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February 5, 2024 Report-back and organizing meeting in Santa Fe Wednesday 2/7/24 6 pm, St. John's United Methodist Church / Please continue and step up your outreach! Previous letter (01/31/24): Come to the Santa Fe City Council TONIGHT, Wednesday, Jan 31st, 6 pm, or call in Permalink for this letter. Prior letters to this New-Mexico-oriented list. Good morning! First, we were very pleased with the turnout at this past Wednesday's Santa Fe City Council meeting. There were 27 or 28 people there to request that the City pass a resolution opposing plutonium warhead ("pit") production at LANL. This was more than ever before. Two of us called in (I, Greg, was in Washington DC). Many people spoke in opposition to pit production and in favor of re-introducing a new City resolution saying that, all eloquently. Several new volunteers have expressed interest in working with us. Opposition to pit production is growing. Second, please continue your outreach to businesses, organizations, religious communities, and individuals urging them to endorse the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production. In our information-saturated age, usually the biggest barrier is the lack of just a little bit of personal outreach, which pulls a message out of the background noise. A phone call, a flyer, a personal request from a friend, is often all that is needed. We now have 178 businesses and organizations and 792 individuals on board. Third, if you want to work with other volunteers on outreach projects, please write, text, or call Bex (505-545-9578) to find out more, or come to the meeting this Wednesday evening in Santa Fe (see next). Fourth, we are having a report-back and organizing session in Santa Fe this Wednesday 2/7/24 at 6 pm in the Gathering Room at St. John's United Methodist Church (SJUMC) in Santa Fe, 1200 Old Pecos Trail (map). Come one, come all! I was in Washington, DC last week at a (horrible) meeting of various nuclear weapons industry people, government watchdogs, administration officials, etc. I also met with a few others elsewhere. At this conference, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) made extra efforts to paint a smiley face on its pit production progress. LANL has begun lying blatantly and obviously to news media, not just at this conference but increasingly over the past half-year or so as we have noticed, hoping to use gullible reporters to spread information they could not say in front of Congress and dare not put in writing. There is now a powerful and I would say dominant faction in government that is pushing for more deployed nuclear weapons, of more kinds. Two new kinds -- a high-yield precision-guided nuclear bunker-buster bomb (B61-13) and a sea-launched nuclear cruise missile (SLCM-N) -- were mandated by Congress in December in the fiscal year (FY)2024 Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which is now law. Others are contemplated. At this conference I heard a pitch to use stored pits (at Pantex, near Amarillo) to create new low-yield nuclear weapons for battlefield use, which (as the speaker said), would economize on (relatively scarce) cruise missiles. A more mainstream idea gaining traction is to "practice" increasing the number of deployed nuclear weapons in preparation for the U.S. breaking out of New START limits in February 2026, when uploading more warheads could be legally done for real. Of special note, we now know that LANL is to be the only factory for pits for new warheads for the silo-based "Sentinel" intercontinental missile system. We can and must halt this slide toward nuclear war. New Mexico has a special role to play. The people here in this state -- that's you and me -- can stop this deadly nuclear arms race, which apart from the large-scale dangers posed is already bankrupting households all over the country. The entire paradigm of threats and terror can and must be changed into one of respect and cooperation if our communities, our country, and our planet are to survive. Greg, Trish, Bex |
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