Action Alert #75 (12/23/06)

Key nuclear warhead decisions pending, more

In this alert: 

1.      Introduction: break the silence
2.      Annual funding request
3.      What you can do: connect!
4.      Tools you can use
5.      Hoodwinked again? The buzz over “Complex 2030”
6.      Internship announcement
7.      New working paper: “Does Los Alamos National Lab help or hurt the New Mexico economy?”
8.      Status of the CMRR project
9.      James Carroll on U.S. nuclear weapons and Iran

Next time: arguments for pit production debunked  

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Dear colleagues and friends – 

1. Break the silence

An odd thing is happening.  In late 2007 the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) hopes to start a new nuclear warhead production run, the first in 18 years.  The goal is to make about 70 W88 warheads over a three- to four-year period for deployment on submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

If built, each new warhead will have 475,000 tons of explosive yield.  So this single production run will create more than ten times the explosive power used in World War II (which was about 3 megatons). Said differently, these new warheads would have the explosive energy of 2,217 Hiroshimas.  They would provide more nuclear yield than the entire British arsenal. 

The U.S. has nearly 10,000 warheads overall.  They have a combined yield of a little more than 1,000 World War IIs.  These include at least 3,400 submarine-launched warheads – the role of the proposed additional warheads – of two kinds, W76s (at 100 kilotons) and W88s (at 475 kt). 

There are hundreds more W76s available than deployed, more than the Navy and NNSA want to maintain.  In fact, it seems clear that more than 1,000 W76s will be dismantled in the precise time frame when these new warheads for the same missile are to be built.  All parties seem to agree that there is a surplus of submarine-launched warheads –just not, NNSA says, of W88s. 

W88 production waits on new plutonium “pits,” each one a warhead’s fissile core.  For the foreseeable future, these can only be made at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). LANL’s plutonium facility has been working multiple shifts lately to get ready for production and to “demonstrate” to skeptics that it can do this job despite long-standing safety-related deficiencies and aging buildings. 

What can we do?  Break the silence.  

2. Annual funding request  

We have a simple request; that you will either join our work, help fund it, or both.  Without you we can do very little.  Not too put too fine a point on it, I think we all know we have reached a point where “business as usual” will be fatal to millions.  (Don’t believe this?  Try reading the first chapters of the Stern Review of what is known about climate change.)  We have the freedom to prevent catastrophe, if we accept it.  

3. What you can do  

“What you can do” obviously depends on who you are, what your circumstances, skills, and inclinations are, and on how much of yourself you want to invest – what you want to do.  And all these change.  We at the Study Group have no great faith in cookie-cutter “democracy” or “grassroots” Astroturf campaigns in which citizens are asked to drop a postcard in the mail to their congressperson. 

We have nonetheless carefully assembled a few suggestions as to what you can do, but really these are in the nature of expert hints.  Some (not all) are primarily applicable to New Mexicans. You know more about “what you can do” than we do.  

Still, if you haven’t met with your congressperson's or senator's staff about nuclear disarmament and especially about pit production and the CMRR, now’s the time.  New Mexicans will find up-to-date contact information for their congressional delegation here. 

4. Tools you can use

• A longer version of “Break the silence” (item 1 above) may be published tomorrow (Christmas eve) in the Albuquerque Journal (Northern edition).  It is available here in the meantime.  Print or forward to others.
•   An easy-to-read overview of plutonium “pit” production issues can found in the November issue of the Sun Monthly, a New Mexico magazine. 
• Some background on LANL’s proposed new plutonium buildings, called by the misleading moniker the “Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) Facility,” can be found here in the form of a letter to key members of Congress. 
•   Some general background and history of pit production can be found here.  (More on pit production will come in the next alert, hopefully by New Year’s Day.)
• The growing network of organizations and local jurisdictions in New Mexico opposing nuclear weapons can be seen here.  If you have not already done so, we hope you will join forces with us.  Your organization or business can endorse the Call for Nuclear Disarmamenthere.  This registry of resistance, by far the largest on nuclear issues in New Mexico , is very important and is used as a barometer of concern by elected officials. 
• The previous Action Alert #74 (“Two ‘stealth’ NNSA projects aim to preempt U.S. nuclear warhead decisions,” 11/9/06 ) is still current and useful.

5. Hoodwinked again?  The buzz over “Complex 2030”

At the recent Complex 2030 hearings in New Mexico , we handed out a small flyer with this text: 

You’ve come to NNSA’s “Complex 2030” NEPA scoping hearing.  Great! Speak up – but be careful!

Why?  Because long before this “supplemental programmatic environmental impact statement” (SPEIS) ever sees the light of day in 2008, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will already be implementing the single most controversial element of this plan by other means. 

            NNSA has already made a decision to invest $1 billion (B) in new plutonium infrastructure at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).  About another $1 B will also be necessary to renew existing facilities. 

            Powerful members of Congress are fighting this semi-secret agenda. They need our New Mexico representatives to help them.  But so far our delegation is silent on the key issues – except for Senator Domenici, who favors it.  We must help them focus on the here and now and not on Complex 2030, which won’t be implemented for many years if ever!  It is a distraction!

