January 7, 2020

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• Previous Letter (1/3/20): Demonstrate tomorrow, Jan. 4, in Albuquerque, 2 pm: illegal US assassination of top Iranian general dramatically inflames region. Last month's letters are linked at the bottom, for background.
  
• Previous Bulletin (12/23/19): Please help us work this coming year! Also: important meetings Jan 2 & 8 in Santa Fe; Pope Francis and The Bomb

• This letter: No LANL in Santa Fe! Join us tomorrow, Jan. 8, at 6 pm at Santa Fe City Hall; more

Dear New Mexico activist friends –

First, if you live nearby please join us tomorrow, Wednesday, January 8, at 6 pm at the Santa Fe City Council meeting at City Hall (map).

This will be the last City Council meeting before the City decides which applicants will be the finalists for "Master Developer" of the City's 64-acre Midtown District and possibly other surrounding lands. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which builds U.S. nuclear warheads, has applied for Master Developer. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), our local nuclear bomb lab (that does little else and can do little else), figures in at least one proposal as a partner or tenant as well.

We will meet outside the City Council chambers for an hour or so before the evening session, in preparation for citizen comment under Item F on the agenda, "Petitions from the Floor." There are no other formal opportunities for public comment prior to this decision.

Our demand is simple: No LANL in Santa Fe!

We brought talking points to our Jan. 2 meeting. NNSA and LANL meet none of requirements for Master Developer, and so we expect to win this first round. What embodied moral force we can bring out tomorrow, in our bodies, will be momentum toward the next challenge -- keeping a satellite nuclear weapons administrative, engineering, and training center out of Santa Fe.

Second, please contact others to bring as many people as possible to the meetings tomorrow (ours and the Council's). Not everyone need speak at the latter, but a show of force will make everything easier from this point forward.

Third, please write letters, op eds if possible (Willem Malten's: "Grab the opportunity to make a difference") , and call the Mayor and City councilors. (Handy contacts and background were provided in our December 12 update). Meet with them if you can. They may say they can't discuss these proposals, which is fine, but they can and should listen.

There is no question that the Mayor has already met with LANL representatives during or just preceding this process. His initial response to us, on the other hand, is that he cannot meet. We need to make sure he and the councilors understand the gravity of this issue, and just how negatively LANL's presence will affect the viability of any proposal that includes it.

Tomorrow's ACTION SHEET is now posted.

Fourth, if you live nearby please come at noon on Wednesday, January 15 to the Santa Fe City Hall (map), where we will have a demonstration and joint press conference. We can't know the outcome of the decision, or exactly when on the 15th it will be announced, but as it is a work day and we also need to give the press time to write, noon it will be.

This will also give us a chance to network among each other and with representatives of other groups present.

Fifth, we are scheduling in-depth workshops on NNSA's and LANL's efforts to build a new "Goldilocks"-sized Rocky Flats plutonium plant in Los Alamos and to greatly expand LANL, for the sake of designing and now building new nuclear weapons. LANL has not seen such a huge proposed expansion, involving thousands (net) of new staff and some $13 billion in capital improvements and new buildings, since the early 1950s. So far:

• In Jemez Springs, Sunday, February 2, 1-4 pm, Jemez Springs Public Library, 30 Jemez Springs Plaza (map).
• In Taos, February 4, time and place TBD.

Sixth, tomorrow NNSA will publish its decision to *NOT* conduct further National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analysis for its pit production program. We are "shocked, shocked." A comparable decision -- to avoid further NEPA analysis -- is likely at LANL as well. We must challenge both.

NNSA is flying blind, and at the same pulling the wool -- if only it was as organic as that -- over local officials' eyes.

If our senators, Governor, or Congressman Ben Ray Lujan demanded a Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS), it would happen.

And if our senators demanded a Supplemental Programmatic EIS (SPEIS), that would happen, contrary to tomorrow's decision. But they haven't. They want to rush pit production forward, without further environmental analysis.

