July 19, 2021

LANL: Plutonium is Good for You

Permalink for this letter. Please forward as desired. Prior letters to this New-Mexico-oriented list.
Previously (06/7/21): Key pit production talking points; some progress in DC in killing LANL pit production; important article on co-optation and destruction of U.S. disarmament movement
Please endorse the Call for Sanity not Nuclear Production!
Do your interested New Mexico friends get these updates? To subscribe, send a blank email here. To unsubscribe, send a blank email here. 
Home page; Press releases; Bulletins
To subscribe to our main listserve (less frequent, more national and international content) send a blank email here. To unsubscribe send a blank email here.
Our blog (little used at present but this may change): Remember your Humanity. Twitter.
Contribute. Volunteer. Contact Greg or Trish.

Dear friends --

We hope this letter finds you well.

You should have received a short history of attempts to add a "Rocky Flats mission" to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) (LANL pit production: fifth failure in progress). Many of you also saw a guest editorial we wrote recently in the New Mexican (paywall but mirrored here: Los Alamos lab: Plutonium is good for you).

It is copied here below the line, in case you missed it. Those of you who find yourselves engaged from time to time with friends who say, "but LANL provides important jobs" may find it useful. Beierchmidt's prior op ed, to which this responds, is here (paywall): LANL's growth means opportunity for Northern New Mexico.

It is a pity the New Mexican did not see fit to quickly pair Beierschmidt's op ed with my response (12 days passed) or even, dare we say, to ask me and/or others for a response prior to publishing Beierschmidt's piece, so they could be published together. That approach would accord the advocates of a peaceful, just society too much status -- which is as Simone Weil said the face of power. LANL, which makes weapons of mass destruction and is a sorry mess morally, intellectually, and managerially, has the highest overall status of any institutional entity in northern New Mexico. Whether as cause or as symptom, that fact alone shouts our poverty. The New Mexican definitely wants LANL to grow, as does the Democratic Party mafia.

LANL growth means nuclear weapons growth. There can't be and won't be any other kind. (Nor should there be. We have much better places to do non-bomb R&D. Beyond that, technology is accorded far too much weight in many people's thoughts and hopes anyway. There are no magical replacements for oil, or water, or food, no magical means of pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere other than the miraculous operations of the living biosphere.) In any case LANL is a "national security" lab through and through. The rest is window dressing ("public relations science" or "staff recruitment science") and its "non-weapons" research often has weapons applications anyway in the broad sense, which is why it is being done at LANL in the first place.

So then, what to do? A great deal is possible. We are sooner or later going to win this narrow battle, but it would be much better to do so quickly, in time to contribute to the wider struggle for survival that we and our animal friends and their habitats face.

Meanwhile we do want to steer clear of "feel-good" activities that make believe there is political traction where there isn't. From the introduction to Robert Bly's fine work, The Sibling Society:

It is hard in a sibling society to decide what is real. We participate in more and more nonevents. A nonevent transpires when the organizer promises an important psychic or political event and then cheats people, providing material only tangentially related. An odd characteristic of the sibling society is that no one effectively objects....

Kierkegaard once, in trying to predict what the future society would be like, offered this metaphor: People will put up a poster soon saying, Tonight John Erik will skate on thin ice at the very center of the pond. It'll be very dangerous. Please come. Everyone comes, and John Erik skates about three inches from shore, and people say, "Look, he's skating on thin ice at the very center of the pond!" A lecturer says: On Friday night we will have a revolution. When Friday night comes, the hall is filled, and the radical talks passionately and flamboyantly for an hour and a half; then he declares that a revolution took place here.

We can skate 3 inches from shore but we have got to follow up with skating 3 feet and then 30 feet from shore. Instead of weakly-attended symbolic protests we need to actually prevent our communities from "going over to another order" in our place and time, while building the foundations of sustainability directly.

We are working as hard as we can on informative advertisements, op eds, and above all educating Congress before they make decisions on the coming year's nuclear weapons programs, which is happening literally as I type this and over the coming few weeks. I will be in Washington in early August and for the coming three weeks we can't do more than we are, so we can't organize anything surrounding the twin nuclear attacks of 1945. Perhaps others are doing so. We here must apply the limited hours we have where they will do the most good.

We do want your help in on-the-ground campaigns to begin in roughly mid-August however.

And as you know we crave help in amplifying the hours we have: Research Associate position available.