            Further, this hearing has nothing whatsoever to do with stopping plutonium bomb core (“pit”) production at LANL, which is the only place pits can be made for the next 16 or more years.  This hearing deals only with the scope of a document purporting to analyze environmental impacts of, among other things, various pit production options after 2022. 

            NNSA doesn’t want you to notice what’s going on right now.  They don’t want you to organize effectively to stop it.  A strong letter from either New Mexico senator, or intervention from Congressman Udall, could stop this. 

            The U.S. hasn’t made nuclear warheads in 17 years. Pit production at LANL is essential for it to start up again.  It hasn’t happened yet and there are a lot of reasons why it shouldn’t.  There’s just no good reason to make pits any time in the next four decades, if not longer -- even if you want to keep all the warheads in the U.S. arsenal.  [Which even Dick Cheney does not.]

OK, that last sentence wasn’t on the flyer.

In Santa Fe, I (Greg) said (twice) that the more of its limited attention the public puts into commenting in the “Complex 2030” scoping process, the more likely it is that pit production will begin and a new pit production factory, the centerpiece of Complex 2030, will actually get built, at LANL.  

There is a pernicious tendency in many quarters to gloss over these two developments – the advent of warhead production, or a new pit factory – as if they weren’t happening, or as if they were behind us.  In comparison to these, Complex 2030 is a distant development.  No federal commitment can be made to it until a Record of Decision (ROD) is issued under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).  That ROD is now tentatively scheduled for fall, 2008.

Thus citizens are led into focusing on what is far away, nebulous, and in many eyes unlikely, and their attention is distracted from the real issues of today. 

Veteran Albuquerque Journal reporter John Fleck heard me (Greg) speak about this in Albuquerque and wrote about these matters in his blog. 

6. Internships available  

We are starting a new internship program, available for serious activists, young adults, and scholars of all ages.  Details are here. 

7. New working paper: “Does Los Alamos National Lab help or hurt the New Mexico economy?”  

A new working paper (504 kb pdf) outlining some of the issues underlying this question has been posted on our web site.  We invite your thoughtful review and your own contributions. Please feel free to share this paper with elected officials and others who might be interested in the economic impact of LANL.  A lot remains to be added to this paper but we felt it was worthwhile to share even in this readable draft. 

8. Status of the CMRR project 

The sales pitch for LANL’s big CMRR project is changing.  Although all three phases of the project (a light radiological laboratory with utility core, gloveboxes and other equipment, and heavy plutonium facility) are proceeding in parallel to some extent, NNSA must find a way to respond to the House Appropriations committee, which has recommended zero, and nearly zero funding for this project for two years running.  Although the details of NNSA’s new sales plan won’t be available until next month, the general drift is that NNSA will likely ask for the first phase of the project to continue for now (which is mostly what they are doing anyway), leaving the subsequent phases for later.  No doubt they want to continue spending at least some money on them, however, to keep the contractors happy and the momentum going.  

The fact is that LANL already has dozens of nuclear facilities and dozens of lighter radiological facilities as well.  Many are poorly utilized.  For example the existing 550,000 square foot CMR facility, the largest building at LANL, could be a safe radiological laboratory, although it cannot forever keep operating as heavy nuclear facility.  Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to upgrade and renew it.  NNSA and LANL keep trying to say that the CMR is unsafe and a new facility must be built, but if the facility to be built is only a light radiological facility it will not be able to take over the missions that make the CMR unsafe.  The hidden resolution of this contradiction is that the CMRR project doesn’t make much sense if it does not include a heavier nuclear facility.  There is an element of deception here.

The primary reason LANL wants this particular new radiological facility, in this particular location, is that it will make plutonium analyses and tests easier and more convenient, enabling faster pit production.  It is surely pit certification and pit production which will be the biggest “customer” of the new lab.  Further, the CMRR radiological laboratory, conveniently located as it would be, would likely allow the “off-loading” of analytical work now taking place in PF-4, the main plutonium facility, enabling the reconfiguration of gloveboxes and production equipment for faster, more efficient pit production, which is the point of the whole project.

Citizens and lawmakers alike should not be hoodwinked by these elastic arguments.  The CMRR is not needed unless LANL is to have an expanding plutonium mission.  NNSA’s view is that “if we built it they –pits -- will come.”  Senator Domenici’s view is that “if we build it they – dollars – will come.” It is likely that LANL dollars are going to decline with or without the CMRR.  The CMRR will stamp LANL as a production facility.  

9. James Carroll on U.S. nuclear weapons and Iran

Many of you will have seen this excellent and interesting editorial by James Carroll of the Boston Globe.  Thousands of (mostly useless) articles have been written about Iranian situation this year; this one is interesting and different.  (Carroll omits to mention Israeli nuclear weapons, however, which cannot be omitted in this context.)  Carroll’s semi-new book House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power is likewise unusually insightful and fresh on the issue of nuclear weapons, not to mention being a very fine book on the rise of American militarism in general. 

