April 21, 2021

Public briefing, discussion Thurs. Apr 29, 6-8 pm, St. John's UMC, Santa Fe: "The nuclear and foreign policies of the Biden Administration"

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Dear friends --

We hope you are well and enjoying the spring.

There are several topics to cover. We can only do two today.

1. Mark your calendars! We are going to have an important public briefing and discussion on Thursday, April 29, 2021 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm in the Fellowship Hall at St. John's United Methodist Church, 1200 Old Pecos Trail (map).

Our topic will be "The nuclear and foreign policies of the Biden Administration," which very much involve New Mexico. Support (or passivity, the same thing) from northern New Mexico communities is vital to the U.S. nuclear weapons agenda and to U.S. wars and aggression worldwide, as Admiral Richard explained in so many words (below).

We will be masked and socially-distanced ("physically distant" is a better phrase but not current) at this meeting, which will take place in a very large room with high ceilings and windows.

The Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard, said yesterday in his prepared testimony, "Strategic deterrence is the foundation of our national defense policy and enables every U.S. military operation around the world" (emphasis in original). "[I]f deterrence fails," he said, "we are prepared to deliver a decisive response, decisive in every possible way."

Ouch. Tulsi Gabbard explains (3:28 video) how "decisive" that would be.

But how does this involve northern New Mexico, precisely? Admiral Richard spelled a lot of it out yesterday:

After the closure of the Rocky Flats Plutonium pit fabrication facility in the early 1990s, the nation no longer had the capability to produce key components, turning instead to limited warhead refurbishments to sustain the stockpile. As a result, component and materials manufacturing needed to produce new nuclear weapons effectively stopped and much of the infrastructure atrophied. Then, shifting budget priorities over the past 30 years delayed needed weapons and infrastructure modernization programs, contributing to erosion of critical nuclear forcecapabilities and capacities. Today’s NSE infrastructure, which the command relies on to sustain strategic deterrence, continues to decline and requires investments for sustainment and immediate modernization. Facility condition, loss of key capabilities, and constrained capacities also limit the NNSA’s timely response to unforeseen technical, geopolitical, programmatic, or operational developments. As such, the NNSA is now challenged to simultaneously complete one limited refurbishment (B61-12 LEP) and one maintenance activity (W88 Alteration). This is concerning as recapitalizing the remaining force will require the capacity to concurrently execute up to four modernization programs to meet operational requirements.

Progress has been made with close NNSA collaboration and budget transparency, but much of the damage to the infrastructure and personnel has already been done. As a result, many of the modernization and sustainment efforts (which typically require 10-15 years to execute) have zero remaining schedule margin and some are already late-to-need. If the nation does not continue to address these concerns, no amount of money will be able to adequately mitigate operational risks associated with key stockpile and infrastructure capability losses. Long lead times needed to field modern replacement infrastructure require continued investments in future and enduring facilities and capabilities.

Today’s nuclear complex relies on single production points and vendor sources, putting at risk our plutonium and uranium processing, high explosives manufacturing, and production of radiation hardened electronics. This provides few to no alternatives in the event of an unplanned production facility or vendor shutdown. In such an event, recovery of those production efforts could take many years.

Plutonium pit production is the biggest stockpile modernization issue - pits have not been produced at scale since Rocky Flats ceased production in 1989. As a point of comparison, our adversaries produce new pits in modern facilities at a rate many times greater than 80 per year; while most of our stockpile depends on pits that are, on average, over 50 years old and well past their design life. Accurately predicting aging plutonium performance with today’s facilities and modeling capabilities is limited at best. We cannot study our way out of this problem. If we fail to recapitalize plutonium pit production now, we risk catastrophic failures given an infrastructure incapable of responding in a timely manner. Bottom line, re-establishing plutonium pit production is a “must do” and is foundational to stockpile modernization. (emphasis added)

Russia, he said, has "a robust nuclear weapons production complex capable of producing hundreds of warheads per year, enabling Russia to increase its overall nuclear stockpile-driven primarily by projected increases in unconstrained nuclear weapons - while our production capacity remains essentially non-existent."

