March 3, 2023

Ukraine news and views; antiwar rally March 18; pending guest editorial; pit production precis

Dear friends --

Good afternoon. We hope you are well and enjoying the mixed spring weather!

This letter is going to our New Mexico members and others who are interested. This mailing list is a subset -- about 40% -- of our main mailing list. Given the crises we face we are going to increase the frequency of these New Mexico letters to twice a week, starting this coming Monday and Thursday. As a reminder,

• To subscribe to our New Mexico Activist Leaders listserve (this list) send a blank email here. To unsubscribe send a blank email here.
• To subscribe to our Main listserve (less frequent, broader content) send a blank email here. To unsubscribe send a blank email here.

We will try to keep these local letters relatively brief and informal.

1. Please help us reach more people, re Ukraine and via these mailing lists

The most basic (and very helpful) thing you could do to help is to promote subscriptions to these mailing lists. In our community discussions, we notice that most people have little idea what is going on as regards nuclear weapons in their own back yards (or elsewhere). The news media can only do so much. They are thin on the ground. The same lack of knowledge is evident when it comes to the present war against Russia, now very close to the abyss of World War III. Too few understand this and we are frankly desperate to get the word out. So please help us.

Our Ukraine page, updated daily or nearly so, is of particular interest. As noted previously, we select these few offerings from a wider intel "take" for quality and educational value to active citizens. On that page we also recommend a few key web sites and authors. (This short list is biased away from some longer quality podcasts that we don't have time to listen to and so can't knowledgeably recommend.) Please help us "socialize" our Ukraine page. Don't bother with the mainstream media, aka Big Brother. It's harmful.

2. Please support the ANSWER Coalition's anti-war rally on Saturday, March 18th in Albuquerque, at 2 pm on the corner of San Mateo & Gibson just outside Kirtland Air Force Base.

There are a diversity of organizations endorsing this rally (including us). It's focus is "Peace in Ukraine." We are sure we wouldn't agree with every single political view of all these groups, if we bothered to investigate them, but why should that matter? People who will march only with those with whom they agree on everything won't accomplish anything.

This rally is in solidarity with the rally that ANSWER, UNAC, and many other organizations are organizing in Washington, DC on the same day. We are also endorsing that DC rally.

Please tell your friends in and near Albuquerque to come to that March 18 rally if they are in any way concerned or upset about U.S. support for the war in Ukraine.

Now is also a good time to make new anti-war signs, devise street theater, and in general let your creative juices flow!

3. We said we would be having a public meeting about Ukraine.

We will, and soon, but our schedule is not our own right now. Meanwhile please get as many people as you can to ANSWER's rally on the 18th. The antiwar cause needs TV coverage, and that means larger numbers of people in one place at one time, as well as creativity. Remain nonviolent in word and deed, please.

4. The "Rage Against the War Machine" rally on February 19 in Washington was wonderful.

Apparently this needs to be said because some mainstream commenters didn't think so. I (Greg) was already in DC so I went. The speeches were quite good; the atmosphere was mellow and accepting, and the rally was quite diverse. I was able to meet up with colleagues. As we have said before, what united people there was more important than their differences on other issues. We do not agree with the various small-minded critiques we have seen and heard about. Code Pink did not allow Medea Benjamin to speak but she was there; we think she should have defied her organization and spoken anyway (easy for us to say, huh?). UNAC did not endorse the rally, which is too bad also. These days, it is not necessary to sow division; our Zeitgeist favors it. Multiple speakers addressed this problem; perhaps Jimmy Dore was the most eloquent. We guesstimate that about 2,000 to 3,000 people were present. For the arm-chair critics who say that is too small, a) the pre-rally opposition from other groups sure didn't help, b) it's a start, and c) that just means we all have to get cracking to make the numbers larger.

5. Pending guest editorial by Greg in the Santa Fe New Mexican

We aren't sure when (or if) this will run. So here it is:

Ukraine, Propaganda, Mass Formation, Liberation

We live in a society in which critical thinking is scarce, propaganda is pervasive, and "groupthink" is enforced. In a recent essay, former British diplomat Alastair Crooke writes, “So arguments no longer revolve around truth. They are judged by their fidelity to the tenets of singular messaging. You are either ‘with the narrative’ or ‘against it’. Remaining loyal to ​'​the group​'​ becomes the highest morality. That loyalty requires each member to avoid raising controversial issues, questioning weak arguments, or calling a halt to wishful thinking. And to further reinforce conviction in the rightness of the ‘narrative,’​ those outside the bubble must be marginalized and, if necessary, their views mercilessly caricatured to make them seem ridiculous.”

