The Los Alamos Study Group is a widely-respected nonprofit nuclear weapons policy organization founded in 1989 and based in Albuquerque, NM. We are strictly nonpartisan and factual, and we anchor policy details in a broad historical and technical perspective. We focus on practical outcomes. We have wide technical, legal, and public education experience as well as strong academic and work histories in science, engineering, law, and organizing. We draw on a wide range of other experts as needed. 

We have conducted hundreds of public meetings, and several hundred briefings on Capitol Hill. We have been quoted in thousands of newspaper articles and interviewed on hundreds of radio and TV programs. Greg Mello has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Issues in Science and Technology, in the New Mexico press, and elsewhere. We have won environmental, civil rights, and freedom of information lawsuits. We have blocked major nuclear warhead infrastructure projects at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Our litigation led to the only cancelled nuclear weapons project since 2008, causing the cancellation and long delay of various warhead plans. 

We were named one of the nation’s “top ten small green groups” in 2011, one of eleven “favorite groups” in 2013, and one of 20 organizations in the "Thin Green Line: 20 Groups Standing Between You and Doom" in 2016 by Counterpunch.

Our analyses of U.S. nuclear weapon modernization have been significant contributions at Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) review and preparatory conferences and other international fora starting in the 1990s through the successful creation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in 2017, an effort in which we participated at (and between) every negotiating forum. Greg was a Research Fellow in the Princeton Program on Science and Global Security (PSGS) in 2002 and in 2017-2020 PSGS contracted with the Study Group to produce articles for the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) blog as well as congressional workshops on plutonium warhead core (“pit”) production.

We have also led dozens of public workshops on energy and climate policy and related economic issues. In 2017 devoted much of the summer to training young people in energy and climate policy. 

The social and political context of our work is changing faster than ever. There are tremendous opportunities at hand but they generally require bold initiatives that transcend the confines of traditional arms control on the one hand, and traditional domestic politics on the other hand. 

The demographic core of traditional arms control and disarmament efforts is growing older, as are we ourselves. We must therefore be a bridge between generations. This means we must train young people, and provide them with the material and intellectual resources they need.

We must also be a bridge between the New Mexico resistance -- weakened by losses of sovereignty in the face of increasing federal and corporate colonization -- and international peace and disarmament efforts. 

Resisting militarism and the culture of war is insufficient. Collectively, we must center our resistance in renewal -- economic, social, political, and personal. This is the Gandhian "constructive program," and we can't do without it. 

We must also bridge between issues, linking foreign policy and nuclear policy on the one hand -- war and peace issues, broadly speaking -- with energy, our economy, and our environment, especially climate change, which increasingly constrains our future. At bottom, they ARE linked. 

The crises facing our country and humanity as a whole are profound -- indeed existential. To face them creatively and effectively requires not just leadership ability but also internal resources of insight and character. HOW we do our work needs to be centered, not just WHAT we do. Especially in a time of existential crisis, what is political and professional is also personal. To the degree the Study Group has been effective with small resources, it is because we are respected, in part for personal reasons.

We are capable, perhaps uniquely so, of fostering these five bridges as they related to nuclear disarmament in this state and to some degree this country. To foster them we have to BE those bridges at least to some degree, a daunting role. To be successful on a meaningful scale we need not just our own limited wisdom and energies, but also external help of two major kinds. 

The first is money. We'd rather not ask for it, but it's essential, and financial donations are often the easiest way for people to help. And if we don't ask, others will not know how helpful financial support can be, or how needful it is. 

We are entering an era of persistent high inflation, increasing precarity for idealists (especially younger ones), declining journalism, a rising cacophony of distractions (not to mention political hatreds domestic and foreign), along with rising complexity across society. Money alone is insufficient, but we cannot cut through all this without it. Money is needed for advertising and outreach, and more important, for providing an economic basis for the fresh talent we need. Without funds to support people, and without visibility in "the public realm," we cannot recruit the talent we need. 

The second is that talent itself, either as staff or as full-time volunteers, as well as the matrix of community support and solidarity which helps inspire all of us. Particularly for young people, active community support helps inform and validate the choices they are making. At one time we could take community support more or less for granted. Today, as multiple problems mount in society and in peoples' personal lives, we cannot. Community members generally do not know how vital their contributions can be. 

• Mission and Method
• Board and Staff
• Brochure, 2006
  

  "[W]e as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values...A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." – Martin Luther King, Jr.