Upcoming events, Santa Fe Reporter ads, unexpected confirmation of the power of New Mexico resistance
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This is a letter to our New Mexico-oriented activist mailing list, a subset of our whole mailing list.
This letter:
- Upcoming events
- Santa Fe Reporter ads
- Unexpected confirmation of the power of New Mexico resistance from 14 years ago -- but the danger still lurks
- Volunteer opportunities
- To do our work we need financial support; THANK YOU
Dear friends --
Upcoming local events
- Today, 10/1, 4:00 pm: Mildly educational New Mexico district court hearing regarding Study Group Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA) request to the City of Santa Fe for emails between the City, LANL, and NNSA during 2023. You can observe at https://meet.google.com/hdc-wqjx-wes. More attendance probably won't help or hurt our case, but some may find it educational for their own public records requests in the future.
- Saturday, 10/5: "Resistance until Liberation" rally and march against Israeli genocide, organized by several organizations, at 2 pm, Robinson Park, Albuquerque (map). U.S. funding and support for other wars including the current U.S. war against Russia and the threatened U.S. war against China, will also be a theme.
- Tuesday, 10/8: Some of us will attend the Santa Fe County Board of Commissioners meeting (general information here, map), to discuss issues related to the expansion of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and plutonium warhead core ("pit") production. Issues include transportation and traffic, housing, the proposed power line, and more. Details and related issue discussion TBD.
- Wednesday, 10/9: Some of us will attend the Santa Fe City Council meeting at City Hall (map) this evening, to again present on issues related to the expansion of LANL, pit production, and related transparency issues. Details and related issue discussion TBD.
- Saturday, 10/12: Los Alamos Study Group in-depth community briefing and discussion on some key issues related to the new nuclear arms race, 1 to 5 pm at St. Bede's Episcopal Church, 550 W. San Mateo (map). At this meeting:
- Former senior CIA analyst and presidential daily briefer Ray McGovern will speak to us on U.S.-Russian relations, the Ukraine War, and related topics at 1:30 pm; and
- Renowned international law authority Francis Boyle to speak at 3:00 pm (see for example his Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence). Francis has sent us an updated Chapter 12 from this book, which we have uploaded for you at this link.
- Please write or call Bex (505-545-9578) if you wish to attend!
- Thursday 10/24: Briefing and community discussion on pit production, SALA Event Center, Los Alamos (map), 6-8 pm. Virtual attendance will be possible but we hope those of you in easy driving distance will attend in person. There will be no charge for admission.
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Santa Fe Reporter ads
Thanks to some of you we have been able to place double-page ads in back-to-back issues of the Santa Fe Reporter:
Please feel free to print out the second of these ads if you want to use it in your own outreach, or copy it from an issue of the Reporter.
Unexpected confirmation of the power of resistance from 14 years ago -- but the danger still lurks
Yesterday we received an interesting trove of internal LANL documents from a 5-year-old Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Of course there were a lot of redactions, but there were also plenty of useful gems -- and some unexpected confirmation of the policy impacts of cancellation of LANL's previous attempt to add plutonium pit production infrastructure. The cancelled facility was called the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF). Congressional staff have informed us on multiple occasions that it was our litigation and analysis which stalled and then killed this project in 2010-2012. In early 2012 it was only "deferred," but everybody knew what that meant. NNSA stopped work then, and finally closed the books on CMRR-NF in 2014.
So it is interesting that in one late 2012 presentation given to the joint Livermore-Los Alamos "Mission Committee," LANL said:
- "The US strategy for plutonium must be reworked...
- The US stockpile modernization strategy [for ballistic missile warheads]...relied on availability of new pits
- The 2010 DoD/DOE MOU [memorandum of understanding] stated a production need for 50-80 new pits per year
• Deferral of the CMRR Nuclear Facility has impacted this LEP [warhead life extension program] strategy
- As a result, both nuclear Labs are pursuing pit reuse"...
- The Deferral of the CMRR Nuclear facility erased a decade of Integrated Nuclear Planning virtually overnight."
Unfortunately these things never stay dead forever. They can reanimate with amazing vigor, and this too is evident in the LANL documents, which by early 2018 were making an almost manic -- and fallacious -- case for bringing the whole pit production mission to LANL, claiming that existing LANL facilities could produce over 80 pits per year without so much as a new congressional line item for construction. Then later, up to six underground workshops could be added, all linked by tunnels, where LANL's worker bees could hammer out pits for the nuclear gods (cue: Richard Wagner: "Descent to Nibelheim").
While this ugly proposal appears dead for now, there is little doubt that it -- or a worse proposal -- merely sleeps, awaiting the proper cues from a weak or desperate administration.
Meanwhile we have what has turned into a real monster of a $22 billion factory for -- supposedly -- "at least 30" pits per year. However too many details are classified for us to know whether this LANL factory, which will be under construction until at least 2032 (and by that time more construction will have been requested), will actually be limited to that production rate. Neither NNSA nor LANL have ever been honest before. Why would they start now?
Local resistance been a successful bulwark against pit production for about 30 years so far. As a result of not having a pit factory and other factors, the U.S. has already lost the new nuclear arms race. It just hasn't figured that out yet.
Volunteer opportunities
Please write or call Bex (505-545-9578) if you wish to join our volunteer outreach teams.
Or just pick up the phone and start calling (these days it's a lot easier, though hardly less important, than Paul Revere's midnight ride). Ask your business and organizational friends to sign the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production! Keep asking!
To do our work we need financial support
As most of you know we are a 501(c)(3) organization, supported primarily by many small and medium-sized donations. Our work has been uniquely successful on the national stage, and is needed now more than ever. We are grateful to be able to work with you. THANK YOU for your generosity -- and not just in making our work possible, but for work you may be able to do in direct service and on other important issues.
Best wishes,
