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April 11, 2026 Bulletin 375: Zoom workshop and discussion Tuesday April 14, 6 - 8 pm MDT: "The Accelerating Nuclear Arms Race -- What We Can Do" / new ad, billboard / summer program / money Contribute if you can! Our work depends on you!
Permalink for this bulletin (tomorrow; be patient). Please forward!Simple home page. Detailed home page. Press releases. Bulletins. Letters. Plutonium pit production. Contact us. Office phone (best for general inquiries): 505-265-1200. To subscribe to this list send a blank email here. To unsubscribe send a blank email here. To subscribe to our New Mexico Activist Leaders listserve send a blank email here. Please endorse the "Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production" if you have not done so. Ukraine war updates, analysis. We urge anyone interested in nuclear disarmament to read and think about what we've put there, and share that page.
Dear friends and colleagues -- 1. Zoom discussion Tuesday April 14, 6-8 pm MDT: "The Accelerating Nuclear Arms Race -- What We Can Do" Here are the coordinates:
In a recent local letter we said that the meeting on the 14th would be in-person in Santa Fe, but given national interest we think it would be better to have this meeting on Zoom. By way of background, the Trump Administration has revealed quite a bit about its nuclear expansion plans since our last Bulletin. These press releases have tried to capture this news as it happened; most of you received them.
You can see some of the resulting news media articles here; more articles specifically concerning the production of plutonium warhead cores ("pits") are here. On Tuesday we will provide a guided tour of these "mad" plans, with some thoughts on what we can do to counter them, immediately and over the rest of this administration. Trump's appointees call their proposed nuclear weapons program expansion an "historic investment." It is part of a much larger expansion in the overall militarization of the United States government and society. As you will already know, Trump proposes to spend more than $11,200 per U.S. household per year on the military, not counting interest. Longtime budget analyst Winslow Wheeler puts the proposed total "defense" budget at more than $2.5 trillion, if the interest payments associated with past defense spending are included along with Veterans Affairs and some smaller accounts. For the 134 million U.S. households, that's $18,700 per household per year. There is nothing about this that is "MAGA." (It hardly needs saying, the world-changing war against Iran is on all our minds and in our study and conversations every day, even if it's not in this Bulletin or on our web site. Organizationally, we have only so much bandwidth.) 2. New double-page advertisement in the Santa Fe Reporter Here 'tis:
This ad is currently in its first of two weeks on the newsstands. It will run from April 8 - 21. If you are in the Santa Fe area, we encourage you to look it over, share it with your friends, and use it to reach out to other organizations, businesses, religious communities, and individuals. Those of you far away may not have yet seen the previous double-page ad that ran from Feb. 18 through Mar. 3 in the Santa Fe Reporter: Both ads, each of which ran to about 120,000 copies, are good primers on many of the recent warhead production developments at LANL and to some extent nationwide. We hope you find them interesting and useful. There's a handy QR code on the ads which takes folks to StopTheBomb.org, which redirects to "Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production." Speaking of which -- 3. Please endorse the "Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production" if you have not already done so, and recruit others! As of today there are 303 endorsing businesses and organizations and 1,402 individuals on that "Call." Those numbers are growing. By the way, this is a public registry of resistance to the production of nuclear warhead cores (pits), the largest and arguably most central element of the new nuclear arms race in the U.S. Any organization or individual can use this to buttress their arguments and organizing. When you reach out, you can use StopTheBomb.org, which is easy to remember and transparent as to the objective. If everybody who has endorsed that Call were to recruit just one other organization, our local resistance in New Mexico -- which has national and dare I say global importance -- would really take flight. What we typically see is that good people stop at the threshold of this next step. Especially here in New Mexico, we have particular agency to stop the arms race. Let's use it. 4. A new billboard is coming By the end of this month, this billboard will be up. It will be seen by a half-million pairs of eyes driving north from Albuquerque on I-25 toward Santa Fe, Los Alamos, and beyond:
We are very serious about the value of growing this public registry of resistance against nuclear weapons production. 5. Want to work for peace and nuclear disarmament? Join us this summer! We are organizing what we hope will be a terrific summer program this year for both young and old, with both educational and practical aspects, running from June 15 through August 9. Stay tuned for details, which we will solidify and communicate by the end of this coming week. 6. Money All this costs money, which cannot be an afterthought in our line of work. Dear donors, thank you -- you make resistance to the sad and evil nuclear weapons business real. We have not asked for money since our end of year fundraising campaign. Now we must. All contributions to the Study Group, a 501(c)(3) organization, are fully tax-deductible, See this page for ways to give. Just as we all know people and businesses who would join us in the "Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production" if asked, so also we all know people whose financial gifts, large and small, could help give real punch to the nuclear resistance. You know what to do. Sincerely, Greg Mello, for the Study Group |
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