April 21, 2023

Study Group lunch discussion this coming Monday 4/24 re pits, nuclear weapons, waste; THANK YOU for attending the April 4 town hall

Friends --

First, thank you for attending the April 4 town hall if you were able to do so. Our last two lead-up letters about the most important issues to be addressed in that meeting were here and here, in case you missed them. We also held educational meetings in two cities, which some of you attended.

With at least 250 people attending in person and another 200 on-line, the April 4 town hall was the best-attended "anti-nuclear" event in New Mexico since the early 1980s, although the focus was rather fuzzy. 

Some news media reported on the event (e.g. "NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby Offers Frank Answers On LANL Plutonium Pit Production And More During Hybrid Town Hall Meeting In Santa Fe," Los Alamos Reporter, Apr 11, 2023 and  'Stop making nuclear weapons': Activists press federal chief on LANL pit push, Santa Fe New Mexican, Apr 4, 2023). Thanks to many of you, opposition to plutonium pit production was a strong emphasis at the meeting.

There is much more that could be said, and discussed, about the issues that came up in that meeting. We've been doing that among our most active members and we do need to write about it in some depth.

Meanwhile we have had to turn almost our full attention and engagement to events in Washington, DC, where the annual cycle of budget hearings has begun. There is much to be done in that context, where the near-future of nuclear weapons (including pit production) is being decided.

Second, in what we hope will become a monthly series, the Study Group will be hosting a short talk and discussion over lunch this coming Monday 4/24 in Santa Fe, at noon. Please join us!

Space will be limited, so if you are interested please let us know as soon as possible.

We can touch upon these initial topics to get discussion going: 

• The latest revelations from NNSA about its ongoing struggles to rebuild production capacity and what they mean;
• Did you know that the estimated cost for NNSA's overall effort to restart pit production is now larger than the whole Manhattan Project, in constant dollars? Here, LANL start-up costs for pit production are going to be about 20 times what the Army spent at Los Alamos through the end of 1945.
  
• Other NNSA projects are also in trouble, as is the defense industrial base as a whole, in comparison to the production capacities of our so-called "enemies" Russia plus China.
  

We are open to other topics as well, as time allows.

We are hoping attendees can enjoy some relaxed, informal fellowship and conversation in what we hope will be a positive, uplifting, exploratory atmosphere. This will be a discussion, not a presentation.

Third, please do avail yourself of our Ukraine web page. Please share this resource with others, as what is happening in and around Ukraine is a fulcrum for major and quite rapid historical changes, not understood or truthfully explained by the mainstream media. You have to read and think for yourself. There is almost zero antiwar activity in this state or country.

By the way, this page gets "special" attention from mystery bots, almost certainly from one or more three-letter agencies. Somebody "loves" us.

Fourth, the Study Group is impecunious these days, and we can't easily bring on board the young people who have expressed interest in helping, say as interns. You are the reason we can work at all, and the collective "you" are a major reason NNSA has been back-footed on the production of new pits. To the extent you can act as ambassadors for us, please do. 

We will soon send out some products of wider interest to our main list serve and elsewhere, and of course to Congress, so we won't repeat those more substantive things here.

Best wishes, see some of you Monday,

Greg, Trish, and the Study Group