More to follow quickly now, as we have new work we will be sending out this week.

Thank you so much,

Greg Mello, for the Study Group

LANL: Plutonium is Good for You

7/15/21

Kelly Beierschmitt’s July 3 op-ed (“LANL’s growth means opportunity for Northern New Mexico”) repeats familiar fictions: LANL helps “our” region thrive; LANL’s growth is an “opportunity;” and LANL’s “diverse” missions support “our” global community.

These myths invert the truth. Their purpose is to comfort the consciences of politicians and enlist their support. These myths are the same old “political heroin” (h/t Carol Miller) that has helped keep New Mexico poor.

Beierschmitt did not mention nuclear weapons – 80% of what LANL does. That mission expanded by 49% since last year, primarily to create a plutonium processing center and warhead core (“pit”) factory. New pits (at about $50 million apiece) are “needed” on a crash basis for the new warhead LANL’s sister lab in California is designing for the Air Force. The entire justification for the new LANL factory is to provide pits quickly. A better, safer facility is planned in South Carolina but it won’t be ready in time to meet the artificial deadline set by Congress.

Beierschmitt is saying plutonium pits are good for our families. It’s his job to do so. At the same time, he is keeping what is planned secret. He writes in bad faith.

Readers can glean between the lines that LANL is desperate for housing, including “RV parks,” aka trailer parks. The new plutonium mission require 24/7 operations involving 4,000 people and tens of tons of plutonium. LANL’s infrastructure and nuclear waste management capacity are already overwhelmed. LANL is bursting at the seams. Is regional growth sustainable, or good? Beierschmitt assumes so.

Since 1943, LANL has spent about $130 billion. What shared prosperity and social advancement has this flood of money created? Northern New Mexico is one of the poorest regions in the U.S. and one of the worst places in the U.S. to raise a family. Los Alamos County has thrived, to be sure.

To quote one regional economist we know, “Those who think LANL has been a boon to northern New Mexico are people for whom 70 years of data are not enough.”

LANL did provide millions of cubic feet of permanently buried nuclear waste, some contaminated groundwater, and more than 1,600 federally-documented occupational deaths.

LANL benefits very few people, and is a major inequality engine. Inequality is devastating – far more important in social outcomes than aggregate GDP. Corporate paternalism is not the same as a true social contract.

Local labor markets are distorted as LANL absorbs scarce talent, an internal “brain drain.” Housing markets are bid up. Scarce resources such as water and road capacity are consumed. Taxpayers in LANL bedroom communities pay for public services, often with net negative local fiscal impacts.

Even more damaging than these “deadly upas tree” phenomena, LANL suborns the attention and loyalty of our political and civic leadership and provides false, self-serving answers to economic, environmental and social problems, just as we see in Beierschmitt’s op ed. Imaginations are stifled as narrative dominance becomes complete. Political and opinion leaders become unable to “think outside the labs.” Instead of coming together to truly grapple with problems, our leaders talk about LANL “jobs,” a narrative that centers our attention on LANL – not where it belongs, in our communities. In short, LANL corrupts.

And then there is the moral problem. These are weapons of mass destruction, illegal to use under several treaties. Just one of these pits would burn a whole city full of people. There was a reason Beierschmitt didn’t mention nuclear weapons.

“Without vision, the people perish.” LANL has a vision, but it centers around death, not life. Buzzwords like “innovation” are empty. Governor, what’s your plan?

(Op ed ends here. I also appended a comment, part of which follows).

Government and this newspaper operate in a conceptual framework that ignores actual economic experience in peripheral regions such as ours. It's easier to kowtow to powerful federal forces than to think. Northern New Mexico is poor in part because too few people actually care. Economic and political inequality are in that sense self-perpetuating. If people in responsible positions cared more they would focus on the problems better. Many of our senior leaders profess to care but few actually do care enough to explore outside the mental corral created for them and which they themselves have created. Part of the problem is that political and opinion leaders who have entered the wealth-forming classes tend to look upward to the sources of wealth rather than downward to those left out, economically and politically. The system is working fine for them, thank you very much. They turn away from addressing the poverty system in all its aspects, and one of the main directions they turn toward is LANL. One regional economist of long experience remarked to me that in his view the main impediment to economic and social development in northern New Mexico -- or was it New Mexico as a whole? -- is "the failure to recognize that The Bomb was and is a mistake."