March 3, 2020

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REMINDER: TOMORROW -- DEMONSTRATION (NOON), DISCUSSION AND WORKSHOP (6 PM)

• Emergency demonstration at Sen. Udall's office (map) in Santa Fe, noon Wednesday 3/4/20; when we are done speaking with Udall's people we will walk to Sen. Heinrich's office on Marcy Street
• Also tomorrow(3/4/20): discussion, action planning at 6 pm, First Christian Church, 645 Webber St., Santa Fe (map)
• Mark your calendars: update, discussion, in Albuquerque Wednesday March 11, place TBD
• Think locally, act locally, win locally and globally; avoid distraction and division

Dear New Mexico friends –

Please come tomorrow!

As we said a few days ago, what is being proposed for northern New Mexico -- let's not kid ourselves, all of New Mexico -- is dramatically different than even the level of nuclear military enthrallment we have suffered thus far.

The good news is that the nuclear-military juggernaut is a tottering wreck, and a storm is coming. We will talk about that tomorrow.

*******

Finally in the news: the huge accumulated National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) "slush fund" of unspent prior-year funds, now in the range of $8 billion dollars ("$20B Budget Would ‘Choke’ NNSA, Skeptical House Approps Cardinal Says, Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, Feb 28, 2020):

Meanwhile, [Rep. Marcy] Kaptur, like her counterpart on the House Armed Services Committee days before, said she was concerned that the NNSA is sitting on some $8 billion of unspent appropriations from 2019. The chairwoman said that pile of cash itself is proof that the agency has already bitten off more than it can chew from the Treasury.

“[T]he fact that they’re a little bit behind tells us that, again, we can’t choke them with money that’ll just sit there,” Kaptur told reporters. “We have to develop a budget that can be realistically accomplished in the nuclear modernization.”

An NNSA spokesperson, in a statement ahead of Thursday’s appropriations hearing, said most of the $8 billion in carry-over funding from fiscal 2019 was earmarked for existing weapons life-extension and construction operations. A fraction, some $340 million, was unobligated.

Most of the carry-over funds are in the Directed Stockpile program, the spokesperson said, where they help pay the bills for operating and expanding the NNSA nuclear weapons complex. That includes “funding nuclear warhead life extension programs, and infrastructure activities, [and] capital construction projects...

Related, Feb. 27: Feinstein, Markey Request GAO Study on Affordability of Nuclear Weapons

We are usually unimpressed with Sen. Markey's activities but when paired with the powerful Sen. Feinstein, and knowing some of the parties involved, we are very pleased.

Rep. Thornberry, Ranking Member of House Armed Services and a major hawk, foresees a "most contentious" fight over nuclear modernization. Let us hope he is right. Bring it on.

We have corrected and updated (with the additional data now available, all inflated to 2020 dollars) this chart of US warhead design, testing, and production spending, from 1948 to this year's proposed spending levels for FY21-25.

*******

On the novel coronavirus, we expect a large number of US cases to be reported this week as testing becomes more prevalent. The mainstream media is getting better on this issue; readers might want to also follow The Automatic Earth as a decent source of filtered updates. There are others of course, if you want to put in more time and thought.

The New Mexico State Epidemiologist Dr. Michael Landen said yesterday: “We feel that community spread in New Mexico is likely.” Contingency plans for school closures are being readied, among other preparations.

It is possible, depending on how this virus propagates, that portions of the US nuclear weapons complex will temporarily suspend operations.

We will discuss the wider implications of this epidemic tomorrow evening. We are entering an Age of Disruption. Not just our nuclear-military juggernaut but pretty much everything in our just-in-time, financialized economy is now teetering, or slipping, or being renegotiated -- you pick the word. In many ways we are on the brink of collapse. It will be gradual in some ways, sudden in others, plain to see sometimes, and hidden in others. The extent to which it is also an age of renewal is up to us.

In that regard you may find this Alexander Aston essay rather excellent, as I do. It begins:

It took until the first two months of 2020 for the long Twentieth Century to finally come to an end. One thing now seems absolutely clear, this will be the decade that the majority finally come to understand that things are never going back to “normal.” To be sure, the complex entanglements of institutions, narratives, cultural practices, and economic relationships that emerged during the previous century have been under immense strain these past two decades. Enormous effort has been expended to maintain the inertia of the global system, from the immense violence of imperial politics and regime change wars, to the more subtle violence of economic dispossession by a privileged elite that control the mechanisms of power.

*******

Just before Christmas, we wrote (in Bulletin 265):

Very real dangers aside, nuclear weapons undermine the moral, material, diplomatic, and ecological foundations of our country and civilization.

There are those who think local governments and citizens should rejoice in the booty looted from taxpayers by our nuclear weapons labs. Our New Mexico politicians want to increase that spending. But nuclear weapons do not give us anything. They take. They corrode every aspect of our civilization. What seeming benefits they provide to a few incur great expense to all. Some of those costs are plain to see; others are hidden amidst our society's overall crassness, violence, and environmental carelessness.

Even many of the founders of Los Alamos, Rotblat first but later Oppenheimer, Fermi, Rabi, Bethe and many others, understood that thermonuclear weapons were genocidal. Rabi and Fermi said as much, and called the hydrogen bomb "[n]ecessarily an evil thing in any light."

Those who pursue disarmament and peace should consider carefully these words of the great Indian journalist, political analyst, and activist Praful Bidwai (1949-2015):

Historically, [internal] differences have never prevented disarmament campaigns from becoming effective.; What has crippled them is lack of clarity on the point that nuclear weapons are wholly evil, unacceptable and indefensible -- that is, failure to mobilise enough moral force internally.; Moral force is all-important when you are rolling back an epochal injustice. Without it, India could not have achieved independence, nor South Africa liberation from apartheid. On such morality, there can be no compromise.

Praful Bidwai, "The Struggle for Nuclear Disarmament," in Out of the Nuclear Shadow, Smitu Kothari and Zia Mian, eds.

Unfortunately such views remain effectively marginal among "progressives" and the environmental community in New Mexico.

To be politically effective, it is important if not essential to actually support, and actually oppose, real things in the here and now. Everything else is pretty much hot air. "All politics is local" said Tip O'Neill. And so it is in nuclear politics also.

Logically, asking for a national ("programmatic") environmental impact statement (PEIS) for pit production, to be followed by more detailed EISs (site-wide, or project-specific) at the two proposed production sites, makes sense. That's what we said early last year, and in the year before.

Logical, yes. Best, no. We support a PEIS for pit production, but for New Mexicans it should be secondary to a new LANL site-wide EIS (SWEIS), for many reasons.

More broadly, all it would take to deliver New Mexico over to the nuclear colonialists entirely would be to get those who might oppose the nuclear assault on New Mexico to think nationally (or worse, internationally). Sounds rather high-minded, doesn't it, to look at the bigger picture?

It is not. It is at best mistaken, both in its direction and in the degree to which it rises to the "name of action," as Hamlet put it.

We support a PEIS for pit production. Let it come after a commitment to a new LANL SWEIS. It is at LANL, and on New Mexico, that the hammer is falling hardest by far. Don't get suckered by nuclear agendas set in Washington, compatible with the goals of our nuclear pork-barrel delegation, that promote or accept a pit factory at LANL. The pit factory in your back yard is the only one you can really stop.

We can discuss this further on Wednesday.

Greg, Trish, Lydia, and Michelle for the Study Group