September 28, 2026

Please come to the Santa Fe City Council this Wednesday 9/30 at 6:30 pm!

Especially if we haven't heard from you recently, we'd love to hear from you! Call us, at 505-265-1200. 

Dear friends -- 

I (Greg) have just returned from a week in Washington, DC and South Carolina. I am glad to be back. 

We hope you are well. 

We urgently need your help. 

What:     Santa Fe City Council meeting: your presence, possibly with a 2-minute speech in hand opposing LANL pit production and/or with a sign (we have extra signs)
When:    Wednesday Sept. 30, 6:30 pm; public comment is usually at about 7:00 pm
Where:   Santa Fe City Council Chambers, 200 Lincoln Ave. (map)
Why:       If you live in the region, it may be the single most impactful place and time you can go to register your concern about nuclear weapons and the new nuclear arms race.

From all we have seen, it is increasingly apparent that in the final analysis, it is the strength of local opposition which is the main determinant of how large the nuclear weapons mission of LANL might grow to be. 

Why?

• Yes, there are inherent physical, geographic and cultural limitations at LANL. But often these impact decision-makers first and foremost through local opposition. Every site has problems, and every project has massive cost overruns. Which problems and which overruns will matter most? That depends on us. 
• Yes, LANL employees are bidding up the cost of housing everywhere, costing Santa Fe residents tens of millions of dollars in higher rents and mortgage payments. (See our recently-posted conservative guesses here, which come to about $500 per adult resident of Santa Fe, looking at that City only.) 
• Yes, the 12,000 or so commuters going into and out of Los Alamos County* cause congestion and danger on regional roads and in the towns serving as bedroom communities. (*This figure is from a presentation to Los Alamos County by cbz consultants, May 13 2026.)
• Yes, LANL uses 272 million gallons of potable water daily, and wants to use 504 million gallons per day (p. S-24). This amount is ~300 times what Project Jupiter data center claims it will use once it is running. 
• Yes, LANL's preferred alternative includes making 3,504 55-gallon drums of transuranic waste annually (p. S-22). As if we didn't have enough. 

But if nobody effectively protests and opposes all this (and much more), who in Washington, DC will care? New Mexicans tend to just suck it up and keep going. After all, we are last in everything, so why care? We can't do anything about it, right? Wrong. That's why we are last. 

The money available to build bombs, we are seeing, is now effectively limitless. At one time, a ten-fold cost increase would make congressional committees swoon. No longer. Congressional oversight is now nearly absent. (But, miracle that it is, there is a House-passed bill pending in the Senate which would slash $5.4 billion from nuclear warhead spending. But it allows a 58% increase in pit production spending at LANL. See p. 186 here. We aren't being heard.) 

Another bill that has passed the House would double the already-aggressive plutonium warhead core ("pit") production requirements by 2050 (" House passes requirement to build more than 200 plutonium nuclear warhead cores annually by 2050; Views of key senators, representatives not yet publicly known," Jul 23, 2026).

Should this bill pass, it could very well impel construction of a new pit manufacturing building at LANL to replace or augment the production roles being temporarily housed in the old PF-4 facility. 

The day after tomorrow (Wednesday, 9/30/2026), the City of Santa Fe Governing Body is meeting. Again our proposed resolution ("A Resolution Objecting to the Expansion of Nuclear Weapons Work and the Production of Plutonium Warhead Cores at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and Opposing Additional LANL Facilities in Santa Fe") is not on the agenda.

The City Council does not yet see enough public support for this resolution. They shouldn't need a large number of people telling them to go ahead and pass this resolution but apparently they do. 

Many people in Santa Fe who are interested in nuclear disarmament and arms control -- or for that matter, self-governance -- do not understand how important it is to show up and be counted in a relatively democratic setting such as this council meeting. It is far more important to appear in person in an actual democratic setting and speak than to "write your congressperson" or stand on a street corner waving a sign at everybody and nobody. 

For those who care about the risk of nuclear war, and the nuclear arms race Mr. Trump is accelerating, LANL is simply -- as Lindy Madley put it -- a boil that has to be lanced. It cannot be ignored. No site is better funded (in the whole world) and none are more important to the advancement of U.S. nuclear weaponry. 

The pits LANL would make are to be the foundation of the next generation of nuclear weaponry, for next-gen silo-based missiles that make no sense strategically except as signifiers of a certain craziness in U.S. nuclear policy. The more they cost and the less sense they make, the greater the "crazy factor" and therefore the scarier the "deterrent." That line of thinking does not end well.   

Please, please come. 

Another reason we hope you will come is that there will be young people from UNM present, led by our interns Madi and Ella, who are planning to drive up. It will make a difference to them to see a real "partnership of the generations," as Edmund Burke put it. 

Finally I want to remind us all that the frontier of resistance "is where it is." The fenceline of the nuclear weapons facility, the military-industrial factory, the anti-human AI data center, runs through our own towns, our own families and friendships, and above all through our own hearts. We don't need to hate anybody and we shouldn't. We are all in this together. We aren't "better" than others. But we do need to decide for ourselves where we stand, in our own place and time.

As it happens, New Mexicans have a lot of power. We have tremendous personal and collective agency in determining what is done to us, and through us, here. 

Thank you for your attention. We hope to see some of you Wednesday!

Greg and Trish, for the Study Group