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July 20, 2022 Short update and report; new poll on Ukraine, August 2 event cancelled Dear friends --
As interesting and generally valuable as that would be, we estimate that the distractions and political confusion we see in northern New Mexico would be deadly to success, despite the hard work of a few and generous contributions of historians and others. So, unmark your calendars! We'll have to discuss Russia and the Manhattan Project a bit later.
Congress and the uniformed military are beginning to understand that a) Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) can't make enough pits, and therefore b) the Savannah River Site (SRS) had better be successful if there any significant number of pits to be made -- ever -- AND this will cost more money right now than the Biden Administration allowed NNSA to put into its funding request to Congress. So the armed services committees want to give more money to SRS. Congress does not yet openly grasp the horrific price tag for its two pit factories -- although committee staff can certainly add just as well as we can -- and what that implies for the old, small, inadequate, explicitly unsafe factory-to-be at LANL, with its inadequate support facilities, inadequate housing and transportation, inadequate staffing -- its inadequate everything. A lot of people think LANL has a pit production facility that "just" needs to be upgraded, modernized, and expanded somewhat. These little adjustments will "just" cost at least $16 billion or so through this decade and will go on up from there with no apparent endpoint, as first one and then another expensive new facility is going to be required. Barring a miracle, getting back to the production level of 10 pits per year that LANL had 10 years ago -- less than one per month -- is going to take at least a year longer than previously anticipated, because, according to LANL documents, LANL accomplished only 7 months of work toward the 10 pit-per-year goal over the 20 months that ended in September of last year. (How well they have done since then we do not know.) Well over a billion dollars was dissipated in those "lost months." More than that will be required to get back on schedule, LANL says, if that is even possible. Meanwhile the production capacity of LANL is zero, as it has been since 2013. The probability of meeting the 2026 production goal is now officially "To Be Determined," but we know from other sources that it is...shall we say...low. LANL is therefore in a race to get as much built and as many people hired as possible, before too many people figure out what a boondoggle it all is. As noted previously, LANL and NNSA have largely given up on hiring from northern New Mexico. In NNSA's words, LANL has already "depleted the local talent pool in northern New Mexico" (p. 25). There is still hiring going on, but as well-placed sources in Washington have been telling us for months, LANL considers the local labor market "tapped out," which no doubt it is. The long and short of it is that the United States has no coherent or even viable pit production strategy at this time. As long as NNSA policy depends on LANL to make pits on an industrial basis, as opposed to just running a demonstration and training program at LANL, the U.S. will be building TWO new pit factories. That is the sad outcome of misguided attempts to bring all that work and money to New Mexico.
They did NOT give us the private room we expected but the company, discussion, and food were good! We really enjoyed seeing those of you who came. Lots of careful notes were taken, and really good comments were made and questions asked. Please keep in touch with us, and we will try to do the same. We do not want all the talent present last Friday to spread to the winds, never to be seen again! We spoke of the international, national and regional importance of LANL's new mission, and its vulnerabilities. The importance can be summed up by saying that the U.S. cannot have an arms race without a pit factory very soon, and northern New Mexico, perhaps New Mexico as a whole, cannot survive as a remotely democratic entity if it hosts one. The vulnerabilities can be summed up by saying the people have all the power in this as in other cases. We lend legitimacy and permission to the pit production mission. Silence is assent. We didn't get a chance to talk much about the Ukraine war and the feverish Russophobia spread across the land, although preparing for nuclear war with Russia has been LANL's central organizing principle since 1945, and is the sole purpose of the "war-reserve" pit production mission at LANL. In that regard, some of you may be interested in a brand new poll released by CNN this week showing that a majority of Americans disapprove of President Biden's Ukraine policy. The details (p. 22) are interesting. Democrats, liberals, college graduates (especially white ones), and older people are more supportive of Biden's war policies, which have been extremely provocative and militaristic. Others are not. Those of lower income, and those without a college degree (especially if they are white), are the most "antiwar" of the groups interviewed. Here I want to insert a bit of dialog from a good panel discussion in July of last year in Europe on "Mass Formation and Totalitarian Thinking in This Time of Global Crisis," led by Mattias Desmet (machine translation): Justus Hoffmann (00:51:06): This is something I have encountered so much—to finish this—my personal experience is that people with certainly above average intelligence and high, let’s say academic credentials like lawyers, doctors, psychologists, they seem to me to be more susceptible to this kind of manipulation. For example, my father’s side of the family, my father was the only academic, he was a chemist, a chemical engineer. Everybody else on my father’s family side they are hairdressers or they have a mechanic shop and you can talk to them and they’re very educated on these topics. You can have a conversation with them and they let you speak, you let them speak and you can come to a consensus of sorts even if it’s to agree to disagree. This is my experience with people who work construction, who are craftsmen, handymen, whatever. They have no academic background and they are more open to discussion and more open to being convinced that you may be onto something than most academics I know. That said, and returning to last Friday, we discussed what each of us can do, in the most practical terms.
At the outset most of us have to sit ourselves down and realize that history is not going to be changed by some convenient little actions taken in our spare time. We have to remind ourselves of this because we are subtly told otherwise by all those who, often with the best of intentions, are selling one kind of fake democracy or another. There's nothing wrong with seemingly small actions, if they are undertaken in a wholehearted, transformative manner. We ourselves must be ready to be transformed. "Does the individual know that he is the makeweight on the scale?" asked Jung. Generally no, he or she does not. It's in that spirit that all our suggestions have been offered over the years. If we suggest putting up a yard sign, people tend to say "How can that help?" Well, one yard sign can help a lot, and a personal campaign to coordinate emplacement of yard signs in dozens of yards would be on quite a different level, wouldn't it? The rest are details, and perhaps too obvious. Yard signs, check -- call or write us. Initiate discussions in your churches and other groups, check. Get them to endorse the Call for Sanity and convince others to do so also. Write letters to editors -- a lot of them. Recruit interns. Don't bother talking to the New Mexico delegation; they won't listen to you. It's a waste of your time and it sends the wrong signal. Withdraw your support and tell them why. Some of you know people who could help pay for our billboards and other expenses. Nothing is cheap, as we all know, least of all skilled people. LANL is dying for 'em. We, Trish and I, are working mostly on projects directed toward Washington, where nuclear weapons decisions are largely made and where we have hard-earned access that we must use. The rest of what needs to be said should go to our full mailing list, so I will close for now. Thank you so much for your precious attention and godspeed in your efforts at this time of crisis. Greg and Trish, for the Study Group Permalink for this letter. Prior letters to this New-Mexico-oriented list. |
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