonium Research. The bill authorizes $1.1 billion [in FY21 alone] for LANL’s ongoing plutonium operations and pit production programs. The funding supports personnel, equipment and other activities at LANL to meet pit production requirements by 2026; highlights include, $611 million for plutonium operations, $226 million to support pit production, $30 million to construct new fire-control panels in PF-4, $27 million for fire protection and equipment, power and communications improvements in PF-4, $37 million for a new transuranic liquid waste handling and $169 million for upgrades related to replacing the outdated Chemistry and Metallurgy Research (CMR) building at LANL. Tomorrow we will all find out the details of what, if anything, the House Appropriations Committee proposes to cut from these programs. Our best guess is that no LANL pit production funding will be cut, although the better pit production project in South Carolina will likely be cut. Senate appropriators will likely act later this month. Last year they reversed the House. Unfortunately, liberal arms control groups and many "antinuclear" organizations have lined up, or have been shoved into line, behind the idea that LANL is the indispensable pit factory. This makes New Mexico's situation much worse, and it hurts the whole country and world by making new warheads possible using LANL's production in the 2020s. Nearly all the real efforts and litigation preparations of these organizations are going into trying to keep the Savannah River Site (SRS) from making pits, while offering only token statements, if any, about stopping pit production over the coming decade in Los Alamos -- including fantasies about "pit reuse" as a substitute for production. These sound good but are politically meaningless. News flash: the Pentagon is never going to put 50-60+ year-old pits into new warheads. This was a realistic possibility in the 1990s and 2000s but the shelf-life of this argument has expired. We have reached the point in nuclear history where we need to either retire significant numbers of older warheads or else remodel the big, partially-built plutonium facility at SRS for use in the late 2030s. It is the only practical option short of finally retiring some old warheads. A "little" Los Alamos pit factory was never a reasonable compromise. It never was "little" and at $6.4 billion for the next 5 years alone, just to expand pit production at LANL -- more than twice the estimate of 3 years ago -- it sure isn't little now. Most House Democrats want pit production focused on Los Alamos. The only choices House Armed Services leadership is allowing are: a) Los Alamos alone, or b) two production sites, with Los Alamos starting sooner. Under option a), Los Alamos is under a legal mandate to produce as many pits as NNSA wants to produce at both sites together (at least 80 each year, or more than 100/year on average). The biggest problem with the "Los Alamos compromise" (among many) is that it has no scientific, engineering, or management merit. That is why there have to be two pit production sites. Los Alamos is slated to be an industrial pit production site because of politics. SRS is slated to be an industrial pit production site because of engineering merit, as multiple in-depth studies have shown and as we will shortly explain (again) in the next Bulletin. The politics of nuclear weapons expansion are incompatible with a politics of climate mitigation, equality, community resilience, and justice, locally as well as nationally. So progressives who look the other way when it comes to the military-nuclear complex in their own back yards are just not what they say they are. There is no "hope" and there will be no "change" without taking a forceful, public stand about the huge nuclear weapons expansion taking place here. Glenn Greenwald's picture is all too accurate: Perhaps most remarkable is the amount of the military budget itself. It is three times more than the planet’s second-highest military spender, China; it is ten times more than the third-highest spender, Saudi Arabia; it is 15 times more than the military budget of the country most frequently invoked by Committee members as a threat to justify militarism: Russia; and it is more than the next 15 countries combined spend on their military. They authorized this kind of a budget in the midst of a global pandemic as tens of millions of newly unemployed Americans struggle even to pay their rent. How does this happen? How do Democrats succeed in presenting an image of themselves based on devotion to progressive causes and the welfare of the ordinary citizen while working with Liz Cheney to ensure that vast resources are funneled to the weapons manufacturers, defense sector and lobbyists who fund their campaigns? Why would a country with no military threats from any sovereign nation to its borders spend almost a trillion dollars a year for buying weapons while its citizens linger without health care, access to quality schools, or jobs? Who are the people in Congress doing this, and why? When these Committee members [in House Armed Services, Deb Haaland and Xochitl Torres Small; in Senate Armed Services, Martin Heinrich; in Senate nuclear appropriations, Tom Udall] return to their blue districts, they talk endlessly about topics such as the NRA, LGBTs, [and hiking], and reproductive rights — issues on which many do little work and over which they wield little influence — in order to manufacture brands for themselves as good, caring progressives, which is how they are re-elected over and over from very blue districts. But as these little-discussed proceedings demonstrate, when they return to Washington, what they really do is spend their time collaborating with lobbyists for weapons manufacturers to ensure that as much taxpayer money as possible is diverted away from social programs and into the coffers of the “defense” industry. That is what we see as well. Best wishes to all, stay safe, Greg Mello, for the Los Alamos Study Group |
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