Thanks for your attention and best wishes to everybody for the New Year,

Sincerely,
Greg Mello, for the Study Group

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--
Greg Mello * Los Alamos Study Group * www.lasg.org
2901 Summit Place NE * Albuquerque , NM 87106
505-265-1200 voice * 505-577-8563 cell * 505-265-1207 fax

1362A-2 Trinity Drive , Los Alamos , NM 87544
505-661-9677 (voice and fax)

To subscribe to the Study Group's regional listserve, send a blank email
to lasgnewmex-subscribe@lists.riseup.net. To subscribe to our national
listserve, send a blank email to lasg-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.

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Action Alert #74 (11/09/06)

Two “stealth” NNSA projects aim to preempt U.S. nuclear warhead decisions

A new and fairly easy-to-read overview of one of these issues – plutonium “pit” production – can found in this month’s Sun Monthly, a New Mexico magazine.  Background on the other – LANL’s proposed new plutonium buildings – can be found here.  More general background, which you might have seen already, can be found here and elsewhere at www.lasg.org. 

 

The slowly-growing network of organizations and local jurisdictions in New Mexico opposing nuclear weapons can be seen here.  If you have not already done so – and many organizations still have not – we hope you will join forces with us.  Your organization or business can endorse the Call for Nuclear Disarmament here. 

Subscription information can be found at the end of this Alert.  Contributions are welcome and needed; you can use this secure portal.

Dear friends and colleagues –  

This fall and winter, two of the most important policy choices facing Congress regarding U.S. nuclear weapons are these:

·           Whether or not to continue the design/build process for a new plutonium warhead core (“pit”) manufacturing annex at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).  This project, which would preempt much public and congressional discussion about the future of the warhead complex (see “Complex 2030,” below), is called the “Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement” (CMRR) facility.  It involves two new nuclear facilities at LANL which together are expected to cost about $1 billion, not counting related necessary investments.  Although the “design/build” of the first phase of the project has nominally begun, the CMRR remains very controversial for good reasons.

·          Whether or not to re-start U.S. warhead production after an 18-year halt, beginning with re-starting stockpile pit production at LANL after what would be a 58-year gap.  Pit production is the pivotal, necessary step in resuming warhead manufacturing overall.  Should it occur it would also be the rate-determining step in warhead production overall.

Among U.S. NGOs, there is a strong temptation to overlook these critical, far-reaching decisions.   In part because of this, many members of Congress (including the two Democrats in the New Mexico congressional delegation, Mr. Udall and Mr. Bingaman) are tempted to remain passive concerning these decisions.  For New Mexicans, it is critical that we find ways to awaken these two gentlemen.  For NGOs and activists nationally, it is important to grasp the full extent of the opportunities implicit in these decisions and to take effective, undistracted action.

1. The proposed new plutonium buildings at LANL

As regards the first of these decisions, the proposed plutonium pit production annex at LANL, the House recommended zero funding (last year) and an 89% cut from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA’s) request this year.  This year’s Senate Appropriations markup recommended full funding (as it did last year, when its view prevailed over the House).  This year’s Senate markup has not been passed by the whole Senate.  And as of last week no conference committee meetings between the two houses had even been scheduled.  With both houses poised to change leadership in January, the work they do for the remainder of this year is likely to be limited.  This may lead to a continuing budget resolution for the whole warhead complex, possibly one based on current-year funding levels.  This arrangement, should it come to pass, might remain in place all this fiscal year. 

Regardless of what happens in the next few weeks, additional funding for the CMRR likely will remain a point of contention next year.  Both houses know that these two expensive new nuclear buildings, one with a large vault for plutonium and highly-enriched uranium, comprise de facto long-range infrastructure and program commitments to LANL.  They are also commitments to the huge Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program, the making of new pits for which is the CMRR’s primary purpose.  RRW production has not been approved by Congress; even the Pentagon has offered only tepid endorsement of the project so far. 

More about why the CMRR project should not be funded can be found in this letter to Senator Harry Reid, soon to be Chair of the Senate Energy and Water Development Subcommittee.

2. The resumption of U.S. nuclear warhead production

The second decision, to resume pit and warhead manufacturing, seems already made and not a real decision at all.  But in fact: 

·          There is no stockpile pit production is occurring today and no final decision has been made to begin real (as opposed to test) production; and

·          New information has recently become available which suggests pit production is even more unnecessary, unwise, expensive, and unsafe than we thought even a few months ago. 

 

Regarding the latter and in the briefest terms, pit production is more unnecessary than ever because NNSA now knows that pits last a very long time, in effect removing doubt about pit longevity as a motive for manufacturing new pits or even laying the groundwork to do so in the current time frame.  (An unclassified summary of NNSA’s long-awaited study is reportedly nearing release.)  Further, the known long lifetime of pits means that surplus pits, of which the U.S. retains about 13,000, are more valuable as a “hedge” to NNSA managers.  Finally, the decision to make pits was made long before the appearance of an official stockpile plan which would dismantle some 4,000 warheads, providing 4,000 additional surplus pits (i.e. 17,000 in all).
   

Resuming pit production now appears more unwise even than before because U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy, based on a “do as I say but not as I do” theory, is now visibly in tatters in the important cases of Iran and North Korea.  Better compliance with our own Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, a minimum necessity for any rule-of-law approach to nonproliferation, could be said to begin with not making more warheads.   

Pit production now appears more expensive than ever before because it is now apparent that even more LANL infrastructure investments is needed than previously thought in order to manufacture pits.  Meanwhile nobody has yet figured out what has become of the $2.5+ billion already invested in this project.   

