|
October 2, 2023
What you can do to help oppose plutonium pit production; more
Previous letter (09/25/23) Reminder: Oppose plutonium pit production at LANL, meet in Santa Fe this Wednesday 9/27/23 at 6:00 pm, St. John's Methodist Church (Subscribe/Unsubscribe and other links at bottom)
- 1. Good meeting last week
- 2. Ukraine, thank you for grasping the nettle of understanding; please forward
- 3. Eight electricians contaminated with Be at LANL
- 4. What you can do
Good afternoon, friends --
We hope you are all doing well and enjoying the great weather, or Great Weather, whichever applies.
First, we had a pretty good meeting last Wednesday in Santa Fe. Twenty people attended, with several younger people and other people we had not met before. In the last third of the meeting we spoke along practical lines, about which more below (at 4.).
On behalf of Trish -- who is recovering nicely from knee replacement -- and myself, and on behalf of our part-time assistant scholar-organizers Jessie and Bex, thank you, to those who came in person and the many others who were with us in spirit, here locally and from afar.
We have posted the briefing slides we used ("Plutonium Pit Factory at LANL: Dead End for New Mexico and the U.S.") plus 8 other slides, 7 of which deal with aspects of the local economic situation as it relates to the expansion of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). These didn't get included in our last-minute meeting preparations. You will be able to supply some of the questions that go with that partial data. The eighth slide deals with the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina.
Second, we did not talk about Ukraine at that meeting. So I urge everyone to take a look at our Ukraine page, and please please please forward it to your friends.
Why? From Alastair Crooke's essay posted today:
The Ukraine war is not about ‘democracy promotion’. Western intelligence services have had a history of close links with Ukrainian ultra-nationalism, dating from the end of WW2. Possibly, these committed ultra-nationalists were seen as ideal material for stirring a war against everything Russian – that which Brzezinski had in mind when the wrote his Grand Chessboard in 1997.
In any event, it was on this particular pillar – ethnic-cultural mobilisation vs the Russian presence, culture and language in Ukraine – that western intelligence services focussed. Efforts were made by these services and U.S. State Department to place members of this constituency into key positions in politics, security and the military in Ukraine – initiatives that were accelerated in the wake of the Maidan coup.
An evident legacy now is that Zelensky is hamstrung by the political primacy of the hard Right that refuses any, and all, negotiations with Russia, and demands only Moscow’s surrender.
Last week’s Canadian parliamentary debacle inadvertently gave an insight into the depth of the Ultra-nationalist Ukrainian constituency that was given passage to western states – including to the U.S. and Canada – in the wake of WW2, when Canada’s Parliament accorded standing ovations to a former member of the Waffen SS during a visit by Zelensky to the Canadian Parliament. Yaroslav Hunka was among around 600 members of the Galicia SS Division who were allowed to settle in Canada after the war. The point here is that this constituency in Canada, and its analogues elsewhere, forms a backbone to lobbyist support for Kiev, and is the one most closely tied to the U.S. Deep State.
Back to the Brzezinski doctrine: Does this Canadian imbroglio remind us that the sub-plot originally conceived by Brzezinski was identity-driven cultural war? Certainly, Ukrainian officials have embraced repeatedly, the aim of cleansing all things Russian from Ukraine. Democracy promotion may have been a pretext, but the quiet part always was to foment violent animosity towards Russians – and to Russia, as a cultural ‘idea’.
Third, the first of the articles I mentioned at the meeting, about recent contamination of eight electricians with beryllium (Be) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), appeared (our archived version is here, but do go to the original if you have access to it, as those clicks show public interest: "Eight workers exposed to beryllium dust at LANL, a recurring problem," Santa Fe New Mexican, Sep 27, 2023).
It was a good article. I added this comment:
Thank you Scott for finding the time to do this, amid everything else you must cover.
That DOE Enterprise Assessments report is more categorically harsh than I ever could be. This case and that prior report raise obvious questions, such as why "big DOE" made no apparent followup, what is the status of staffing and activity for chronic Be disease prevention at the site office, and whether the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) is doing anything about it either -- which could only be advisory, but still would be better than nothing. (DNFSB has a very small staff, to be sure, but if they don't ask Congress for a lot more they won't get it.)