Replacement of individual thought with group-enforced ideology is especially widespread in the most influential part of our body politic: the news media. There, ideological conformity in the face of contrary evidence reigns to a degree not seen since at least the McCarthy era. This is true as regards many life-and-death issues, not just Ukraine.

Many people know this. Earlier this month, Gallup and the Knight Foundation found that half of Americans “feel most national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public.” Only 25% of Americans disagreed; the rest were unsure. Overall, trust in the news media is declining. Which is as it should be, given the barrage of “big lies” to which we have been continuously subjected since about 2016.

What will happen when the propaganda-built “house of cards” surrounding the Ukraine conflict collapses? For we as individuals, part of the answer lies in how deeply we incorporate official U.S. government lies into our identities and social commitments – how deeply we allow ourselves to be gaslighted.

People are starting to wake up. On February 24 Rasmussen released a poll showing that just 21% of voters now think Ukraine is winning the war, down from 32% in December. Forty-six percent (46%) see the war as a stalemate, up from 38% in December.

Political leaders are also changing their tune. Consortium News is the latest to report that “western leaders privately say Ukraine can’t win the war.”

Consider the silence around the Nordstream sabotage. It is virtually certain that Joe Biden and several people around him orchestrated this attack, as strong evidence suggested last fall and renowned journalist Seymour Hersh now claims. If this crime is not investigated and punished, what remains of law and our Constitution? Where is the news media on this?

In any groupthink situation there are three groups: the “believers,” those who “go along to get along” (the largest group), and the dissenters. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed, it is useless and often dangerous to reason with the true believers, as they are impervious to rational argument.

The power of the ideologues in the first group depends on the degree of conformity in the second group and on the amount of public dissent from the third. As Matthias DeSmet (The Psychology of Totalitarianism) notes, dissonant voices usually do not succeed in breaking through the first group’s “hypnosis” but do limit its depth and can prevent atrocities. DeSmet concludes, “The first and foremost task is to keep speaking out. Everything stands or falls with the act of speaking out. It is in the interest of all parties.”

The Ukraine War is the altar on which the Biden Administration has chosen to sacrifice not just Ukraine but, unless we can stop them, civilization as a whole. What each of us does now, or fails to do, has consequences for ourselves, and for others, that far exceed those we might expect in normal times.

6. Important comment on pit production in the Santa Fe New Mexican

Here's the article and Greg's comment, broken into paragraphs for readability: LANL still has responsibility to monitor Russian nukes after treaty suspension, lab head says, (with comment by Greg Mello), Santa Fe New Mexican, Feb 27, 2023). The comment is important because it lays out the basic situation re pit production in a few words.

Here is an excerpt from something we wrote recently on the same topic:

Reliable war reserve (WR) pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) will be delayed at least four years from the statutory requirement, with an unknown production schedule in the interim (NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby to Mello, 2/14/23). As a result, combined production from both sites is now required to be greater than 80 WR pits per year for some years, with the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) carrying the additional load – which it can do and then some (Savannah River Nuclear Solutions CEO Stuart McVean 2/14/23; other privileged sources). This is a dramatic setback, one which marks defeat of the ill-conceived efforts to focus all pit production at LANL. It paves the way for scaling back and terminating industrial pit production at LANL and has significant impacts to the design and production schedule of W87-1 and W93 warheads...Attempts to block construction of the SRPPF have failed, because LANL’s pit production potential is severely and inherently constrained, while the SRPPF and the Savannah River Site enjoy manifold advantages, not least in safety and capacity. At the same time, endorsement of LANL as a pit production site means endorsing pit production a decade prior to any actual need, for current and planned delivery systems, thereby endorsing the new weapons this additional early production would enable.

Note carefully that we are not endorsing pit production at SRS, which is not expected to begin until 2036. We are describing engineering realities.

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

Greg Mello, for the Los Alamos Study Group