Dear friends and colleagues -- 

First, for those of you on our New Mexico mailing list (a subset of this main one), this is a reminder that tomorrow some of us will meet in Los Alamos for: 

• informal discussion at 3 pm at a cafe; 
• nearby street-side protest to the (thousands) of workers leaving Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) at 4 pm; and then 
• At 6:30 pm, Dr. Ted Postol, Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at MIT, will speak (via Zoom) at the SALA Event Center on "The Effects of Modern Nuclear Weapons." There will be time for Q&A for those present. This seminar will not be webcast. 

(For details see this press release and letter.) 

We will be hosting other discussions in Los Alamos on subsequent Tuesdays. Stay tuned!

Second, we would like to cordially invite you to an entirely on-line webinar this Thursday evening 7/16/26 at 6:30 Mountain Time on "Whither Nuclear Disarmament? Is it possible, and if so what is needed to realize it? Or if it is unrealistic, what can be done to lower the risk of war?"

Our speakers will be:

• Dr. Ivana Hughes, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Senior Lecturer in Chemistry and Director of Frontiers of Science program at Columbia University; 
• Dr. Peter Kuznick, Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University; and
• Greg Mello, Director of the Los Alamos Study Group. I think the tagline for my talk will be the old Sam Hinton line, "Peace to the world/or the world in pieces" from "Talking Atom Blues."

You must register in advance for this meeting at: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/rUHrhyvZQZud1PTGG95Txw 

These are certain to be very interesting presentations, which will hopefully help open space for wider discussion. It is no secret that we at the Study Group have been very concerned about the state of the nuclear disarmament movement for the past 20+ years. These discussions will not be the last of their kind. 

As usual, there is a lot going on in nuclear weapons policy space, war-and-peace space, and in local resistance. Tidbits:

• The Town of Taos has passed a strong resolution opposing all plutonium pit production at LANL. This resolution is the clearest one to this effect passed by local government near LANL since a previous Taos resolution in 2019. Santa Fe County, we should add, also recently registered its formal opposition to LANL production. 

• Our new centerfold ad in the Santa Fe Reporter is running right now ("Will Santa Fe aspire to be a 'City of Peace,' or will it be a City of War?" Jul 8, 2026.

• Four of us were in Washington, DC in late June, meeting with committee and agency staff, and some personal congressional staff. While we had some good meetings, we do not like what we are seeing in DC these days. And today, Congress returns to take up key national security legislation. 

• Greg was recently interviewed on Libbe HaLevy's "Nuclear Hotseat" podcast regarding the latest shocking updates from Washington. Look for it midweek. 

• Folks at Princeton's Program on Science and Global Security recently published a worst-case environmental impact scenario for pit production ("Consequence Analysis of Major Fires at Plutonium Pit Production Facilities"), which was widely covered in the press (New York Times, New Mexican [with comments], Albuquerque Journal, and other papers). It should stimulate much-needed discussion -- especially about the real need for certain "safety class" controls designed to continue functioning during and after the worst credible accidents, which NNSA is in some cases balking to provide at LANL in particular. "It will cost too much [to have modern safety standards]."

Without providing any kind of complete review as yet, I had to comment on this study right away, given the publicity. We find it to be a strange study, in that the actual buildings, actual safety equipment, actual operational constraints, and actual material at risk are altogether treated as a "black box." The assumed source terms for the plutonium plumes analyzed are instead more or less based on estimates from the two main historic Rocky Flats accidents. 

Prior work on the real facilities involved by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) is not reviewed, although it is difficult to summarize that DNFSB work due in part to classification and in part to its framing along regulatory, rather than public health, lines. 

In other words, this was an academic study of hypothetical accidents like those at Rocky Flats that were posited to reoccur in new places, in the absence of modern safety controls. As a result, the model results were not real-world results, although they were pretty much reported as such. As real-world results, they are not credible. It's not exactly a case of "garbage in, garbage out," but the situation does highlight the need to think carefully about what this study is and is not. 

The overall safety situation needs a much more careful treatment than anyone has provided in the open literature. 

Also, there are certain "beyond design basis" events which could conceivably occur, for example by intentional malicious acts, which could come closer to the dire outcomes described in this study than the "maximum credible accidents" that are the usual bases of safety designs.

Greg Mello, for the Study Group