January 10, 2022

Guest editorial; environmental analysis at LANL?; Archbishop virtual press conference re nuclear disarmament tomorrow 9 am

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Dear friends --

Good afternoon everyone. As the week gets started there are some fresh developments that may be of interest.

1. Guest editorial submitted to Santa Fe New Mexican

This may be useful to you in your own outreach activities. We don't know when it will be published so it seems better to send it along now.

Letters to editors (LTEs) and guest editorials remain powerful tools, within reach of everyone. (See "How to write effective letters to the editor" and "Thousands of Hearts and Minds," Ed Kinane). You will see and say things differently than we do, which is wonderful. LTEs affect not just editorial stances but also news assignments.

Anyway here it is. Forward to your friends if you like. Sooner or later it will appear in the Santa Fe New Mexican, we believe.

Can Santa Fe survive as a nuclear weapons suburb?

Many Santa Feans understand that Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the most lavishly-funded nuclear weapons facility in the world, has embarked on a new mission: making plutonium warhead cores (“pits”) on an industrial scale, to involve 4,000 full-time personnel and 24/7 operations.

It’s among the dirtiest and most dangerous missions in the nuclear weapons complex, not seen at LANL since the 1940s. It’s centered in an old facility built for research and development, now to be driven far beyond its original capacity.

LANL predicts it will spend $18 billion to start up production over this decade. In constant dollars this is 15-fold what the Manhattan Project spent in New Mexico – indeed it dwarfs the cost of every other project in New Mexico history.

LANL’s pits will cost at least $50 million apiece, 200x their weight in gold. A single LANL pit, assuming all goes well, will cost as much as the combined annual salaries of 1,000 New Mexico teachers, or the equipment for 5,000 residential solar systems. A major reason our society is failing is because it is kept on a war footing.

This huge program has nothing to do with national security, except in the negative sense. It is not needed to maintain any stockpile weapon. As military planners say, it’s (very) “early to need” and there are now perfectly sound, cheaper plans to do without LANL’s production should something go wrong. Why wait?

After extensive analysis under both Obama and Trump, in 2017 the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) firmly rejected what is now LANL’s pit plan. The New Mexico delegation fought back, enlisting congressional hawks to help blackmail the Trump administration into building an unheard-of TWO pit factories. Up to now a barely-functioning Congress has gone along with the game. Time will tell just how long this scam holds up.

LANL’s pit production, for all its cost and danger, just isn’t enough to support any foreseeable US stockpile. If LANL is a pit factory, there will be two.

What about Santa Fe, then?

On July 18, 1945, Harry Truman wrote in his diary, “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland.”

Will Santa Fe “fold up,” democratically and spiritually, when this new “Manhattan” fully appears? Is the faith of that man of peace, Saint Francis – the very name of this City – obsolete to political leaders in the City, and the state?

What exactly would Santa Fe stand for or mean, if nuclear weapons – the ultimate in human disposability – became its main tangible product? When our schools and community colleges direct our young people into LANL’s “pipeline” of plutonium minions? Or do you suppose their potential for creativity, compassion, and wisdom could be better developed in other ways, as the region faces the towering crises of the 21st century?

Can “Santa Fe” survive as a nuclear weapons suburb? It certainly can, as a kind of nuclear “Pottersville”: a sprawling, increasingly-ugly “city” with growing inequality, a vacuum where shared ideals should be, with no real urban center or shared human purposes, its most cherished traditions washed away by too much money given to too few people doing “work” society doesn’t need or want. It would be a City divided against itself to be sure, with plenty of poverty, human tragedy, and crime.

“Without vision, the people perish.” Santa Fe could be a city that aims for justice and peace, where the obligation of respect binding us together is fostered, where the potential of every child is honored. Those political values are incompatible with manufacturing more nuclear weapons.

2. Is the Department of Energy (DOE) going to conduct a new Site Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) for LANL, and if so what would it mean?

The Los Alamos Reporter got an interesting scoop last Thursday evening (1/6/22): "DOE/NNSA To Start New LANL Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement."

As you know, you and we worked hard for such an outcome -- up until September of 2020, when NNSA formally ruled against writing a new SWEIS for the foreseeable future.

A demand for a SWEIS is still one of the five elements of the "Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production."

If DOE is going to write a new SWEIS for LANL (there has been no formal announcement as yet), what would it mean? The short answer is, we don't know -- it depends on whether NNSA is willing to put LANL's pit production on the table, halting further investment in starting up industrial production. The chances of that right now are less than a snowball's in hell. That could change and eventually it will, but we aren't there yet. Color us "profoundly skeptical" of NNSA's SWEIS plan.

Concerned as we were that NNSA would use this announcement for public relations purposes without even contemplating changing the pace of its investments at LANL even an iota, we sent this explanation to a few key reporters in news media.

The Los Alamos Reporter wrote from those and other comments on Saturday ("Los Alamos Study Group Responds To DOE/NNSA Announcement Of Plans For LANL Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement,Jan 8, 2022).

As you will see there, the only reasons we can think of for NNSA to look at a SWEIS right now are these:

• to protect the agency against litigation for all the decisions and investments it has made between 2008 and today;
  

• to provide legal "cover" for future big projects, which NNSA will do without much if any transparency as to the actual nature of these projects, as was done in 2008, through the use of "scenarios" that encompass the projected impacts of projects without actually needing to be clear about what they are; and finally

• to provide disgustingly-great public relations to NNSA -- "see, we are so open -- you can submit a comment!" -- so that its pit production and any other controversial projects (e.g. industrial plutonium oxidation) can proceed unimpeded.

As we said over the weekend, the only way LANL could write a legal SWEIS now would be to rescind its September 2020 decision and halt further investment in pit production. Which would be great.

Now that NNSA has made this quasi-announcement, we will make sure the evolving situation is explained in the introduction to the "Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production."

3. Tomorrow (1/11/22), Archbishop John Wester will hold a press conference on his Pastoral Letter, “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament.”

The press conference will be livestreamed at 9:00 am MST on YouTube. The pastoral letter and a summary will be available online here tomorrow at 7 am. 

The Archbishop's evolving nuclear disarmament ministry, which follows the strong leadership of Pope Francis, was most recently evident in a prayer service and sign-dedicating ceremony at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe last month.

He has promised to continue the disarmament conversation in his diocese, which we greatly welcome.

There is a rub. In our culture, feelings and opinions are easily conflated with actions. Preparations for plutonium pit production at LANL comprise the largest nuclear warhead program in the United States. In fact it is the largest nuclear warhead program since the end of the Cold War. It is really not enough to speak out against nuclear weapons in general without addressing the uniquely huge, new, aggressive nuclear weapons program in his own Archdiocese.

In other words, there is a danger of pious generalities that lack specific application. "Fine words butter no parsnips."

This is his and also our great challenge, here in the very belly of the nuclear beast. Virtue signalling, without sacrifice and risk, is now commonplace and it is worse than useless unless it quickly grows into something more serious -- which it often does not. Many people are all for "nuclear disarmament," in the abstract. That and three or four dollars will buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

But are they against pit production right now, right in front of them, and if so what are they going to do about it?

These are the conversations we have to have, no different than the difficult conversations we have to have about climate change. Platitudes will not suffice. The Archbishop will need help from all of us -- for political cover, for backing in the Church, and for tough love if needed -- to lead on this issue.

If you aren't able to be involved in helping the conversation evolve in the Archdiocese, each of us can also lead in our own churches, environmental groups, political parties, friendship networks, and organizations.

Be well, everybody, and more soon,

Greg and Trish, for the Study Group