Finally, we are learning that pit production is even more dangerous than we thought because of LANL’s poor (and apparently declining) nuclear safety performance, extensively documented by the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board (DNFSB).  LANL nuclear operations consistently do not meet important NNSA, DOE, and nuclear industry safety standards.  Coming into compliance will take heaps of time, money, and management attention. 

Especially because of all this new information, which is only sketched in the barest way here, there is now no convincing reason whatsoever to re-start U.S. nuclear warhead production or to begin making new plutonium pits.  Congress should realize that the push to re-start warhead production is causing a variety of serious problems, from preempting complex-wide planning to running plants like LANL and Y-12 on variances from established safety and security standards. 

We in the NGO community should meditate deeply upon the moral and political impact of allowing the re-start of warhead production by our country after 18 years, should that occur.  It is, after all, up to us whether we allow this to happen.  The facts on the ground, morality, law, economics, and plain old common sense are on our side.  The messages are simple, quite conservative, and very easily framed.  Thousands of people marched at Rocky Flats and many other places to stop warhead production in the 1980s.  Shall we allow warhead production to start up all over again? 

3. The “Complex 2030” plan – please don’t get distracted

A few months ago, NNSA – which has long recognized the vulnerability of its pit production plans – launched what amounts to a diversionary sally, called the “Complex 2030” plan.  This is a pie-in-the-sky, long-range strategic plan or vision for the nation’s warhead facilities.  The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process for Complex 2030 is slated to begin with a scoping hearing tonight in South Carolina.  There will be 12 such hearings in all, the last one to be held on December 14 in Washington, DC. 

We NGOs have limited time and resources.  From an organizing perspective, it’s important for all of us not to get too distracted by NEPA processes, which are rather removed from actual policy decisions and from politics in general.  The Complex 2030 process is particularly far removed, dealing as it does with decisions to be made some time in the next administration (i.e. after 2008).  The legal perspective is another matter, so organizations must at least comment. 

There’s a big difference in timing – “Complex 2030” deals with matters far in the future, while the CMRR and pit production decisions will preempt the central core of those same decisions now, this year or next. 

For us in New Mexico, I would like to stress that if the newly-reelected Congressman Udall or Senator Bingaman were to write a letter questioning the rationale for the CMRR project, that letter could tip the balance.  The CMRR project has few devoted friends in Congress other than Senator Domenici, who has now been deposed from his powerful chairmanship of the Senate Energy and Water Subcommittee.  As it happens, the billions to be spent on new construction at LANL, which construction is slated to take up more and more of LANL’s budget over the next three or so years, will mean fewer jobs and require more layoffs.   

Dear New Mexico friends, we need to stop this project, just as we did its predecessor (the “Special Nuclear Materials R&D Laboratory”) in 1990.  There is no more justification for this project than there was for that one.  Going to NEPA hearings will not get us where we want to go.  Holding our elected officials accountable will.  This will take time, commitment, knowledge, and skills, but what besides these have ever been effective?   

For NGOs nationally, I hope we fully recognize our opportunities here and press our moral, technical, legal, economic, and foreign-policy advantages, both in the new Congress and in our own communities.  And right now I hope we don’t get too excited about reacting to NNSA’s latest dog-and-pony show, which I think has been designed for distraction.   

If you want to help stop these projects, please call or write us.  There are many ways to become involved, or get more involved. 

Greg Mello, for the Study Group

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--
Greg Mello * Los Alamos Study Group
2901 Summit Place NE * Albuquerque, NM 87106
505-265-1200 voice * 505-265-1207 fax * 505-577-8563 cell
www.lasg.org

To subscribe to the Study Group's regional listserve, send a blank email
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The University of New Mexico (UNM) Board of Regents will conduct its next regular monthly board meeting on

Tuesday, October 10, 2006, at 1 p.m. in ballroom B of the Student Union Building on the UNM main campus.

It is really important for everyone to come to this meeting and voice their concerns over the militarization of our University systems.  The panel discussion held at UNM last Friday, September 29th, promoting new nuclear warheads was a wake-up call for many.  For background information, the Study Group's press release about that panel discussion is pasted below.  You may have missed coming and speaking out at the panel discussion for numerous reasons.  Don't let another opportunity pass you by without coming and making your voice heard!!

The following is advice from friends that regularly attend these meetings:

1.       The regents do not make it easy for the public to comment during these meetings and furthermore, may even bully you into thinking that you don't have the right to speak out.  However, there is usually some time for public input during the meeting -- possibly a very short period at the beginning.

2.       Come early and look for the person that is making a list of the people that would like to speak.  They will make you speak to an item on the agenda, so look at the agenda in advance and choose an item to which you can relate your comments -- there are many.

3.       According to the regents website, you might be able to get copy of the agenda from these locations: 

• University Communication and Marketing ( Welcome Center in the Cornell Parking Structure) at least 24 hours before the meeting.
  
• Agendas can also be found at http://www.unm.edu/news/Regents'Agendas.htm
  
• Office of Public Affairs and at the Zimmerman Library Reserve Desk at least 24 hours before each meeting.

