June 1, 2020

Letter to antinuclear groups re organizational endorsements for Los Alamos pit factory

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Dear New Mexico activist leaders –

We were outraged to hear of a national effort to recruit organizational endorsements to a sign-on letter supporting a plutonium warhead core ("pit") factory in Los Alamos.

The sign-on letter is supposed to be filed with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) tomorrow as a comment on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed pit facility in South Carolina.

NNSA doesn't care about such comments except insofar as they could lead to litigation or real political action in a future, post-EIS administration.

But real damage could be done by nonprofits and antinuclear groups committing to the idea that Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is the best place for pit production and should be used for that purpose.

Our emergency response from this past Saturday is here: Letter to "NukeNet": concerns about organizational sign-on aimed at focusing pit production at LANL, May 30, 2020.

There has been an 18-or-so year effort by some parties in the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA), in the arms control community in Washington, in the foundation community, and in the Democratic Party, to promote (or in other cases, stand aside while others promote) the expansion of LANL's pit-making capability (which currently stands at zero) as a "lesser evil" -- lesser than doing the same work elsewhere. We don't buy it.

Northern New Mexico, in other words, is supposed to sacrifice for the greater good of the country as a whole, as interpreted by people in Washington and elsewhere who don't give a damn about New Mexico and whose vision of the "greater good" has never been very clear.

We have heard this many times and in many places, far more often in Washington, DC than in New Mexico, so it's understandable that many New Mexicans who opposed nuclear weapons are unaware of the continuity and extent of these efforts.

Part of the problem, you will understand, is that if, say, you work for a big nonprofit in Washington that wants to be taken seriously by the national security state, or is funded by a big foundation that wants to play the same game, you have to say "Yes" to making pits someplace. Virtually all these groups are aligned with the Democratic Party, so standing with New Mexico Democrats is a LOT easier than any other alternative.

Standing up to NNSA and the Pentagon and telling a general with four stars that he does not need a new warhead, and really meaning it -- investing real political capital in that position, and working hard for it -- seems beyond today's Democrats and NGO think tanks and lobbyists.

If you are a staff member in such an organization, you will be fired if you step out of line. So we should be sympathetic -- and we are -- but at the same time we need to realize that this is the system that has been undercutting efforts at peace and justice since the end of the Cold War. Even partial disarmament is "unrealistic" (just ask Barack Obama). "Our committee will lose face and become a laughingstock," I heard not so long ago from a friend. The system is locked -- paralyzed.

Far from the hallways of Washington, the paralysis which prevents desperately-needed reform creates desperate people across America -- and in northern New Mexico -- who aren't getting health care precisely because the Air Force is getting a new ballistic missile system and a new warhead, with new pits. Desperate people who aren't getting humane governance of any kind, let alone the services they think they are paying for in payroll and other taxes.

We have heard from people in northern New Mexico who say "We need those LANL jobs! Without LANL, northern New Mexico would dry up and blow away!" That's an exact quote from a person who identifies on the far left of the political spectrum.

That is the Stockholm Syndrome talking. That is the talk of a colonial subject who has internalized the colonizer's narrative. A person hostage to an abusive relationship. To paraphrase Caitlin Johnstone, it's like saying "My boyfriend is a serial killer, but he can cook."

Our suggested actions are the same as a few days ago. (They do not include the confusion that writing NEPA comments is any kind of political action. Signing onto somebody's NEPA comments is a dangerous substitute for political action, like shouting into a hole in the ground and thinking you have done something important.)

The winners of tomorrow's primaries in New Mexico Congressional District 3 will need education. The two front-runners on the Democratic side think LANL can do something for the District. It can - by shrinking, along with the rest of the nuclear-military-industrial complex and US ambitions for global hegemony, which are increasingly dangerous.

Managing US imperial decline while redirecting attention and money to urgent needs like climate mitigation, economic justice, and restructuring our society along much more sustainable and equitable lines is the task before us.

Support communities and ecosystems, not LANL.

LANL cannot do work that New Mexico needs, or the world needs, with the smallest of exceptions that only prove the rule. The belief that it does, or could do so, is a major factor causing loss of democracy, inequality, and poverty in northern NM. It places those who hold such ideas to the right of Eisenhower's Farewell Address, unwittingly I am sure.

LANL is a bomb lab and would-be manufacturing plant, with little else to show for the billions involved. It's fortunes rise and fall with the military budget as a whole and with the US Empire. Thus has it ever been. The source of all propaganda otherwise is LANL.

We often quote Manuel Garcia, former Lawrence Livermore physicist:

The "brilliant minds" and "use[less] infrastructure" [quoting another author, with whom Garcia is disagreeing] of the nuclear labs are incapable of "work the world needs." That these nuclear weapons playpens might be "useful" to civilian purposes is a great misconception widespread among the public. Certainly, some of the individuals in these labs could apply themselves to "useful" work, applying technical skill to improve social conditions, if they were placed in the right setting (and in rare cases, on their own as lone scientist-inventors). But, such people are the exception. The vast majority are unable to conceptualize actual social needs, and few have technical expertise that is applicable to "real world" problems. Most of these "brilliant minds" need massive high-tech resources to work on arcane details of exotic physical situations with no relation to the experiences and problems that face most of humanity. Also, most of these "brilliant minds" expect lots of money for their work, and would not be cost effective to projects aimed at improving social conditions. Just like an old battleship is useless for passenger or cargo or fishing or ocean research purposes, the nuclear weapons people are similarly useless outside their niche. The only way to make the battleship useful for peaceful ends is break it up for scrap metal. Similarly, the only way to get "usefulness" out of nuclear weapons experts is to put them into civilian occupations at an entry level, and let them start over in a new "peace" mode. Few will show themselves to be brilliant.

The waste of the labs is that they suck up national resources (money and graduates of technical schools) that would be better spent on projects for the solution of real social problems (e.g., clean water worldwide, renewable energy, public health, care of the environment, etc.) and the education of new young experts to man these projects. Just as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suck money out of the federal budget and impoverish our society (lack of funding at state and local level for social programs), so do the nuclear labs act like little fiscal black holes of war, that suck up what could otherwise be useful investment in technical education and socially beneficial research. The labs cannot be reprogrammed, only melted down and recycled.

So far northern New Mexico and Santa Fe are passive with respect to the new Rocky Flats Plant being planned at LANL. There is no visible opposition, while our congressional delegation and governor provide much support. There is as yet no pain or accountability among Democratic circles, where the LANL Rocky Flats plan was hatched and nurtured. (This was not Trump's idea, nor was it an NNSA or Pentagon idea -- not at all.)

So get businesses and organizations to join the Call for Sanity. Write letters. Tell politicians that your support hinges on their strong public support for cutting back the nuclear weapons industry and US military spending, and doing something actually relevant and important with those billions (up-to-date data here). You will find the words.

Stay in touch, stay safe,

Greg Mello