July 28, 2021

Reminder: "Stop the plutonium pit factory, here and now:" update and outreach training Thursday 7/29, 6 pm in Santa Fe (1 of 2 letters today)

Permalink for this letter. Please forward as desired. Prior letters to this New-Mexico-oriented list.
Previously (07/23/21): New Mexico under assault; voters approve plutonium bomb factory for Los Alamos; update and outreach orientation Thursday July 29, Santa Fe Please endorse the Call for Sanity not Nuclear Production!
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Dear friends --

Tomorrow evening (that's Thursday, July 29), from 6:00 to 8:00 pm, we will host an update and outreach training meeting at St. John's United Methodist Church (1200 Old Pecos Trail) in Santa Fe.

We will provide an overview and update of the current nuclear weapons situation, especially as regards the production of plutonium warhead cores ("pits"), LANL's would-be new mission. And we need to talk about what we are up against and who our allies might be, which aren't necessarily obvious. And finally we need to talk about strategies and tactics in a rapidly-changing time.

The proposed LANL plan for an extra pit factory is premised solely on a falsely-perceived "need for speed" promoted by nuclear hawks, weapons contractors, and pork-barrel politicians in New Mexico.

In addition to other forms of outreach, we will be announcing a new door-to-door campaign in Santa Fe and explaining how you can get involved. (Those of you in Albuquerque, see the next letter.) A new flyer is at the printer's now and we should be ready to go by the second week in August, so stay tuned. If you want to take part, please come tomorrow evening if you can. Otherwise, stay tuned.

Our education and lobbying work in DC is also intensifying. We are encouraged by receptive comments about our work from people in government. I will be there all next week. We are preparing as fast as we can and you will see some of those materials.

In George Orwell's 1984, protagonist Winston Smith is told "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever. ” When and if not just the politics and economy but the identity of New Mexico is defined by nuclear weapons, military bases, space war, nuclear waste, and by the associated "innovation" and employment "pipelines," we will have reached "full Orwell." It will then be impossible to even ask whether LANL's plutonium missions, or the latest space war installation, "benefit" New Mexico. The question will no longer make sense.

Or as E.L. Doctorow put it, "We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945. It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after years, compose our identity?"

We are not there yet. Our situation is akin to being on the convex slippery slope near the top of a mountain glacier, where each step down gets far more dangerous. With a moment of complacency and all of a sudden you're going down fast, and your life -- the state's life, it's promise to its citizens -- may well be over. "Forever."

In the last letter I linked to a non-factual presentation made by LANL to a legislative committee of a LANL plan to guide our energy future. Oh brother. As I said, our Governor is already deeply invested in elements of this fantasy -- or one element anyway: hydrogen. These questions by eminent Spanish scientist Antonio Turiel and this critique by energy journalist Kurt Cobb should adequately destroy LANL's creepy "vision" for you, if necessary. These apt critiques of LANL's vision -- and of the vision of former scientist and Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz -- came here serendipitously. I am saying it would take about 5 minutes of research, or the quick application of a little undergraduate science or engineering, to undercut what LANL is offering this state. The whole "hydrogen hype" should never have made it past the first manager's desk. The moral is that LANL's civilian science is sometimes even more dangerously off-base than its nuclear weapons.

Thank you for your attention, see you on Thursday,

Greg Mello