September 28, 2021

Important public information and planning meeting, this Thursday 9/30/21, in Santa Fe -- please inform and recruit your friends as well

Permalink for this letter. Please forward as desired. Prior letters to this New-Mexico-oriented list.
Previously: (08/31/21) Protest and press conference at "Q Station" in Nob Hill tomorrow, Wednesday September 1, 11:00 am. If you don't want a military takeover of NM please come.
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 --

First, there will be a double-page ad tomorrow in the Santa Fe Reporter, similar to (but subtly better than) last week. We urge you to forward it to your contacts, either as a link or attached file: "Plutonium warhead factory under construction near Santa Fe."

Second, this past Sunday the Albuquerque Journal finally published this op-ed, after a month of waiting (why?): "How deep a ‘pit’ will Biden dig at LANL?" Again, please forward this to your friends. They probably won't get this information any other way.

We really need you to help us publicize these issues. The public information space is fragmented, and the mainstream news media is censoring this big story, along with a lot of other challenging realities. Not to put too fine a point on it, we are entering an Orwellian world and we have to fight back or worse will befall us and our children.

Third, as mentioned previously, this Thursday evening 9/30/21 -- the day after tomorrow -- we will be hosting an important public briefing and discussion on

a) the proposed expansion of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and its transformation into a plutonium warhead core ("pit") production site, now in its initial stages, and
b) the immediate next steps in halting and reversing the nuclear colonization of northern New Mexico and all that entails.

Basically LANL wants to provide the same services the former Rocky Flats Plant did, on a smaller scale. The political impacts are already profound.

• Where: St. John’s United Methodist Church, 1200 Old Pecos Trail(map) in the "Gathering Room." This is a large hall with superb outdoor cross-ventilation. Wear a mask as usual.
• When: Thursday 9/30/21, 6:00 to 8:00 pm. Be prompt; we have a full schedule.
• What:
• Background and update on recent nuclear weapons developments, nationally and particularly at LANL, with Q&A, discussion
• Savannah River Site pit production, background and update: presentation, Q&A, discussion with our guest speaker
• Overcoming artificial divisions between issues
• Next steps, including: demonstration and call for transparency, dialogue, and accountability, November 5 at the State Capitol -- general outline, objectives, volunteer opportunities, internships; and meanwhile. Put it on your calendar please!

There are some other "next steps" but we need to develop them further before promising anything here.

Nothing important is going to happen on any of the major issues we face without a broader political awakening on the part of a critical mass of citizens, sufficient to impel more transparency and accountability from elected officials. Secret meetings will result in corrupt, faithless, unjust outcomes. That's how policy is being made, currently. We have an extreme lack of democracy.

In our New Mexico work on nuclear weapons and related issues, our immediate objectives are public meetings -- in-person, hybrid, and on-line -- at which our elected officials are present, and at which they tell us what, exactly, is happening with LANL expansion and pit production, where they stand on these matters, and why.

We'd like to know what our elected officials think the impacts of this expansion will be. We would like them to be present -- physically, if possible -- and accountable. We want them engaged in this issue on others, not hiding. That is what we will be asking between now and November 5 and afterward.

On this issue, we'd like to know the actual plutonium plans, the ones being funded and implemented at LANL to the tune of over $1 billion dollars this year, and every year after. Elected officials as well as citizens need to see the construction plan overall, the regional transportation plan with its several dozens of coach-class buses and parking lots for workers hither and yon and who is going to pay for it all, the plans for trailer encampments for workers, the plans for building another big nuclear facility to process plutonium, at a cost of billions. Where will the workers come from? What resources will be needed to house them? We want to see the projected nuclear waste production, shipment, and disposal plans. We want to know how many nuclear materials and weapons convoys will be traveling the roads. We want to know when LANL expects to transition to production and construction around the clock.

Transparency is necessary but it's not enough. We, the public, need to talk and interact with our elected representatives about the impacts of these plans and understand where they stand on them, and why.

We also need to talk with those same officials about federal priorities in a time of national social, economic, and environmental crises. Why are "we" starting a new Cold War? Why are we spending nearly $1 trillion/year on "defense," dwarfing every other component of discretionary spending? We need to have some serious talks with our delegation about such priorities, in which pit production plays such a crucial, enabling role. It will be impossible to address any of our national or local problems while funding and supporting a new Cold War.

What's important is not just seeing some "scenarios" as would be the case in an environmental impact statement, which can be (and usually are, by design) quite detached from reality. We asked for that in 2019 and 2020 and we got little or no support from elected officials.

It's important to discuss, publicly, the actual plans as they are understood and endorsed, or not, by our elected representatives. They are the ones who are choosing $50 million plutonium pits -- that will be the minimum unit cost -- over hiring 1,000 new teachers for a year. Those elected officials are the ones who are passively standing by, or hiding. Will such people be capable of leadership in the face of climate disruption? Or in the face of vast inequality, with two or more decades of difference in life expectancy between some census tracts?

No, of course they won't be. The elected officials who want pit production at LANL are also offering bogus energy and climate technologies like "blue hydrogen," with more greenhouse gas emissions than just burning the natural gas it is made from even under optimistic assumptions. These same elected officials are offering a few pennies to address really profound social problems instead of the tens and hundreds of millions actually needed, while pushing hard to support nuclear weapons to the tune of more than $6 billion per year in New Mexico. These same elected officials want to continue oil and gas production at maximum levels, while professing to care deeply about climate change.

None of this will change without a sufficient quantum of public pressure. We won't even get the news media to start speaking much truth without more social pressure. Editors and reporters are terrified. Their business models and careers are fragile, their worldviews are being challenged just like everybody else's, and they need social support and encouragement to explore and speak the shocking truth of our situation as best they can. Right now they are hiding behind various authorities, who themselves are mostly functionaries.

So what can change, really, in this paralyzed situation? We can, for starters. Our first moral and political job is to overcome our own fears and liberate our own creative energies in service to our communities. The state and the country are facing real crises, and we need to get real about them, which means getting beneath and beyond the propaganda spewing from political parties and their actors, and of course from defense contractors like LANL. Many possibilities, personal and political, will open when we do that. That is our ulterior motive here.

Greg, Trish, and the rest of the Study Group gang