From this point forward, all local government and civic leaders who silently sit on their hands are part of the problem. We need to wake them up.

We sent these quick comments to a few newspapers:

This decision favors ignorance over knowledge and planning. It strikes a blow against good science, good engineering, and good government. NNSA is trying to rush into pit production for purely ideological and pork barrel reasons, an approach very likely to fail.

NNSA does not want to expose the contradictions in its pit production plans to further scrutiny by the public, tribes, affected governments, Congress, or even by other NNSA and DOE programs, some of which will suffer as a result of the rush into pit production.

Much more is known now than in 2008 about the impacts and risks of NNSA's pit production plans. None of this new knowledge is supportive of NNSA's plans, which are proceeding without the required environmental analysis of reasonable alternatives.

Many of NNSA's 2008 assumptions turned out to be optimistic. At LANL for example, NNSA assumed it could use a new $6 billion nuclear facility to help produce pits. That facility was never built.

Either NNSA has not learned that NEPA helps vet bad policy choices, or else NNSA knows it is making a bad choice and hopes to brazen its way through, as some in DoD have advised.

NNSA sees opposition, but not the facts behind that opposition. Those facts -- of geology, topography, location, of NNSA's own failures to date, of infrastructure limitations, and of a rapidly-changing planet earth -- aren't going away.

As of at least mid-November, and despite clear legislative reporting requirements, NNSA had no clear idea how to proceed with its pit production plans at LANL in particular, the first site at which industrial pit production is supposed to take place.

Especially in this administration, NNSA obeys laws selectively, thumbing its nose at Congress and now at our nation's foundational environmental law. A new plutonium pit production plan involving multiple sites in multiple states, with ramifying effects on transportation and on waste management at all DOE sites that produce, store, or dispose of transuranic waste, inherently requires programmatic analysis under NEPA. To repeat, much has changed since 2008.

This decision also violates a legal settlement to which this organization was a party. NNSA is therefore also thumbing its nose at the courts, and to the parties in that prior litigation, with whom it made a solemn agreement. We will challenge this decision, to the best of our ability.

Our comments on the draft "Supplement Analysis" (the final version will be published tomorrow) are here and here.

Seventh, these pit production plans are our main local contribution to the war machine that is producing the war Trump is intensifying so criminally in the Middle East. Pit production is a big part of New Mexico's way of saying it will never lead on climate mitigation, or toward making our communities resilient. This is a binomial choice, friends, a choice between two whole worlds of meaning and authority, narrative, morality, and possibility (nomos, in the Coverian sense). We see the struggle against nuclear weapons -- in our midst, and growing in social, political, and economic influence -- as identical to the struggles against the extinction of nature and an increasingly ruthless politics of disposability. 

There will be another antiwar action Saturday in Santa Fe. I am sure there are other local protests as well. A global day of action has been declared for January 25, local details TBD. New developments good and bad are occurring hourly, and we can't burden this letter with them.

We urge you to get involved, and get nonviolently serious. Mere protesting will not be enough to mitigate any of our converging crises, this growing war and the extinction crisis included, but at and through these protests, which will hopefully grow to halt business as usual in this country, we can build and deepen relationships and political strength. We need to understand and live, as best we can, the essential unity of all serious resistance and constructive programs. The greater the nonviolence, the greater the moral, persuasive force.

Greg, for the Study Group

Last month's local letters

• (12/31/19): Reminder: workshop & training Thursday January 2, Santa Fe
• (12/22/19): Important meetings January 2 & 8
• (12/12/19): No LANL in Santa Fe -- update
  
• (12/07/19): Please come tomorrow to Collected Works Bookstore, 202 Galisteo Street, Santa Fe, 11 am: Developer to present plans for Midtown Santa Fe campus: will they include nuclear weapons research, training, manufacturing, administration?
• (12/02/19): Safety Board: Los Alamos plutonium facility does not adequately protect the public