4.       You can find the minutes from their last meeting here: (these give you an idea of their typical meeting and the names of the regents)

http://www.unm.edu/news/Regents/06-08-08.htm

*********************************************************

For Immediate Release

September 29, 2006

 

NNSA, Lockheed Host “Academic” Panel Discussion at UNM of New Nuclear Warheads and “Responsive” Manufacturing Plants

Entire panel works for, or is otherwise tied to, NNSA, labs – all other voices excluded

“Academic” event hosted by UNM “office” funded entirely by Lockheed

 

Contact: Greg Mello 505-265-1200

 

Albuquerque – Today, September 29, 2006, from 1:30 pm - 4:00 pm at the Student Union Building (SUB) on the University of New Mexico (UNM) main campus in Albuquerque in Santa Ana rooms A & B, there will be a panel discussion about the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program.  The event is sponsored by the UNM Office for Policy, Security, and Technology (OPST), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), and Women in International Security (WIIS).  Details can be found at http://www.unm.edu/%7Eopst/events.html.

Greg Mello, Study Group Director:  “The goal of today’s discussion, from the perspective of those paying for it, has nothing whatsoever to do with its technical or policy content.  What is being attempted is to harness the academic thirst for prestige to create a façade of legitimacy for U.S. weapons of mass destruction programs, which are now in political and financial trouble.” 

The so-called RRW program and its associated construction program designed to create a “responsive infrastructure” of agile nuclear warhead factories that will replace all U.S. nuclear weapons with new-design warheads over the coming 30 or so years.  U.S. nuclear warheads are highly reliable – far more so than other weapons systems components – and current life-extension programs are in the process of extending their “shelf-life” for decades to come.  Tens of billions of dollars have already been committed.  In the proposed new RRW program, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) wishes to gradually replace existing warheads with untested new warheads.  Neither Congress nor the Pentagon has yet approved RRW except in its earliest stages. 

Greg Mello, Study Group Director:

“The key questions regarding Friday’s panel are not this or that management strategy for U.S. nuclear weapons.  They are not whether nuclear weapons are a problem in some sense – or perhaps a panacea for military insufficiency, as U.S. nuclear doctrine suggests.  These are very important questions but they are not the gravamen of concern today.  The key issues are rather:

• The false impression being given that this is an “academic” panel, when in fact all but one of the panelists work for NNSA, SNL, or LANL.  Each would be fired in a heartbeat if they said anything that strayed too far from the “party line.”  These people must do the bidding of higher authorities in the nuclear weapons complex or find a new job, quite likely at much lower pay. There is therefore little or no uncoerced deliberative content to the panel.
  
• Lockheed-Martin, the world’s largest military contractor, has created its own little Lockheed-funded portion of UNM with a $1.25 million, 5-year grant.  LockMart is using UNM as a public relations front to advance a political agenda that will benefit the corporation’s profit-oriented idea of “national security,” which polls show is not widely shared by the American people in this case as in many others.  The panel is thus not just somewhat interest-conflicted – it is almost totally interest-conflicted.  The RRW program will involve more than $100 billion in contract work over 30 years; much of that work would go to the corporations represented on the panel.  The U.S. nuclear weapons complex is now 96% privatized; the 20-year, no-bid LANL contract alone is worth $37 billion, according to the Department of Energy (DOE).  Most Americans, and most members of the UNM community, have no idea how intellectually corrupt these institutions are, or how coercive are their internal cultures.
  
• The U.S. has signed binding treaties and agreements which require complete nuclear disarmament, not nuclear maintenance – and certainly not nuclear rearmament, which the “responsive infrastructure” is meant to provide.  Under what legal basis does the work proceed?
  
• The organizers of the panel have taken every pain to assure that the panel appears authoritative and prestigious.  In fact, the effort to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the context of treaties requiring the exact opposite outcome – especially in the context of the aggressive wars now underway (which must invariably bring in their train violations of the Geneva Convention and widespread suffering) – breaks clear international law.
  
• It also breaks domestic law, as ratified treaties become binding U.S. domestic law as well.  The speakers’ careers challenge the Nuremberg Principles, which require individuals to act independently of illegal government orders to uphold universal moral and legal principles even when the most serious personal repercussions may result – which is not at all the case here.  Preparing the instruments of mass murder breaks the universal moral norms of humankind and challenges civilization itself.  The purpose of the RRW is to threaten and if necessary annihilate of entire countries and peoples, the very definition of genocide. The supervisors of the individuals who will speak today have openly said the purpose of these weapons is to threaten the annihilation of countries and peoples, and to carry out this threat if necessary, on a number of occasions.
  
• The University of New Mexico, the primary institution in this state charged with passing on the precious fruits of human civilization to future generations, is being suborned and perverted in this way.  It is possible that career ambitions and personal gain have been placed above academic and moral judgment, not just within the OPST but also in the political science department and elsewhere in the University.  It is our universal moral duty to speak up against preparations for nuclear holocaust, not to provide “intellectual” peer review for it. 

