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Mission and Method
The Los Alamos Study Group seeks nuclear disarmament, environmental protection and enhancement, social justice, and economic sustainability – goals which are closely interrelated, mutually reinforcing, and essential to one another. These goals are very widely supported in American society and we construe them as essentially conservative, however revolutionary they would be in actual practice.
We aim not only to change public policy but also to prevent the implementation of bad policies. The latter is often easier to achieve; it comprises de facto policy change and often leads to de jure change.
The central ideal in these four goals can be stated approximately as respect for the human person in the living landscape. Such an ideal is as intellectually, morally, economically, and politically incompatible with nuclear weapons as it is necessary for economic, social, and spiritual renewal in this state and nationally.
Within this overall framework of goals and ideals, in 2006 we aim to:
- Prevent successful plutonium bomb core (“pit”) production at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and help prevent production from starting anywhere else. (Halt pit production.)
- Increasingly encumber waste generation and disposal at LANL and bring it to a halt as quickly as possible. (Stop nuclear waste dumping.)
- Halt new weapons development at LANL, to some extent at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), and to a lesser extent at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and elsewhere. (Prevent new weapons development.)
- Stigmatize and impede the indefinite retention of a nuclear arsenal, especially a large one. (Impel nuclear disarmament.)
- Generate intellectual products which lay out the case for conversion of the New Mexico economy and provide a road map for getting there. (Create a Charter for New Mexico.)
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Every activity we will undertake next year will be directed toward the practical achievement of these objective goals. Each program element will contribute to all five goals, and we believe each element fits with the others to make a harmonious whole. Based on our experience, we believe the proposed program can achieve these goals, assuming we can inspire funders and volunteers, and we also think it is the most efficient way available to us to do so in the present circumstances.
These external goals are served by internal goals. Briefly, these are:
- To increase and stabilize our income and broaden its sources.
- To routinize some of our most complicated work, making it simpler and more efficient.
- To coordinate most “retail” outreach through a) volunteers and b) allied organizations.
- To recruit long-term, skilled, committed staff, board, advisors, and volunteers.
- To re-emphasize intellectual work and accessible publications.
- To increase the public and political stature of Study Group issues, perspectives, and people.
- To provide staff, board, volunteers, and donors paths of maturity, fulfillment, and transcendence.
- To uncover, strengthen, and build traditions that ground our work in our particular location.
- To understand our work and configure it as service to society and to the land.
- To make respect the hallmark of our work in both substance and process, as the central touchstone of our political ideals.
- To conserve energy and other resources in our operations and strategies.
Everything we will do to achieve both our external and our internal goals falls into one of three program categories:
- Research, writing, and publication: activities primarily involving research, writing, publication, public speaking, and the education of news media, federal decisionmakers and legislators;
- Organizing and outreach: activities primarily involving building and evoking strong public commitment in New Mexico, the U.S., and the world to nuclear disarmament and related goals; and
- Sustaining the organization: activities primarily devoted to institutional development, maintenance, accountability, and sustainability.
In practice, all three kinds of programs work together, like the frame of a bicycle with its two wheels.
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