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August 17, 2023 Want to oppose pit production? Talk to us / The New Mexican implicitly comes out for pits / Ukraine / Resilience Previous letter (08/01/2023): Pit presentation slides; more on Hiroshima/Nagasaki/Russia; Patrick Lawrence on the Bidens and the opportunity at hand; LANL seeks to expand into other cities Friends, good morning. We hope you are enjoying the summer -- in New Mexico, a dry one to be sure! First, we have been working hard on plutonium warhead core ("pit") production, as well as getting the word out about the multidimensional ethical, military, economic, and diplomatic failure that is the Ukraine War, helping journalists, helping local anti-pit-production citizenry, and of course, keeping body and soul together. We will be starting up meetings with anti-pit-production citizenry next week. If you want to be involved please write us. Second, as some of you have seen, the managing editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican has come out in explicit favor of LANL expansion, into Santa Fe no less. The primary if not the only cause of LANL expansion is pit production. So the SFNM is in print supporting our new not-so-little Rocky Flats Plant. See "Satellite campuses make sense for crowded Los Alamos lab," Aug. 12, 2023 Santa Fe New Mexican, along with my (Greg's) published comments. Our earlier press release about this: Los Alamos to metastasize as weapons mission outgrows site Lab management to present before local government Tuesday 7/18/23, 6 pm MDT, Jul 17, 2023. Here is LANL's July 18, 2023 presentation & proposal. (You can also see the 7/18/23 presentation and subsequent discussion at the Los Alamos County Council web page.) Related, here is NNSA's 2019 proposal for taking over the entire Midtown Campus in Santa Fe: "DOE/NNSA Proposal for an Innovation Campus, Midtown Santa Fe," Oct 31, 2019. The current proposal for satellite minicampuses doing classified work in Santa Fe and/or Bernalillo or Rio Rancho may include, per NNSA and LANL, biological laboratories investigating human pathogens. NNSA has already issued a "categorical exclusion" for this work under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). As people in the present administration told me (because they didn't want it to happen), this would be "gain-of-function" research, leaning on LANL's classified computing assets to explore possible bioweapons (for defense purposes, of course!). These details aside, it is a momentous, unprecedented development for top editor in the main newspaper chain in northern New Mexico to come out implicitly in favor of pit production and LANL's new giantism, with all its implications for the future of surrounding communities and the state. Want an affordable home in the area? Fuhgetabout it. Tired of traffic jams? Get used to them. The 20,000-person-LANL that the New Mexican is so happy about would drive a stake through the soul of Santa Fe, which frankly is already on life-support. Nearly all supposedly anti-nuclear NGOs are actually passive with respect to, and some actually support, the creation of a new Rocky Flats in their own back yards. Large national funders and arms control organizations are also perfectly happy to support creation of new ICBM warheads using the pits LANL aims to create. For shame. Third, Ukraine. Please do read our daily Ukraine selections and pass them on. Taken as a whole, they are excellent discussion materials and far better than anything in the mainstream media, for sure. We make occasional comments, provide special recommendations (the "Featured" items) and we pull out some of the main points when we have time. For those interested in nuclear disarmament and arms control, ending the Ukraine conflict is the very first step. It is entirely within U.S. capability to do that, in a single day, provided that Russia's core security needs are met. Every day that passes with no peace offer from the West means more Ukrainian deaths (and Russian deaths, far fewer) as well as less favorable negotiation conditions for Ukraine. Said differently, Ukraine has lost this conflict. Without the U.S. propping it up, the deaths would stop. The silence from churches and supposedly antinuclear NGOs makes them co-responsible for these deaths. Absent habits of moral courage, a kind of armor which is ours to create if we choose, we will pay a heavy price for our collective apathy and paralysis. Fourth, we all need to pay attention to personal, family, and community resilience as we prepare to head into the fall. The confluence of governance crises affecting all branches of the federal government, the exponential rise of federal interest payments (which now exceed the Pentagon budget on an annualized basis), the weaponization of the legal system against the administration's main opponent, the patent failure of the Ukraine War project (now running on fumes or more precisely, rivers of Ukrainian blood), the rise of global alternatives to the neocolonial, hegemonic "rules-based global order," and much more which could be added, comprise a highly-combustible political and economic mixture. Under these conditions the Gandhian "constructive program" must remain in the forefront for most people and communities. It is important to resist the depredations of the military-industrial-administrative state, and even more important to secure livelihoods and to choose vocations that build and sustain our communities. If we had more and better leadership, there would be work and livelihoods for everyone. We can't leave anyone out. Best wishes, Greg Mello, for the Study Group
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