March 21, 2020
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We call for sanity, not nuclear production: please join and recruit others
Suggested actions:
- Call for Sanity: help us recruit businesses, organizations, and religious communities.
- As described in the previous letter write or call Santa Fe city councilors, if you live there, and recruit others to do so.
(For more talking points see this letter from LASG Outreach Director Lydia Clark.)
- Write letters to editors; they are effective.
- Please help us recruit other activist leaders; they can subscribe to this list by sending a blank email here
Dear New Mexico activist leaders –
In 2005 and 2006, hundreds of organizations and businesses in New Mexico, nearly a hundred national and international organizations, and thousands of individuals joined the “Call for Nuclear Disarmament,” demanding “Disarmament, Not Production!” (this brochure went with the Call; it is dated now but is still a useful overview).
With this letter we are reopening that Call now in an updated form, to reflect current pressing issues. Here is the new version: "We call for sanity, not nuclear production."
Please help us recruit business, organizational, and religious community sign-ons!
Many of the signers of that earlier Call are still in business today and are likely to sign the new Call if asked. Will you be the one to ask them? Please do!
We will frequently update a published list of signatories so we can all avoid duplication of effort. We will put a link to that list near the top of the Call.
You may have noticed that we have changed the name of this list from "friends" to "activist leaders." We hope you will be exactly that -- as many of you already are. Anyone can help with this Call, in ways large or small. Every phone call will help.
We are not opening this Call to individuals. The role for individuals in this Call is to recruit businesses, organizations, and churches.
Recruiting sign-ons to this Call can be done from home, an important consideration given the COVID-19 public health emergency.
We need you because we don't have your contacts, and we are working long hours in other ways. Building local opposition to the "Plutopia" planned for us while demanding values compatible with civilization, democracy, and a sustainable environment is extremely important work that everyone can do. Your help could really make a difference; it did in 2005-2006 and it will again today.
LANL is now gearing up for round-the-clock pit production involving 2,000 additional production and support staff by 2025 at the latest, on top of what we are now hearing are 2,000 pit production-related staff already in place -- 4,000 pit-related staff in all. NNSA expects LANL pit production expansion and related construction to cost more than $6.5 billion over the next five years, and that is just the beginning.
How much political loyalty do you imagine $1.3 billion per year would buy in New Mexico? Do you want progressive values in our political leaders? A Green New Deal? Social justice? Climate protection? Economic and social renewal? Environmental protection? Forget all those, because a new not-so-little Rocky Flats is pretty much their policy and fiscal opposite.
Under this plan LANL would become a new, mid-sized “Rocky Flats Plant.” Yet for its first three decades, Rocky Flats had fewer total staff than LANL expects to recruit and assign to pit production. So please don't think this is to be any kind of "mini" or "boutique" operation. And it's full scope has not yet been revealed, because LANL simply cannot do this mission in its old existing facilities, or do so for long, or do so safely. Once the hook is set, we can expect even bigger plans than the ones we see now.
As you may read tomorrow in the newspaper, or soon, and contrary to prior statements to contractors, news media, citizens, and local governments, LANL has begun amassing the staff, facilities, and funding to produce not just 30 or more pits per year (ppy) by 2026, but also at least 80 ppy by 2030.
This story was first covered by the Nuclear Security and Deterrence Monitor("Planned Los Alamos Pit Plant Could Surge to 80 a Year, NNSA Says," Mar 11, 2020) and the Aiken Standard NNSA study: Los Alamos National Lab could boost pit production to meet national needs, Mar 13, 2020).
We will tell this story -- a story of contractor greed, partisan pork-barrel competion, and neocon bloodlust -- in the next Bulletin. Our senators and Rep. Lujan are on the wrong side.
Finally, you may find these two articles inspiring and useful in the present emergency. I did.
Greg, for the Study Group
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