December 31, 2022

Bulletin 321: Last day for 2022 donations! / A few quick updates

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Previously: Bulletin 320 (12/29/2022): Neocon humiliation -- or nuclear exchange / The centrality of war resistance in moral politics / 3 days left for 1:1 donation match!

(Next time: U.S. plutonium policies in flux)

• It is the last day for 2022 donations, and the last chance for 1:1 matching funds as well!
• A few quick updates

Dear friends and colleagues --

We hope you all have a peaceful, joyous, and fulfilling new year, despite -- and because of -- what are sure to be some tough times ahead. Either we will en-joy the times, or we won't. It's up to us. Whatever happens, we can be sure that complacency will not be rewarded.

Today, it is my job to remind us of the obvious: this is the last day in which donations to nonprofits such as ours can be deducted from 2022 income taxes.

Also, as of now, $2,260 in 1:1 matching funds are still available, through today!

If you have not made a contribution and wish to do so, please go to this page for ways to give!

To those of you who have contributed in this fund drive -- thank you so very much. As a result of your generosity we will be able to weigh in strongly over the next few months as the Biden Administration and Congress grapple with their troubled strategies for upgrading U.S. nuclear warheads.

That said, we are not in what I would call "good financial shape," not at all. We will need to look very hard for support in the coming year, starting right away, and we hope you will help us with referrals and introductions. It may be hard for those not working in the disarmament field to understand just how far to the political "right" most so-called "liberal" foundations have gone. "Peace" sounds great until the war propaganda takes over. Never in our lives has it been so intense.

As we have previously mentioned, the war against Russia and preparations for possible war against China are among the factors causing U.S. nuclear weapons factories to work around the clock.

There are plenty of other ways to help, as many as there are people who are interested! If you want to help, please write me. (Two or three people have already written -- bear with us, we will get back to you.)

We will be having local meetings in Albuquerque and Santa Fe in the very near future to discuss volunteer opportunities, so if you live nearby please stay tuned for those announcements.

As mentioned in Bulletin 317, we are making room in our crowded schedule to train interns, effective immediately. Again, this is thanks to the support we have from our very special community of friends and allies. While funds are indeed scarce, we will take care of our people and we will, as we said above, "en-joy" our work together. We run an engaged, happy ship here and are highly-regarded in government and elsewhere -- including by many former interns.

A few quick updates

• On the Ukraine war, we posted these articles yesterday:
• Lavrov suggests ‘hundreds’ of US troops are in Ukraine, Azerbaycan24 (mirrored from Russia Today), Dec 30, 2022. (That is certainly true, especially if CIA and DoD specialists are included. Thousands more help from outside Ukraine.)
• We've Reached Peak Zelensky. Now What?, Robert Freeman, Common Dreams, Dec 29, 2022
  
• Russian Nuclear Base Attacked For 3rd Time This Month (with U.S. help, no doubt), ZeroHedge, Dec 29, 2022 (This time, without casualties. These provocations, which could not occur without U.S./NATO help and support, should make us shudder, and think long and hard about what the Biden Administration is doing and allowing. Where is the "peace movement?" Not even MIA -- just M.)
  
• Evidence of US-Backed Coup in Kiev, Joe Lauria, Consortium News, Dec 29, 2022 (An "oldie but goodie." Multiple investigations have settled this issue.) 
  
• On the Influence of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine, Joe Lauria, Consortium News, Dec 29, 2022 (Ditto, a fortiori.)

Developments are unfortunately very rapid, except on the diplomatic side. As noted last time, our cities may not be here to celebrate New Year's 2024. That's what we mean when we say that "the risk of nuclear war is as high as ever before."
Don't despair, however. Organize. Connect with others. Speak out. Democratic peace activists, it's past time to reach across the aisle to the "deplorables," because like it or not it's on the Republican side where at least some opposition now lives. With every single Democratic member of Congress voting to expand this war, progressive anti-war voices have been completely co-opted and ineffective, so far. Please don't write your congressperson. Do something real.

• As introduced in detail in Bulletin 319, plutonium warhead core ("pit") policy is in flux. Pit production is the largest nuclear warhead endeavor since the 1980s, and it's not going well. Unfortunately, so far the arms control community, many groups in the "anti-nuclear" category, and some prominent "experts" have sided with the nuclear hawks to promote early-to-need pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the "worst place in the country" for this mission as one government analyst put it. Since LANL is so clearly inadequate in scale, safety, reliability, and endurance, the result of this ill-starred policy marriage is that NNSA must also build another factory in South Carolina -- larger, safer, newer, easier to staff, and more sustainable.

Next month, the new Congress will find out just how screwed-up this overall plan is, and we will be there to help them. Last year, our work was passed around in some government offices for comparison with ongoing government analyses and we are eager to expand, update, refine, and communicate our work more broadly. LANL's pit production will fail or have its plug pulled, we can be sure, but what's at stake in the meantime is commitment to, and belief in, a large and aggressive nuclear arsenal and all that goes with it.

• Some of you will be interested in our very brief published comments in the Santa Fe New Mexican on the disposition of surplus plutonium and related issues (also here). We will follow those up in more detail. In one of those comments we said something new:

Finally, while LANL is a bad place for plutonium processing of any kind, processing surplus plutonium is a much better, i.e. less bad, mission for LANL's plutonium facility than making more pits. I don't recall saying that before, or reading it from the antinuclear crowd either. At present, pit production has priority over every other plutonium mission at LANL -- removal of legacy waste, and surplus plutonium oxidation. If LANL must have an industrial plutonium mission, let it be on the disarmament and cleanup side of the equation, which both these other missions are, however weakly.

Plutonium disposal at WIPP [or anywhere else equally practical and relatively safe] improves the world, and does not significantly increase the dangers at WIPP or on the highways. (The real increase in highway danger comes from the thousands of pit production workers who are and will be commuting, under current plans.) Plutonium disposal could be done without processing for 1/10th the cost, 1/10th the dangers to workers, and 1/10th the number of years, and without involving LANL or the Savannah River Site, but even with processing it is a better mission for LANL than making more nuclear weapons and waste.

Thank you all,

Greg Mello and Trish Williams-Mello, for the Los Alamos Study Group