New Mexico congressional delegation denounces president's decision to strike Iran without approval, SFNM, 22 Jun 2025

It's past time for an energized peace movement

Jul 26, 2025

By Jean Nichols

City of Holy Faith, have you lost faith in humanity? Do you really think the answer is more nuclear weapons? New Mexico led the way down this road to death and destruction in 1945. Eighty years later, we have not learned from history and are instead letting the military industrial complex determine our future as one of endless wars, mounting pollution and increasing cancers.

As a country, we have lost the ability to negotiate and to recognize and understand the security concerns of other nations around the world. As a state, if we continue to accept the role of making nuclear weapons. We will be lost as well as last. We are already last in education, last in family and community, and nearly last in child welfare with little help from the rich county on the Hill.

Los Alamos is too small, infrastructures too old and roads too dangerous for it to be a sensible place for a plutonium pit factory. And most important: There is no need for more pits. We have more than enough nuclear weapons for deterrence. New nuclear weapons are for a ramped-up, renewed Cold War, plutonium pork pushed on us by our so-called leaders trading the health of Northern New Mexico for jobs that will inevitably lead to many more illnesses and death.

Here in the City of Holy Faith, one would think we are far from the conflicts of the world, but in effect, we are central to it all. If we allow Los Alamos to become a nuclear weapon factory producing 20-30 plutonium pit triggers every year, it will further degrade our environment and inevitably lead to accidents (check the history of Rocky Flats to the north of us). The priority of removing the legacy waste sitting in tents on the Hill in Los Alamos, tempting the next wildfire, will be ignored as more waste is created.

Many canyons around Los Alamos already test high for plutonium. Imagine this expanding a hundredfold — imagine us becoming uninhabitable. And as tensions escalate around the world, Santa Fe, once known as a destination for art and culture, could become a target for terrorists.

In the 1980s, we could fill the meeting spaces with citizens opposing a plutonium pit factory. What has happened to the anti-war movement? Are we too blindsided by the many current challenges and atrocities to recognize what is happening behind the scenes and under the cover of a misguided congressional mandate?

With our current administration breaking laws and ignoring the U.S. Constitution, perhaps it is time to follow their example and tell Congress no — we won’t use our local resources to make weapons of mass destruction. Join us in standing up against pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Call your representatives, show up at protests, talk to your neighbors. Let’s build a movement for peace in this city, named for St. Francis of Assisi, honoring his voice and legacy: “Lord let me be an instrument of your peace."

Greg Mello published comments:

Well said, Jean. We know the answers to your core question, because we all have mirrors.

Your final sentence is a wonderful call to us. Honoring St. Francis in Santa Fe would not only dramatically improve the quality of life for everyone in Santa Fe. It could also, literally, save the world. The nuclear arms race seeded under Obama in November 2010, that has been gathering money, employees, and momentum since then under three presidents, requires the plutonium pits that would be made in Los Alamos. Because of the turnover in local journalism, few now remember how many times, and how successfully, we have fought off this nightmare down to the present day.

Pit production at LANL remains a fevered dream, untethered to the realities of the site, its location, history -- and the human spirit. The heroic mode of nuclear production that produced pits and other nuclear parts during the stupid and useless Cold War, at the cost of literally thousands of lives -- about 2,000 at Los Alamos alone, according to the Department of Labor -- will never return, this side of an Orwellian nightmare of enslavement.

In that regard, a former associate LANL director for personnel, who quit in disgust at the many coverups then going on, told me that LANL employees were in his considered opinion "as mentally confined as prisoners in concentration camps were confined physically." LANL has plenty of stupid PhDs, people who have drunk the Kool-Aid because the blinders made for them help it go down so easy.

As we contemplate Jean's call to action, it is important to heed her words, calling us to stand up against pit production. That's the nub of the issue for us, the gravamen as the lawyers say. Being "against nuclear weapons," as many say, is the background, but it lacks teeth. This is not an issue that can be gummed to death. Trying to do so is like warm bathwater, without the baby. The packaging, without the content.

How shall we measure and correct our strategies? The most accurate way is by the reaction they cause -- the political pain. Howls from those who promote nuclear weapons are the best single indicator that resistance has traction. The flip side of that coin is that absent such resistance, nothing is happening. The targets in our case centrally include the members of our congressional delegation, which this newspaper never, ever questions. Neither do 90% of "antinuclear" NGOs, most of which quietly avoid confrontation with nuclear weapons pushers and warmongers in the Democratic Party -- like Theresa Leger Fernandez and Martin Heinrich.

It is very hard, at this moment in history, to actually weigh the gravity of this and other issues in our bodies and souls. Demonstrations are a first step, but obviously they do not move the political needle at all. They can boost morale, but let's not kid ourselves. Typically, they are substitutes for deeper commitment. Far too many people are satisfied with various performative actions undertaken in the bosom of one's own tribe, that feel comfortable and require no moral courage. The quantum of political change is the individual, i.e. each of us. We are talking about changing lives, starting with our own. Jean really means it when she says we need to invest ourselves in St. Francis mission of peace. We live in a cynical age, when commitment is scarce and ironic distancing has largely replaced morality. Virtue signaling is commonplace and for far too many, that's as far as it goes. The mission of which Jean speaks is not specific to one faith. It contains not just resistance but a brilliant palette of creative, constructive action as well. May we all be granted the grace to find it.

^ back to top

2901 Summit Place NE Albuquerque, NM 87106, Phone: 505-265-1200