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October 9, 2024
Upcoming events including Santa Fe City Council meeting tonight, in-depth briefing this coming Saturday featuring Ray McGovern and Francis Boyle
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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 including Santa Fe City Council meeting tonight; see especially the in-depth briefing this coming Saturday, featuring Ray McGovern and Francis Boyle
- Sample talking points for City of Santa Fe and other local governments
- Study Group wins legal case against City of Santa Fe for access to correspondence with LANL and NNSA last year
- Volunteer opportunities
- To do our work we need financial support; THANK YOU
Dear friends --
We've been awfully busy on multiple fronts here, hence the VERY late notice of tonight's Santa Fe City Council meeting.
Upcoming local events
- Today, 10/9, 6:30 pm: 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 issues including openness and transparency. If you want to speak or observe come at 6:45 pm for the public comment period circa 7:00 pm. (We are NOT on the agenda.) Or watch via the livestream. More information about the meeting from the City, including instructions for participating virtually, the agenda, and handouts. Some possible talking points are below.
- 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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Some talking points for the City, in no particular order (add to these, subtract from them, and adapt other local governments as you see fit):
- First, just to remind ourselves,
- At this link you can see the effects of an airburst of a 300 kiloton W87-1, the type of warhead to be made with the pits LANL is to make, on the City of Santa Fe.
Santa Fe is almost totally destroyed. The town turns to radioactive rubble and it all goes up in flames.
- At this link you can see the effects of a groundburst of the same weapon detonated at LANL on the City of Santa Fe, with light wind blowing towards Santa Fe.
Almost everybody in Santa Fe gets at least 100 rads; some get 1,000 rads and are dead within days. A pit production factory at LANL probably raises LANL's target rank. In any case Los Alamos would be more or less totally destroyed in such an attack.
No weapon which does this can ever be made legal under the laws of war (aka "humanitarian law").
- As we have been emphasizing, nuclear rearmament (and especially, rearmament in the absence of the negotiations obligated by the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons) is arguably illegal under international law. Rearmament (making new-design warheads that will enable quantitatively increased nuclear deployments is something more than "maintenance," "stockpile management," or even the euphemistic "modernization").
This is a brand-new reality and issue, something we haven't seen in 35 years. For some background please see the updated Chapter 12 of Boyle's Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence. In brief, the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) entered into force in 1970. All NPT states parties have an obligation to negotiate nuclear disarmament per Article VI:
Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.
Taking that obligation and other law into account, in 1996 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) unanimously found (p. 45) that
"[t]here exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control" (emphasis added).
For many years, we and many others argued that failure to negotiate disarmament in good faith was a breach of U.S. NPT obligations. Making pits to enable deploying multiple warheads on brand-new silo-based missiles, beyond the single-warhead capability the U.S. already has that will last into at least the 2040s, is something beyond failure to disarm. It's rearmament.
- Being an essential support for nuclear rearmament takes the City of Santa Fe into a dark cultural and moral place it should not go. It is the opposite of being a City of Peace, the opposite of being the City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis. Will our prayer be "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace" or "Lord, make me an instrument of nuclear war so I can get more money."
- Failure to build a more environmentally-sound and less inequitable future means that year after year, precious opportunities are lost. The bootprint of nuclear weapons is being pressed into the soul of the region.
- The City of Santa Fe has passed multiple resolutions opposing pit production and nuclear weapons in general. Opposition to pit production is City policy, and a Santa Fe tradition. Santa Fe Mayors are also, since Mayor Delgado, members of Mayors for Peace, a nuclear abolition organization.
- Acquisition of industrial pit production capability at LANL, a $25 billion endeavor, is transformative not just for LANL but also the region. You already see the traffic. You see the apartment buildings. You see the reckless and distracted driving, the accidents, and the fatalities on the LANL commuter routes.
- LANL will never be anything but a bomb factory. Everyone understands this, I hope. (Archbishop Wester does not understand this.) LANL's costs are far too great for any other mission. Seemingly "civilian" LANL missions are usually not, are of trivial scale in LANL's terms, and frankly are usually of poor quality, reflecting LANL's peculiar character and conflicts of interest.
- LANL will never be "cleaned up." Yet it is important to do what's reasonably possible nonetheless, and to stop wasting time. Cleanup jobs will never replace weapons jobs one-for-one, but they could still be increased somewhat and weapons jobs drastically decreased through retirement alone. Nobody needs to lose their job. At present, 900 people are leaving LANL every year, but LANL is hiring more than that to replace them.
- NNSA predicts that pit production will more than double the production of transuranic waste at LANL over the 2018 baseline. (Trust me on this for now; I just worked this out for the New York Times but it's too long for this letter.)
- The City of Santa Fe should join the County in verbally opposing the proposed new power line through the Caja del Rio (excellent article about the County's stance in today's New Mexican) and then should offer to join the County in litigation against it [on the grounds of, among other things, segmentation under the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA].
- A court in South Carolina has declared that the government-wide ("programmatic") environmental impact statement (EIS), i.e. PEIS, supporting pit production at LANL is seriously defective. While the dust is still settling, and plaintiffs are (unfortunately and misguidedly in our view) working to halt pit production preparations in South Carolina but not here, the fact remains that LANL pit production now rests on a defective legal foundation. In plain language, the environmental analysis of pit production repeatedly said to be adequate, is not. The City and the County of Santa Fe, and other local governments, and the tribes, are being hoodwinked. There is a great deal more to be said about this, but not here and not now.
- Any "satellite campus" of LANL, which will invariably support nuclear weapons directly or indirectly, will bring with it a host of problems. The City could and should make a policy against any such campuses.
- We will ask the City to stop wasting money and time stonewalling citizens wanting to know some basic information. Most of us can remember when a person could go to City Hall, ask a question, and get a straight answer.
Study Group wins Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA) case against City of Santa Fe
The judge told the City to provide all outstanding records requested by the end of this month. We asked for all correspondence between the City and LANL, NNSA, and DOE from Jan. 1 2023 to Jan. 22, 2024, when we made our request. The City has been "bread-crumbing" us since then.
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,
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