We believe the site office is charged with delivering a pit factory, come hell (for workers) or high water. Overall, NNSA is staffed with too many "yes-men" and "yes-women." They work in a bubble that fears sunlight and the outside world. A symptom of that narrowing of personal responsibility is the constant use of the word "mission," as in "delivering on the mission." This language, which was not prevalent 20 years ago, illustrates a mentality associated with the military and with contractors paid for completing a specific task, not civil servants who are supposed to adopt a wider viewpoint -- one that includes, in this case, adequate emphasis on worker safety. By 2015, the Department of Labor had paid death benefits for more than 1,600 LANL workers, not counting those families who received private payouts in return for promised silence about the egregious circumstances of their relatives' deaths. Yet LANL recently published an orientation briefing for new employees saying that too much safety is a problem for the mission, citing the World War II mores of the Manhattan Project as precedents. This incident is a wake-up call, one NNSA is alas unlikely to heed. Triad and NNSA need to reconsider the wisdom of their crash program to hire thousands of new workers and hundreds of outside contractors, pressing forward on the new pit factory "mission" on a 24/7 basis to meet an arbitrary deadline in what are often cramped, legacy facilities with complicated hazards.
Within Triad, accomplishment of "the mission" is driven in part by huge bonuses for senior management, who already make outrageous salaries. Underneath all the bustle is The Questions That Must Never Be Asked: what is the purpose of "the mission." Is it logical? Is it coherent? Is it a wise use of taxpayer dollars? Does it serve life?
This is not the end of this story. We await an answer from the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board (DNFSB). Another media outlet is also going to write about this and related matters, based on some sources we supplied and others they are digging up.
It's important to realize that without the supervisor of these electricians requesting analysis of the dust in which they were working, LANL would not have done the analysis. LANL told these workers there was no hazard and that personal protective equipment would not be needed. The entire episode would have been an unheard "tree falling in the forest" without the electricians themselves demanding answers post hoc.
Fourth, there are many ways to help fight pit production at LANL, which is the most important direct nuclear weapons policy intervention available to people in New Mexico (and among the most important nationally as well).
The first step is to be very clear what you want, as there is confusion about this in some quarters. Like the endorsers of the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production, we want no (as in, zero) plutonium warhead core (“pit”) production at LANL, "first and foremost, but also elsewhere." We aren't interested in weaselly language like opposition to "expanded" pit production at LANL (what the hell does that mean?), "small" pit production at LANL, or "Goldilocks" production at LANL, or "10-20" pits per year at LANL, or pit production only after it is declared "safe" by the DNFSB (a ridiculous idea). Beware these ideas. Tens of billions of dollars, and hundreds of nuclear materials and waste trucks, will be driven through the loopholes inherent in those notions.
(That "elsewhere" in the Call is SRS. Information about future pit production at SRS is available on this page. The political realities of pit production as they relate to the two sites are summarized in the last slide in from Wednesday's slide deck, not shown then but posted here now. Longer and richer explanations of these and related realities and how they affect what we think should be normative pit policy can be found in "Toward a viable plutonium pit production plan: part 1, LASG Letter to Congress, May 18, 2023 and part 2, June 9, 2023.)
So here are some ways to help:
- Recruit organizations (especially) but also businesses and individuals to the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production. This is foundational work, which helps in many ways.
- If you live in Santa Fe, write or call City Councilor Renee Villarreal soonest. She is contemplating introducing a resolution opposing LANL pit production and the creation of satellite LANL laboratories and classified-work offices in Santa Fe. Tell her you oppose ALL LANL pit production, without conditions, and ALL expansion of LANL into the City of Santa Fe. She has our proposed resolution in hand, in part based on the strongest of prior resolutions.
- Make public comment to the Santa Fe City Council supporting the above-described opposition at its October 11 Council meeting. The City will eventually post the links a) announcing this meeting and b) enabling public comment. We will monitor this closely but you can as well. It is amazing that a City Council meeting 9 days from now is not on the official on-line calendar yet but such is the case. In the coming days, we will post our proposed language as well. For now, the basic idea of total opposition to LANL pit production, and opposition to LANL expansion into Santa Fe, is enough.
- Put up a yard sign. Ask us for help if you want to.
- Write letters to editors (LTEs) or guest editorials. LTEs do matter, and writing them helps refine one's thoughts, as they must be brief.
- Help us distribute stickers, window posters, and bulletin board fact sheets, and other materials against pit production (coming soon).
- There's a lot more I could put here, some of which we have already discussed in-house, but let's wait for now. In the meantime and to ripen the moment, please join us in outreach.
- Yes, funds also help, a lot. It is very likely that the people you know, and the people they know, have enough spare money to basically end the nuclear arms race. Not instantly, but without LANL pit production there is only so much that can be done in the arms racing department. Write or call us. We have more strategies than are wise to put here.
Best wishes,
Greg Mello, for the Study Group
|
