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January 5, 2022 A wonderful New Year to all -- thank you; fundraising, recruitment reminder; Call for Sanity; Innovation Triangle Permalink for this letter. Please forward as desired. Prior letters to this New-Mexico-oriented list. Dear friends -- All of us here at the Study Group send our best wishes to each of you for a truly blessed new year! We hope you are all well, as we are. We are very grateful for your solidarity and support -- and very excited about the opportunities we see in the year ahead.
To those of you who responded to last week's funding appeal or who sent contributions earlier, thank you. Your support gives us wings. (We are quite proud of the breadth of our public support, by the way!) It does not seem wise to spell out in detail those elements of our 2022 work plan which are languishing for lack of funds. You probably have some idea. As we said in Bulletin 290 we are hiring. Among the best ways to advertise for help is through friends like you. Some of the specific projects we have in mind can be accomplished by short-term or part-time help, or by steady, mature volunteers. And then there are internships, which have helped quite a few people toward fulfilling careers. As we said last time, we do take care of our people. This costs money of course. In a world all-too given over to pretense and spectacle, it may need to be said that we are dead serious about nuclear disarmament, starting with preventing production of additional warheads, or warheads of new types. The fact that the United States currently has no operating factory in which to produce plutonium warhead cores ("pits") is substantially due to our work here and in Texas over the past three decades, work in which some of you have played important roles. If you want to be involved in this kind of serious work, please do call or write us. We depend a great deal on word-of-mouth referrals of people and financial resources. Be our ambassadors. If you need more background information, call or write. If you want us to speak to your group, we can probably find a good time. That said, we are still working through a few emails from late 2021 we have not answered. If yours is among them, we'll get to you.
To those who have endorsed this Call, thank you. This small act of solidarity helps strengthen resistance to a new arms race, in multiple ways. The list of endorsers has been quietly growing -- three more as I write this (thank you!). As of today there are 60 organizational and business endorsers and 227 individual endorsers. One question many of us are asking is, why aren't more environmental and progressive groups -- in New Mexico especially -- stepping up? This is after all only a small expression of solidarity, and the impacts of nuclear weapons production are profound and growing. We've heard a few excuses but that's all they are. We don't want to embarrass organizations or individuals but -- hello, where are you? It is good to repeat that we have been working with what Arundhati Roy has called "the power of proximity" for three decades now. Please take our word for it: this is important. Passivity is the main problem. As Einstein put it: "The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it." Trish and her friends defeated a huge nuclear weapons factory very quickly and easily in Texas in 1990, simply by the ferocity of their immediate challenge. As she says, "They don't go where they aren't wanted." That quick, fierce opposition saved a ton of work. In New Mexico the tendency of the liberal community has been to mumble something about how important "jobs" are and then complain about the resulting nuclear waste. If we want the New Mexico delegation and news media to oppose what might be called "nuclear hypercolonialization," we better be clear about whether we want it ourselves. Fortunately, courage and clarity are as contagious as confusion and fear. Often people ask "What can I do?" One good answer is: please recruit endorsers to the Call. We have made some small changes to the text, by the way. We've dropped the bullet point opposing Santa Fe's Midtown project, since that (failed) project has gone back to the drawing board (literally). NNSA and LANL have committed themselves to long-term leases in other Santa Fe locations as we have described. In our judgment the "Midtown project" reference is increasingly confusing and may create hesitancy. LANL also seeks to modify an existing building to create a large new biological sciences laboratory (BSL Level 2) in the area -- meaning, they want it quickly -- but Midtown has no suitable buildings. We won't add new commitments in the text of the Call, of course. We did add a clarifying phrase about the proportion of discretionary spending devoted to the military during the pandemic years -- that proportion went down temporarily, due to massive covid relief that was passed in those two years (see footnote 14 in Bulletin 288: US nuclear weapons since 2020: continuity and change, Dec 7, 2021). We added some new introductory language, which we think is important:
We'll publish an overview of pit production for Congress and others just as soon as we can. Meanwhile, perhaps the best recent overview for the general public is this: Unprecedented weapons production mission at LANL threatens regional decline, loss of autonomy: what can this committee do? (slide deck for the Radioactive & Hazardous Materials Committee, Nov 12, 2021). Slide 9 in that presentation provides some detail and references as to why LANL has never had an industrial pit mission before. Some people who don't want to oppose LANL's new mission excuse themselves by claiming LANL has had this mission for decades. Well, one doesn't plan to spend $18 billion to build and start up a capability one already has.
The developer may seek tax breaks for very wealthy investors like himself in the coming legislative session. To some extent the pump has been primed, as noted previously. At the moment we have no staff time to devote to legislative participation, whether to help good bills or expose bad ones, so please alert us if you hear of anything. We do expect that the developer will eventually seek approvals and/or height limitation relief in the Santa Fe City Council. We see nothing on any current agenda but as you know these things can move VERY quickly if enough votes are quietly arranged ahead of the last-minute agenda notice. It is well to repeat what we said in early December: Please call the Santa Fe city councilors and tell them NOT to introduce, or vote for, any roll-back of the City's height ordinance -- least of all for [the New Mexico Innovation Triangle]. This "plutonium profit food chain" monstrosity would bring a whole train of negative consequences for the city, region, and state, as previously discussed [here]. Be well, everybody, and more soon, Greg and Trish, for the Study Group |
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