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July 24, 2024 Thank you for coming this past Monday or otherwise helping; wonderful Sentinel revelations Permalink for this letter. Prior letters to this New-Mexico-oriented list. Dear friends -- Thank you so much, all of you who were able to go to, or attend virtually, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)/Department of Energy (DOE) Town Hall this past Monday (7/22). A hearty thanks as well to all who have contributed to resistance to nuclear weapons in other ways, whether recently or in the past. It all counts and it all makes a difference, if we keep speaking out. At this Town Hall there was a lot of creativity in signs, speeches, and attire. There were approximately 300 people in attendance and another 200 people attended on-line, I am told. The pro-peace, anti-nuclear-weapons community in New Mexico is very much alive. The meeting had a scripted feel. There was no signup sheet for those who wanted to speak. NNSA and DOE picked the speakers they wanted, as was clear, and few people got to speak or ask questions. Impatience with the generally pat answers offered, where answers were offered at all, grew. This was the Administrative State speaking after all, through its human avatars, as likable and as worthy as some of them are. The "unwarranted" power of the "Military-Industrial Complex" may seem a cliche but as we know it is all too real, especially in New Mexico. Beneath the very thin veneer, it was the Military-Nuclear State that held that meeting on Monday. That Power encourages passivity and fatalism. It seeks to impress its image on the land, on us, and on civil society. We are told, in oh so many ways, that it would be best to join with Sauron. In that regard, it was very strange for the meeting to be co-moderated by the Deputy Manager of Los Alamos County, the County that is raking in the big bucks from pit production and everything else LANL does. Matthias DeSmet (The Psychology of Totalitarianism) provides some advice. He notes that while dissonant voices usually do not succeed in breaking through the “hypnosis” of the true believers -- let alone, we must add, the bureaucratic momentum of the military-industrial state and its many lackeys in civil society -- dissent can limit the damage and set the stage for real, substantive change. By speaking out, we ourselves become free. To the extent the national security state has a free hand in New Mexico, "we the people" do not. DeSmet's most important conclusion was very simple: “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.” People ARE speaking out. Here is some of the press from Monday's meeting:
Changing the subject, I am now in Washington, DC, where I have a small handful of meetings today and tomorrow. I am learning things as well as bringing new information to the table. I have some big news, which we suspected but didn't know of the half of. Back on July 15, we led an on-line discussion: "Sentinel, pit production, and a bit more; Why the US is losing the new arms race it started"; (video). The unspoken theme of that discussion -- "Is this sucker really going down? Because that's what it looks like" -- turns out to be a better question than we knew. Today I learned that the Sentinel program (to deploy new intercontinental ballistic missiles, aka ICBMs, in existing underground silos) is in even worse trouble than we knew, or has been heretofore reported. And because of that, the opinion of David North in Los Alamos, that the "Need for Pits [is] Pushed Back Several Years" (Los Alamos Reporter, Jul 19, 2024) is more right than many have suspected. I don't want to spill too many beans in this brief note but Sentinel is more of a disaster than its critics (like us) have known, up to now. The "several years" delay mentioned by Pentagon briefers on July 8 for "initial capability" really means not until the late 2030s. That is, "several" was a euphemism for "many." How many of the proposed new 400 or 450 deployed missiles will be in that "initial capability"? Fewer than the fingers on two hands, it turns out. And what about the missile silos which are supposed to be "upgraded?" It turns out that "upgraded" means "mostly replaced." Holy moly is that expensive -- maybe impossible in the real world. Did we know that there is a full score or more of Sentinel budget lines that are NOT actually included in the stated Sentinel budget? I certainly didn't. It's a familiar approach -- like the LANL pit production "budget," a many-splendored thing, open-ended, never officially enumerated. There is more to say about this but I anticipate -- I know -- that the defense press will soon write about this and much more, and we will see some fresh outrage about it from many quarters. "What fresh hell is this?," the Air Force and STRATCOM must be saying. What this means is the entire concept of nuclear deterrence is going to be re-thought, whether the "powers-that-be" want to do that or not. The forces majeure we have spoken about over the past few years, and specially this year, are beginning to express themselves. It is not perfectly accurate to say that "the Force is with us," but it is not entirely inaccurate either. Best wishes to all, Greg Mello PS: As I finish this note, yet another press release/pack of lies is coming in across the electronic threshold from LANL. That laboratory emits a seemingly never-ending stream of lies to befuddle the people of this state. |
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