So there you have it. As we have previously noted, the only reason LANL's old, small, admittedly unsafe, and not built-to-purpose plutonium facility is "needed" for pit production is because NNSA wants pits ASAP to equip its new missiles (life-cycle cost: $264 billion with a "b", NOT including warheads and their pits; LANL pits will cost $40-60 million EACH).

Traditional arms control and "nuclear watchdog" groups are not opposed to pit production at LANL. They prefer pit production at LANL starting in the 2020s to production starting in the 2030s at larger, more modern Savannah River Site (SRS) facilities in South Carolina.

We oppose all pit production, now and later. Delaying pit production for another 10 years or so would be very valuable -- quite possibly decisive, as Adm. Richard says. Doing so would accelerate the erosion of the fallacious assumptions behind his thinking, quoted above. We have no nuclear weapons crisis. We have an existential climate crisis, a social crisis, a fiscal crisis, a governance crisis, and very dangerous crises of war and peace. We must redirect national priorities if we expect this country and the people in it to survive. We need to do that NOW. Not making pits right now, in this decade, is one of those changes.

If, later, there must be pit production, we prefer that it happen in safer facilities ten times further from affected communities than is the case here, which is the situation at SRS.

What is most likely to result from the approach of the liberal groups is two pit factories at roughly double the cost and double the impact of one, given that LANL's current facilities are objectively inadequate, dangerous, and -- despite billions in various life extensions -- temporary.

2. If you live in a chartered "LANL community," write or call your city, town, county, or tribal leaders and tell them to get out -- get out of the "Regional Coalition of LANL Communities" (RCLC)

The RCLC member communities are:

• Los Alamos County;
• City of Santa Fe;
• Santa Fe County;
• City of Espanola;
• Rio Arriba County;
• Town of Taos;
• Taos County;
• Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo; and
• Pueblo of Jemez

See our 4/12/21 letter, prior letters, and this page for more background.

The RCLC will collapse when it no longer serves the purposes for which LANL established it, which will likely be when enough members drop out. None have left so far, so colonial is our mentality here.

The purpose of writing and calling local leaders, wherever you are, is not however just to get out of RCLC. It is to implore local officials to speak out against LANL's main mission, against LANL's expansion, against preparations for plutonium warhead core ("pit") production, and in favor of nuclear disarmament and investments in society and a liveable environment. Our local governments are overworked. Our local leaders do not need to be helping LANL. LANL can and does help itself -- plenty.

As you probably know all RCLC member communities have signed a standing authorization that enables the RCLC, a blatantly corrupt entity controlled (financially and in every other way) by the Department of Energy (DOE), the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the LANL management and operating contractor Triad LLC, Los Alamos County -- a captive "company town" -- and its own (sometimes interest-conflicted) board members, to conduct a broad range of planning and lobbying activities on behalf of elected governments. Why would anyone want that?

DOE and LANL can also quite accurately say to anyone that the member governments of the RCLC support all of LANL's missions (which are mostly one mission: nuclear weapons, including pit production) because the RCLC Joint Powers Agreement says that.

By belonging to RCLC our communities have surrendered a portion of their sovereignty to the national security state -- which, we can assure you after conducting more than 500 private congressional and White House meetings and briefings over the last 13 years -- is really and truly "deep." (The "Madisonian" institutions of the presidency, Congress, and the federal courts have proven unable to control what Michael Glennon calls [5 minute video version] the "Trumanite institutions" set up in 1947 and 1949 to prosecute the Cold War. The RCLC basically formalizes a feudal relationship with the "Duke on the Hill," and a colonial relationship between NNSA's LANL contractor and these local governments and tribes. Glennon, you might want to know, believes only an aroused citizenry can return the U.S. government to a constitutional track.)

Thank you so very much for your thoughtful engagement. We will get to those other topics in a day or two, and meanwhile please mark your calendars!

Greg and Trish, for the Study Group