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April 1, 2024 Opposition to building more nuclear warheads is growing, but slowly -- please help just a bit! Permalink for this letter. Prior letters to this New-Mexico-oriented list. Dear friends -- Again it's been too long since we have written. A great deal has happened and is happening in the peace-and-nuclear-war-prevention business. Most of the nationally-oriented updates will be in Bulletin #339, which we hope to get out tomorrow to a wider email list. This list is a subset of that one and so you will get tomorrow's Bulletin, as well as this letter. The main thing we want to emphasize right now on this New Mexico-oriented list is this: Please help us recruit business and nonprofit endorsers to the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production! We currently have 852 individuals and 198 businesses, organizations, and religious groups endorsing. Some 120 of the latter are in New Mexico. Individuals are important also, but we are primarily targeting businesses, organizations, and churches. While this is significant, there is much more opposition "out there" which remains latent. Reaching people is more difficult than meets the eye. We need your help! People, including and especially business owners, nonprofit directors and church leaders, are busy. It often takes a personal "ask" to penetrate the usual blizzard of advertising and other correspondence, electronic and otherwise. While there is some visible opposition to building a plutonium processing and pit production plant right now in Los Alamos, there has not been enough opposition to (for example) convince the Santa Fe City Council to pass a resolution against it, to pick just one intermediate objective. In this "not enough" there is both a "quantitative factor" (our opposition is not numerous enough) and an "engagement factor" (our opposition is not active enough). We have a number of projects in the works to make our opposition more effective (in New Mexico, and in Washington), but right now we really, really would like those who have endorsed the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production (THANK YOU!) to recruit others to do so as well. You know people we don't. There are about 100 times as many people on this mailing list than there are volunteers who can occasionally do outreach for us. If everyone just did a little bit it would help enormously. As we are going to remind people in tomorrow's Bulletin, each of the plutonium pits LANL hopes to make will be the trigger of a nuclear bomb with the explosive power of 20 Hiroshima bombs. LANL expects to make at least 40 times this much each year, i.e. 800 Hiroshima explosions. That's per year. About 3 megatons of explosives were used in World War II, including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. LANL hopes to make as much explosive power as was used in World War II every 3 months. LANL hopes to build its first real pit since 2011 this year. Sometimes people don't understand that being in favor of nuclear disarmament generally, or nuclear abolition, or arms control, or the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), or nuclear safety, or nuclear cleanup, or compensation for downwinders, or understand that opposing nuclear waste generation and disposal do not at all constitute, or even imply, opposition to pit production. The same goes for opposing more nuclear weapons in general, or even opposing pit production in general. Neither of these implies or expresses even privately, firm opposition to pit production right here and right now. To effectively oppose something like this you actually have to oppose it specifically and actively, here and now. The function of the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production is to provide a very easy way to express and "permanentize" one's opposition, and to bring it out into the public arena where it can be communicated to others. There is a huge difference between something happening here and now and something merely planned for much later, far away. And there is a huge difference between a private opinion and a public stand right here. Here, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is building a ~$21 billion factory, far costlier than any prior New Mexico project, on a crash basis, at LANL with all its attendant liabilities, to make as many plutonium warhead cores (pits) as possible (this is a brand-new piece of information -- see the forthcoming Bulletin), for the purposes of increasing the number and the accuracy (aka "the effectiveness") of deployed U.S. nuclear warheads. (Reminder: for more background, please see "Plutonium warhead factory under construction near Santa Fe," and "Plutonium warhead factory: it's about new missiles, an arms race, greed, & domination,") This is much more than a local issue -- as important as the local impacts are. Without pit production in the coming decade, which is the same thing as saying pit production at LANL, the U.S. cannot even pretend to conduct a nuclear arms race. With a stream of new LANL pits, NNSA hopes to build "W87-1" warheads starting in the early 2030s, the purpose of which is to add additional warheads to the fleet of "Sentinel" silo-based missiles. There are already enough modern, accurate, and fairly new warheads to put one warhead on each of the new missiles. That is the way the existing Minuteman missiles are deployed -- with one warhead each and that's the initial plan for Sentinel too, using existing warheads. The pits in these existing warheads are not in any danger of "aging out." LANL pit production would allow tripling the number of ICBM warheads deployed, up to three warheads per missile -- the better to target both Russia and China. And that's the plan. LANL is the only place that pits for these extra warheads are to be made; making them is LANL's sole pit manufacturing mission. LANL has other pit missions, but no other pit manufacturing missions. If everyone would approach one business or organization they know to endorse the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Productio, it would make an enormous difference. Thank you so much, Greg, Trish, Bex |
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