Mello continues: “Today, the entire world is watching the RRW program and New Mexico, and wondering whether a discussion of new kinds of nuclear weapons can proceed and be reported as a technical and management issue, free from legal, moral, and social friction.  Day and night many of us pray that journalists will be able to challenge this false authority and report the facts, standing on the firm ground of the values which uphold civilization, not the underlying hate, fear, and greed that drive the push for more weapons of mass destruction.”    

Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure… Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.

From pamphlets written by the “White Rose”student resistance group at the University of Munich, 1942. 

***ENDS***

--
Greg Mello * Los Alamos Study Group
2901 Summit Place NE * Albuquerque, NM 87106
505-265-1200 voice * 505-265-1207 fax * 505-577-8563 cell
www.lasg.org

To subscribe to the Study Group's regional listserve, send a blank email
to lasgnewmex-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.  To subscribe to our national
listserve, send a blank email to lasg-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.

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Action Alert #72 (09/30/06)

Bob Anderson's arrest & aftermath of RRW panel "discussion"

Dear colleagues and friends --

Yesterday a panel "discussion" of the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) organized by the University of New Mexico's (UNM's) Office of Policy, Security, and Technology (OPST), described in detail in yesterday's Action Alert #71, took place.  (All of you getting this message should have gotten Friday's alert about this meeting.  If for some reason you didn't and wish you had, send a blank email to lasg-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.)

It was a difficult but productive event -- although not in the way the organizers intended, thanks in no small part to Bob Anderson's arrest (see below) as well as to the many citizens who packed the meeting room. 

Bob's arraignment is TOMORROW morning (10/1/06) at Metro Court, 4th and Lomas NW in Albuquerque and he could use our support there. 

The event began with what I would say was an obsequious (to Sandia National Labs) and unlearned introduction by Interim Dean of Arts and Sciences Vera Norwood, who disparaged nuclear disarmament along with those who work for it, saying that "nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented" and "cannot be wished away."  Other platitudes followed.  Ms. Norwood apparently wasn't thinking of the many formal ways in which a great majority of the world's states (not just citizens) have testified to the practicality of nuclear disarmament, including permanently constraining their own nuclear activities, in effect staking their security on the practicality of the linked ideals of disarmament and nonproliferation. 

The six presentations which followed this were very one-sided, in my view amounting to little more than a sales pitch for the RRW from 5 out of the 6 speakers.  Even pro-nuclear-weapons, but anti-RRW, views were entirely suppressed, as were of course all perspectives which gave full credence to U.S. nuclear disarmament obligations under law. 

One of the speakers did offer international perspectives which cast doubt on the wisdom of pursuing the RRW, but these were couched as political matters which might be finessed by diplomatic initiatives taken to placate aggrieved allies and others.  There was no mention of the 1996 International Court of Justice opinion, even by this relatively liberal speaker, and Article VI of the NPT (full text here) was somewhat mischaracterized in the typical foreign-policy-establishment manner, with "cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament" rendered as a commitment to "eventually" achieve these ends.  This, to repeat, was the only presentation that did not lie entirely within the NNSA/laboratory complex promotional perspective. 

All Q&A were deferred until the end of the discussion, a good way to marginalize all views other than those of the panel itself. 

From the outset, this was a very difficult event for all concerned.  It was difficult to sit through almost two hours that involved very few facts (and those mostly decontextualized, even from the technical perspective, let alone any other) but did involve a lot of carefully-crafted slogans, followed by a sort of learned "analysis" based on and limited by those slogans and the ideology behind them, with the partial exception of the last speaker. 

Bob Anderson of Albuquerque's Stop the War Machine (SWM) heard the bullshit barrage and spoke up, saying "You are talking about genocide!" and "Put Greg Mello on that panel, to give some balance!" and more.  Bob was forcibly removed, handcuffed, and dragged away by police to the Bernalillo County Detention Center. 

Bob spent the night in lock-up, with interim attorney Larry Kronen, his wife Jeanne, and others holding vigil outside all night.  He has been released, not on his own recognizance as we had thought, but after posting $5,000 in bail, which cost $500. 

In Bob's words today:

I was kept in the lock up until 6 am this morning, awake the whole time, no food…  Larry, Jeanne and Maria, Victor and Al did a lot of work on the bond and providing outside assistance in the long hours.  They were out at the inhumane social torture center called Metro Detention Center so far out of town no one can easily support their loved ones in jail.

I am trying to get back to all who called in the last day.  If I miss you please realize a lot has happened and I need to a respond to some of it quickly and will get to you.

I see Luis has posted some photos and I am getting back to the many people who witnessed the arrest and called afterwards.  Thanks to all you wonderful comrades!  This is what we need to build an organization and movement in this era when we are going to not only have to fight the imperial wars aboard but the disappearing laws at home, as was just passed in Congress turning over law to the military agenda.

I have an arraignment tomorrow morning SUNDAY, Oct. 1, at 10 am at the Metro court downtown, corner of Lomas and 4th.  If you want to, come on down and we can talk more there.  But there will be a trial later, which will need more support.  The university cop who took me down, whispering like almost in my ear that charging me with battery would ban me from campus, plus cost me jobs and work too, which is what they want, to silence any voices of opposition to the war industry and the new generation of nuclear weapons UNM and the war profiteers are after.  They don't mind smashing liberty here or anywhere.  

