March 14, 2023

Ukraine protest and updates, pit production delays and cost increases in NNSA's new budget

Good afternoon, friends --

First, re Ukraine. There is good news: some elite opinions are beginning to change -- some truth about the situation is beginning to break through the groupthink. Since we last wrote you on Saturday, these are the most valuable articles we have seen (and some of theme are very valuable indeed).

You can find them linked on our Ukraine page. Please share that page, and this email, with your friends! Discuss -- and protest! And as we said last time, we need a serious U.S. domestic investigation of the Nordstream sabotage incident, to show ourselves and world that we still can do democratic things, followed by impeachment of senior officials if warranted. Please be active! We aren't seeing op eds against the war, or -- apart from the coming one in the box above -- protests. Want a yard sign? We have them, or make your own. 

Featured • Ukraine - Media Start To Acknowledge Reality, Moon of Alabama, Mar 14, 2023
    GM: It is irresponsible and unethical to send more arms to Ukraine. All it accomplishes is killing more people. About 80-90% of the people dying will be Ukrainian. All the loudmouth chickenhawk jingoists who want to send arms to Ukraine should head to the firing range for a few weeks and then to Bakhmut or Avdiivka and see what it's like. I am just kidding, because they wouldn't survive. Dear President Biden: stop the war right now, and start negotiating, without preconditions.
 • Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says supporting Ukraine is not a 'vital' U.S. interest, calls the war a 'territorial dispute', Sarah Elbeshbishi, USA Today, Mar 14, 2023
 • Zelensky makes call on key Donbass city, RT, Mar 14, 2023
   GM: Zelensky continues, with U.S. and NATO help and/or supervision, to sacrifice the lives of men and boys for no decent reason at all. What one Ukrainian woman said about it last month: "Kneel down and ask forgiveness."
 • Germany is not a sovereign nation – Moscow, RT, Mar 13, 2023
   GM: We have been stunned by Germany's subservience to the U.S. foreign policy agenda. Yet the German public is awakening, albeit slowly, as the recent rally of 50,000 people at the Brandenburg Gate against Germany's participation in the Ukraine War testifies. Without cheap energy, Germany's industries will be hamstrung and some are already leaving. Loss of the Nordstream pipelines is a real body blow to Germany's economy. Lord Ismay's remark about the purpose of NATO still applies: "to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."
Featured • China steps up, a new era has dawned in world politics, M.K. Bhadrakumar, Indian Punchline, Mar 11, 2023
   "The US’ humiliating exclusion from the centre stage of West Asian politics constitutes a “Suez moment” for the superpower, comparable to the crisis experienced by the UK in 1956, which obliged the British to sense that their imperial project had reached a dead end and the old way of doing things—whipping weaker nations into line as ostensible obligations of global leadership —was no longer going to work and would only lead to disastrous reckoning.
   ..."What the pandemic and the Ukraine crisis have brought to the surface is the latent geopolitical reality that the Global South rejects the policies of neo-mercantalism pursued by the West in the garb of ‘liberal internationalism.’"
Featured • Echoes of Maidan: Georgia has a huge Western-funded NGO sector and regular outbreaks of violent protest, is there a link?, George Trenin, RT, Mar 11, 2023
    "What led to this violent confrontation is perhaps difficult to understand from the perspective of a Western reader. It wasn’t a “civil society” uprising in the sense you might find, for example, in a country like France. Instead, it was organized by people whose livelihoods were threatened by the proposed legislation.
   "Fyodor Lukyanov: As another ex-Soviet state is gripped by violent protests, is a Ukraine-style coup on the cards?
   "In a poor country like Georgia, foreign-funded roles pay multiple times better than local gigs. By taking on the NGO industry, the government went up against a powerful, and relatively well-heeled lobby."
 • US-Ukraine Unity Is Cracking Apart, Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, Mar 12, 2023
 • ‘Rigorous’ Maidan massacre exposé suppressed by top academic journal, Kit Klarenberg, The Grayzone, Mar 12, 2023
   GM: I do not find the paper submitted. To see prior papers on this topic from Dr. Katchanovski type "Ivan Katchanovski Maidan" into a search engine. Many other investigations have come to the same conclusions but apparently none so thorough.
 • NATO country leader Orban believes that the West is very close to seriously proposing sending NATO troops into Ukraine, Mats Nilsson, twitter.com, Mar 11, 2023
 • Saturday Reader's Mailbag Extravaganza, Answers, Simplicius the Thinker, Mar 11, 2023

***

Of note, the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA's) budget request was published yesterday. We haven't had time to pore over it in detail. We can however say that NNSA has:

• Increased the estimated total capital cost of LANL's flagship pit production project by $1.1 billion (31%) over last year's estimate; and
  
• Pushed the estimated completion date out three more years, to the 4th quarter of 2031. 
  
• Projected operations costs for pit production at LANL are estimated to be over $1 billion per year by 2028, as we predicted.
  
• A new nuclear facility is now to be built to manage liquid transuranic wastes, along with many "small" projects (i.e. "small," as in the size of brand-new high schools or major highway projects).
  

Other big-ticket nuclear facilities will be necessary as this project proceeds. We don't yet know if any trace of those appears in this budget, but we'll look over the next day or two.

Meanwhile LANL is, in Thom Mason's words, "at the end of the world's longest cul-de-sac." LANL finds it difficult to recruit and retain people who want to spend their careers handling plutonium. The cost of LANL's pits, no matter how you add it up, will dwarf the cost of the warheads into which they are supposed to be put. Before these latest cost increases and delays, and using NNSA's cost figures, LANL pits were going to cost in the $50 million to $80 million range, each. Now it will be much more. And they are entirely unnecessary, even for those who want to deploy today's huge nuclear arsenal forever. LANL production is early-to-actual-need, unsafe, and inadequate in every way. It will add unnecessary pollution and delay if not prevent LANL cleanup. It will drive up the cost of housing in Santa Fe and clog our roads. Pit production can be postponed until the mid-2030s, when the larger, safer, better-located (ten times the distance to the site boundary), single-shift, brand-new Savannah River facilities are supposed to come on line.

Delaying pit production is the very best option we have. It allows all parties to reconsider what they are doing.

We see the Administration has zeroed out the funding line added in by Congress last year for the Sea-Launched Cruise Missile (SLCM-N) nuclear warhead. Good for them. The budget continues maintenance and "reduced program requirements" pending full retirement of the B83 bomb, which at first glance looks like a compromise with the hawks who want to keep it indefinitely.

So: more to follow on this.

That's it for now, thank you all so much for your efforts.

Greg Mello, for the Los Alamos Study Group