November 7, 2023

Call for ceasefire in Palestine Thurs 11/9; halt LANL pit factory and expansion at the Santa Fe City Council Wed 11/ 8; come to the panel in Santa Fe on a new arms race Thurs 11/16

Previous letter (10/09/23) Press conference and rally, Santa Fe City Hall, Wednesday Oct. 11 at noon; mobilization also at 5 pm same place, same day; other actions

Good morning, friends --

First, we want to amplify the ANSWER Coalition's call for actions in support of Palestine this Thursday, Nov. 9 ("Shut it down for Palestine").  Greg and Trish are on travel out of state until Saturday visiting elderly family members while we can, and just before that Greg was in Washington, DC, so we haven't been as visibly supportive of local actions as we would have liked to be. Like almost everyone, we are grieving, angry, and frustrated.

We are as yet unaware of specific actions planned in New Mexico this week. This throws the mantle of leadership to each of us. Please try in whatever ways you can, large or small, to keep up the pressure on for a ceasefire. We are all watching -- and supporting with our tax dollars -- a genocide. We don't need to provide any analysis or summary here; you all have access to those.

There are also a lot of developments in the other war, the bigger one, the war against Russia in Ukraine in which we are supporting neo-Nazis and the criminal former comedian posing as president of Ukraine. Please see and use our Ukraine page, which we maintain daily. We are available to the news media and in principle to citizen groups, but we can only do so much. It is a shocking disappointment that so many "antinuclear" and arms control organizations and academics cannot oppose U.S. and NATO warmongering and domination (real and attempted), all of which decisively prevents meaningful arms control negotiations and more fundamentally, the cessation of conflict -- stopping the killing. This lack of opposition to U.S. foreign policy is an engineered outcome orchestrated by the liberal foundations which fund these groups -- in the case of grassroots groups, particularly the ironically-named Ploughshares Fund.

Second, The October 11 press conference and rally were rather successful overall, garnering local media attention ("Anti-nuclear activists push City Council to oppose LANL pit production," Santa Fe New Mexican, Oct 11, 2023) as well as modest attention in the nuclear policy world ("...Antis denounce LANL pit production," Oct 13, 2023):

About two dozen people, including members of the Los Alamos Study Group participated in the protest outside the council’s municipal headquarters and spoke during a public comment period before the council.

“The planned addition of a plutonium warhead factory to LANL poses serious problems to the region, and is entirely unnecessary from any sane perspective,” Greg Mello, director of the Los Alamos Study Group, said in a statement. “The pits it would make aren’t ‘needed’ for a long time, even assuming the U.S. retains a large arsenal, which binding international law requires the U.S. to negotiate away. LANL’s Rube-Goldberg, Jerry-rigged pit program is driven by greed and the mistaken idea that more and different warheads will help bring peace into the world. Los Alamos is metastasizing into a more virulent global menace than ever, as well as an increasingly intrusive local headache.”

Thank you to those who helped with that event, especially those who came from far away. We were particularly pleased by the trenchant yet happy tenor of those events.

We believe opposition to the LANL pit factory is unconsciously welcomed by many parties in the media and elsewhere, even by many so-called adversaries. The "scene" is incomplete and unbalanced without it. The hawkishness and fearfulness of the times call for committed resistance, which the above articles acknowledge to the extent they can given the modest turnout.

There are other news articles gestating, by the way. We believe an important one will appear tomorrow.

Third, if you are local please come to the Santa Fe City Council tomorrow and speak opposing preparations for LANL pit production and the metastasis of LANL into the surrounding region. You can also join the meeting and speak via Zoom; see these participation details and the agenda. We explained our approach to this resolution in our October 9 letter. As you can see there is no resolution on tomorrow's agenda; today is the City Council election and the first time we can reasonably hope for consideration and passage is the next meeting, on November 29.

Fourth, please help us recruit endorsers to the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production. The number and political influence of the organizations and businesses opposing LANL pit production is very important to success.

Of note, all national arms control organizations, emboldened by support from Nuclear Watch of New Mexico and the thundering silence from many others in this state, seek to make LANL the nation's only pit factory. We strongly disagree with this approach, which accelerates pit production far beyond any real need, enables production of a brand-new warhead, and is crucial to the new nuclear arms race neoconservatives have recently unveiled ("America's Strategic Posture: The Final Report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States," Oct 2023). Given the nature of the LANL site and its location relative to Native American ancestral and current geography, it is also racist. Since there is no realistic possibility of stopping the Savannah River pit production plant, given the very strong technical case for it and the universal support it enjoys across government, all that is being accomplished by these groups is the endorsement of LANL as a pit factory. Meanwhile asking for LANL's aging, crowded, 24/7 pit factory to be "safe" is just so much piss in the wind.

Fifth, on November 16, from 6-8 pm, we will be hosting a nationally-webcast, panel and audience discussion of the above-mentioned proposed new nuclear arms race, at the Unitarian Church in Santa Fe. Panelists will include Peter Kuznick, who will speak on how this plan is being received internationally, Steven Starr, and myself. Please come if you can, and mark your calendars. We will send out a Zoom link in a day or two to our main mailing list (which includes this one).

Sixth, I can report from recent first-hand experience that Congress is not currently processing issues as rationally as in the recent past. There are many reasons for this, most of which will be apparent to you (e.g. time pressure, high partisanship, war psychosis, strong lobbying by nuclear weapons interests). Less apparent reasons: refuge being taken in bureaucratic processes by smart but relatively powerless actors, and new staff not really understanding how far the norm of accountability has fallen. There are organization-specific problems, like the lack of a quorum at the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, traceable to the lack of leadership from the White House. Subjectively we can add to these the anxiety engendered by the partially-repressed awareness that the state of the Union is very deeply distressed.

The famous fog of war -- of multiple wars now -- is rising to new heights in Washington. We must do what we can to pierce it, as it is deadly. Hence all the above.

Thank you for your participation and support,

Sincerely,

Greg and Trish