We need to build a large fund too for bail for times like this, I figure if we are effective in our work we will be needing to bail out many more quickly.

What I need at this time is if any one has photos or saw the event to let me know the details.  I need people who saw Andrew and Robb there too also getting pushed around.  Robb, Andrew can you write up what you saw…

Wanted to let everyone know to remember that this was a political act and the university's response was a political act to silence dissent. I just learned that Andrew and Robb were escorted out of the building to prevent them from speaking out at the meeting.  Andrew had held up a cloth banner and Robb had spoken out when they tried to take his banner and arrest him.

I don't know how many more people were denied entry or taken out of the meeting like this.

I do know that Vera Norwood the interim dean of Arts and Sciences came over before the meeting to tell me, I guess to tell everyone else to shut up and get in line, that the university space had been rented to Lockheed Martin and Sandia National Lab for this propaganda event - which was to sell to the public the idea that a new generation of nuclear weapons was what the country was demanding.  If they can keep up this kind of high level, academic certified need for new bombs then they can move faster to using them on places like Iran. It is this kind of mass action which has prevented the state from already using the mega bombs, this is a new stage of that same campaign only around a trick called the RRW.

Of course LM and SNL and UNM stand to make billions off a new generation of weapons and millions of people stand the risk of genocide from their use - it is important to remember that the RRW, Reliable Replacement Warhead, as Greg Mello of Los Alamos Study Group has pointed out can also be used as a tactical WMD which means they can use them in low yield mode in more places.
This crosses the threshold of WMDs in the wrong direction, opening up a new arms race and the potential for nukes to be used like cluster bombs, as Israel did in Lebanon.  That is why we must speak out on these weapons, much as Germans should have done when the Nazis were developing their new advanced technologies and gas ovens for their global empire.  I see the RRW as a form of global gas oven.

What would help us all is if people write letters to the Lobo and the Journal and Tribune (and editorials for KUNM) about all that has happened and what is going on.  Be sure to call for justice at these charges against me which are intended to intimidate students on campus and other activists, and call for more mass actions and demonstrations at UNM over their war profiteering.

Tribune <letters@abqtrib.com>; Opinion Journal <opinion@abqjournal.com>; Lobo <opinion@dailylobo.com>; KUNM News <news@kunm.org>

Many thanks to all who were there yesterday -- Bob

Trish handed out quite a lot of literature to the 100 or more attendees and at the end many of those present asked cogent questions, mostly without satisfactory answers.  I personally did not hear any positive remarks about the RRW whatsoever.  Some of the speakers expressed a sincere interest in learning more about the international law relating to nuclear weapons.  I don't think anybody left the room thinking the RRW was not very controversial, at a minimum.  Overall, I think we held the line. 

One problem is that in the absence of substantial print media attendance NNSA and SNL may be able to privately spin what happened as an "academic" discussion of the merits of the RRW (a kind of discussion which didn't happen) to unaccountable audiences elsewhere, to people who weren't there yesterday.  Some of these audiences might be in the Pentagon, for example, which has not yet given its support to RRW.

What did happen is that NNSA, Sandia, LANL, and their one invited guest (a former military intelligence officer teaching at Georgetown who is a Sandia laboratories national security advisor) had a discussion about the RRW using UNM facilities, like a stage play.  An official photographer captured images of the "discussion" for these other uses.  The rest of us watched most of the time and were thrown out and arrested if we protested this format.  For reasons given yesterday, there was no balanced intellectual discussion, let alone a discussion that began with the civilization-upholding premise that we must not and cannot threaten to use weapons of mass destruction and therefore cannot keep them, exactly as the NPT requires. 

The struggle over whether the U.S. will resume manufacturing nuclear weapons, and build a brand-new nuclear arsenal in the coming decades, has come to us. 

Right now, it would be very helpful to build on yesterday's events in a number of ways, but there is no one-size-fits-all approach to doing so. 

First off, donations for bond are very important.  You can send a donation to SWM in care of the Peace and Justice Center at 202 Harvard SE, Albuq NM 87106 with the word BOND written in the subject line. 

You an write the UNM regents and UNM President David Harris about the way this event was planned and conducted (for possible talking points, see yesterday's action alert).  Or about the OPST itself. 

Letter to the editors (see the links above for some places to send them) are very important.

This just begins the list, and the hour is late for us here. Contact us, and contact Stop the War Machine. 

Greg Mello

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--
Greg Mello * Los Alamos Study Group
2901 Summit Place NE * Albuquerque, NM 87106
505-265-1200 voice * 505-265-1207 fax * 505-577-8563 cell
www.lasg.org

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listserve, send a blank email to lasg-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.

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Action Alert #71 (09/29/06)

For Immediate Release

September 29, 2006

 

NNSA, Lockheed Host “Academic” Panel Discussion at UNM of New Nuclear Warheads and “Responsive” Manufacturing Plants

Entire panel works for, or is otherwise tied to, NNSA, labs – all other voices excluded

“Academic” event hosted by UNM “office” funded entirely by Lockheed

 

Contact: Greg Mello 505-265-1200

 

Albuquerque – Today, September 29, 2006, from 1:30 pm - 4:00 pm at the Student Union Building (SUB) on the University of New Mexico (UNM) main campus in Albuquerque in Santa Ana rooms A & B, there will be a panel discussion about the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program.  The event is sponsored by the UNM Office for Policy, Security, and Technology (OPST), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), and Women in International Security (WIIS).  Details can be found at http://www.unm.edu/%7Eopst/events.html.

