Important announcements and upcoming meetings!

October 7, 2015

Dear friends –

Hello everybody, and happy fall!

1. Heads-up: upcoming meetings!

Trish and I are headed to the United Nations to bring our "nuclear heartland" perspective to key delegations next week in the context of the UN First Committee, toward initiating negotiations on a ban treaty.  Then we go to Washington the following week, where we will talk to our Hill, executive branch, media, and other contacts about nuclear weapons programs and infrastructure.

There will be "all-purpose" Study Group meetings the week after that which we hope you can attend.

Our next meeting in Santa Fe is on Wednesday, October 28, at 6:00 pm.  Please RSVP to this meeting so we can plan accordingly, and we will tell you how to get to the meeting place. Space is limited.  This is not a public meeting but if you have a friend you think would be interested please give us a call at 505-265-1200 or write Trish.

Our next meeting in Albuquerque is on Thursday, October 29, also at 6:00 pm.  This meeting will be at the Study Group office (or "World Headquarters" as we sometimes call it -- see below).

We may have a short presentation by an allied international organization at each of these meetings via Skype.  Stay tuned.

2. What's on our plate after these trips?

The top items are:

• Every trip creates considerable followup analysis and correspondence. We are privileged to respond to those allies in power who want our work.  A lot of this we can't share.
  
• We will be preparing and printing fact sheets on four key issues facing our state and nation, with associated new web pages, and using them in a mailing to New Mexico political donors.
• We are keen to build up our volunteer and internship programs ASAP (see below).
  
• We are working on expanding our board of directors and of course on fundraising.
  
• We will continue with a number of ongoing programs, including building opposition to the latest plan for increasing plutonium infrastructure at LANL.
  

3. Please sign up to our blog and follow the Study Group on Facebook if you use it.

Other ways of keeping in touch with us are via Bulletins (which we hope you read and share with your interested friends), Twitter, and checking our complicated but rich web site for updates from time to time. Up to now, Facebook and Twitter have carried the bulk of our most frequent postings but we are trying again to provide new content for the Study Group blog more frequently. The extensive analysis and commentary we currently don't share could, with minor edits, be shared in this way for those who are interested.

We have decided to post letters like this one to our more active members, with their subject matter shown, here.

We will be reorganizing and updating our web site to make it more user friendly.  In the meantime you should know that besides updates to the home page, there are pretty frequent updates to the plutonium infrastructure pages, such as the "Modern Pit Facility II" (MPF2) page and some of those linked to it.

We closely follow a great deal of pertinent foreign, environmental, and nuclear policy issues for the sake of decisionmakers, our own board and advisors, and the news media,but figuring out how to translate this into something genuinely helpful to our membership seems beyond us given our time limitations, apart from the renewed blog emphasis mentioned previously.

4. The Study Group is elevating its international identity and profile.
   

This is a work in progress and we hope to report on it at the above meetings.

5. We can certainly use your help.
   

Some ways to help were discussed in Bulletin 194, and again recently in Bulletin 207.  We want to be very careful about wasting anybody's time, not least our own.  With a very few serious commitments we could better coordinate the efforts of those who have comparatively less time. 

Two recent examples of some fine leadership undertaken by our members were a great op ed by Craig Campbell ("Atomic bombs were not needed to defeat Japan," Sept. 19, now with 52 comments!) and Carol Benson's invitation to us to speak at a 9/26 Gray Panthers meeting in Albuquerque regarding developments in Ukraine. 

In addition, some of you able to do so have stepped forward with increased monthly contributions.  And two of you have requested pretty large billboards designed for highly-visible locations you own -- we have not forgotten those requests!

6. Committees.
   

We would like to stand up one or two volunteer committees, which presupposes (among other things) more frequent meetings than we have been having up to now.  We would like to discuss this further at the above two meetings.

Greg