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Aug 9, 2021 Door hanger campaign beginning Wednesday of this week! Please help! Permalink for this letter. Please forward as desired. Prior letters to this New-Mexico-oriented list. Dear friends -- Good afternoon! We hope you are all well and enjoying the summer. I have just returned from a conference in the DC area with many of the key actors in the nuclear warhead business (lab and plant directors, NNSA and DoD leaders, and many contractors). A few reporters and I got to ask some tough questions. It's a conference where fear, concerns, and plans are discussed, and back-channel communications opened. It was helpful. However, I returned home with covid, delaying this organizing note and much else. It is a light case and I am very much on the mend. I don't recommend it. FYI Trish and I are fully vaccinated; we are following the "I-mask" protocols of the FLCCC for prophylaxis and treatment. To encourage you, I want to say that objectively speaking, LANL's plans for pit production are acquiring a desperate, surreal tinge. The many problems of the LANL site are creating some really painful headaches. This was a never-say-die crowd, especially when $10 billion (omitting sunk costs) through FY28 is on the table. LANL pits are going to cost north of $50 million apiece, an eye-popping number even for NNSA and DoD. LANL's need for workers overwhelms local roads, so LANL is now thinking of operating a fleet of ~60 coach-class buses. This, we deem, will never happen for various logistical, financial, and cultural reasons. LANL is negotiating with the Pueblos to build trailer parks on Pueblo grounds. New Mexico True, all right. Meanwhile NNSA is designing, and soon will be building, a pit factory in South Carolina capable of filling all production needs with a single worker shift. Pretty much everybody knows LANL cannot make enough pits to matter for any warhead program, so if there are going to be warheads -- and there are for some time yet, despite what me and thee might want -- the SC facilities will proceed. Efforts to support one pit production site at LANL, have led to the present stupid two-site plan. LANL is quite candid that its plans, far larger than the Manhattan Project in constant dollars, will essentially remake northern New Mexico. Most people are unaware of this. Meanwhile the West is burning, and the recent IPCC report -- conservative, no doubt; they all are -- puts our dilemma starkly (IPCC report: global emissions must peak by 2025 to keep warming at 1.5°C – we need deeds not words, Keith Baker, today). As veteran energy and climate journalist Kurt Cobb said (also today):
So that is our context. We are not under the illusion we can have nuclear disarmament while continuing with our First-World lives. Not going to happen. We are looking at a big step, not a baby step. The bad news and the good news is that everybody will be faced with that step, one way or another. We can stop pit production, and not just in Los Alamos. At this conference it was abundantly clear that pit production is an existential need for those directing the show. We crave your help, right now -- as in, this week. We will be -- you, we hope, will be -- putting door hangers on as many residences and/or businesses as we can in the coming few weeks. The theme is "Build strong communities, not plutonium bombs." We are asking for help and participation, so this is a sort of bootstrap approach. We start with you. For a variety of reasons we believe few people have heard or understand what is going on. This door hanger tells people, accurately, and asks for their help in various ways. Our contractor and outreach coordinator Sarah Johnson outlines the basics as follows. On behalf of Los Alamos Study Group,
Please respond to Trish or the office ASAP with a list of all sessions in which you'd like to participate. We need a minimum of three teams of two to go forward with each session. If there is a likeminded friend and potential teammate you'd like to get on board, forward this email and have them sign up too! Two days before each session, we'll count our teams and confirm the date with all of you--if we have the numbers. If not, we'll let you know how we're looking for the next date. Pardon our increased email volume to you as we set up for these events; we want those of you interested to be fully in the loop. Finally, we'll be sending reminders, but start prepping now; you'll want
Thanks for your involvement and your commitment to our shared cause. We look forward to seeing you soon.
Trish and I were hoping to join in this week but we now obviously will not be. We are therefore depending even more on you. This will be pretty fun, we think. More soon, thank you. Greg Mello, Trish Williams-Mello, Sarah Johnson, Lydia Clark, and the rest of the Study Group gang |
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