Greg Mello, Study Group Director:  “The goal of today’s discussion, from the perspective of those paying for it, has nothing whatsoever to do with its technical or policy content.  What is being attempted is to harness the academic thirst for prestige to create a façade of legitimacy for U.S. weapons of mass destruction programs, which are now in political and financial trouble.” 

The so-called RRW program and its associated construction program designed to create a “responsive infrastructure” of agile nuclear warhead factories that will replace all U.S. nuclear weapons with new-design warheads over the coming 30 or so years.  U.S. nuclear warheads are highly reliable – far more so than other weapons systems components – and current life-extension programs are in the process of extending their “shelf-life” for decades to come.  Tens of billions of dollars have already been committed.  In the proposed new RRW program, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) wishes to gradually replace existing warheads with untested new warheads.  Neither Congress nor the Pentagon has yet approved RRW except in its earliest stages. 

Greg Mello, Study Group Director:

“The key questions regarding Friday’s panel are not this or that management strategy for U.S. nuclear weapons.  They are not whether nuclear weapons are a problem in some sense – or perhaps a panacea for military insufficiency, as U.S. nuclear doctrine suggests.  These are very important questions but they are not the gravamen of concern today.  The key issues are rather:

• The false impression being given that this is an “academic” panel, when in fact all but one of the panelists work for NNSA, SNL, or LANL.  Each would be fired in a heartbeat if they said anything that strayed too far from the “party line.”  These people must do the bidding of higher authorities in the nuclear weapons complex or find a new job, quite likely at much lower pay. There is therefore little or no uncoerced deliberative content to the panel.
  
• Lockheed-Martin, the world’s largest military contractor, has created its own little Lockheed-funded portion of UNM with a $1.25 million, 5-year grant.  LockMart is using UNM as a public relations front to advance a political agenda that will benefit the corporation’s profit-oriented idea of “national security,” which polls show is not widely shared by the American people in this case as in many others.  The panel is thus not just somewhat interest-conflicted – it is almost totally interest-conflicted.  The RRW program will involve more than $100 billion in contract work over 30 years; much of that work would go to the corporations represented on the panel.  The U.S. nuclear weapons complex is now 96% privatized; the 20-year, no-bid LANL contract alone is worth $37 billion, according to the Department of Energy (DOE).  Most Americans, and most members of the UNM community, have no idea how intellectually corrupt these institutions are, or how coercive are their internal cultures.
  
• The U.S. has signed binding treaties and agreements which require complete nuclear disarmament, not nuclear maintenance – and certainly not nuclear rearmament, which the “responsive infrastructure” is meant to provide.  Under what legal basis does the work proceed?
  
• The organizers of the panel have taken every pain to assure that the panel appears authoritative and prestigious.  In fact, the effort to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the context of treaties requiring the exact opposite outcome – especially in the context of the aggressive wars now underway (which must invariably bring in their train violations of the Geneva Convention and widespread suffering) – breaks clear international law.
  
• It also breaks domestic law, as ratified treaties become binding U.S. domestic law as well.  The speakers’ careers challenge the Nuremberg Principles, which require individuals to act independently of illegal government orders to uphold universal moral and legal principles even when the most serious personal repercussions may result – which is not at all the case here.  Preparing the instruments of mass murder breaks the universal moral norms of humankind and challenges civilization itself.  The purpose of the RRW is to threaten and if necessary annihilate of entire countries and peoples, the very definition of genocide. The supervisors of the individuals who will speak today have openly said the purpose of these weapons is to threaten the annihilation of countries and peoples, and to carry out this threat if necessary, on a number of occasions.
  
• The University of New Mexico, the primary institution in this state charged with passing on the precious fruits of human civilization to future generations, is being suborned and perverted in this way.  It is possible that career ambitions and personal gain have been placed above academic and moral judgment, not just within the OPST but also in the political science department and elsewhere in the University.  It is our universal moral duty to speak up against preparations for nuclear holocaust, not to provide “intellectual” peer review for it. 

Mello continues: “Today, the entire world is watching the RRW program and New Mexico, and wondering whether a discussion of new kinds of nuclear weapons can proceed and be reported as a technical and management issue, free from legal, moral, and social friction.  Day and night many of us pray that journalists will be able to challenge this false authority and report the facts, standing on the firm ground of the values which uphold civilization, not the underlying hate, fear, and greed that drive the push for more weapons of mass destruction.”    

Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure… Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.

From pamphlets written by the “White Rose”student resistance group at the University of Munich, 1942. 

***ENDS***

--
Greg Mello * Los Alamos Study Group
2901 Summit Place NE * Albuquerque, NM 87106
505-265-1200 voice * 505-265-1207 fax * 505-577-8563 cell
www.lasg.org

To subscribe to the Study Group's regional listserve, send a blank email
to lasgnewmex-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.  To subscribe to our national
listserve, send a blank email to lasg-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.

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Action Alert #70 (09/24/06)