Jul 1, 2025

Bulletin 363: "Trinity at 80: Leaving the Jornada del Muerto," speakers and discussion in Santa Fe, July 16, 6 pm / Help grow the Call for Sanity!

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Bulletins like this one go to our main mailing list. If you missed our most recent emails, they come in three forms and here they are:

• Our most recent Bulletin, sent to our whole mailing list: Bulletin 362: Initial comment on the new U.S. war, Jun 22, 2025
  
• Our most recent Press Release, also sent to our whole mailing list: "White House proposes 29% increase in nuclear warhead development and production, largest since 1962," Jun 25, 2025
• Our most recent Letter, sent to a New Mexico oriented subset of our whole mailing list: Looking for two half-time Santa Fe based outreach staff to help build opposition to a new nuclear arms race, Apr 11, 2025

This Bulletin:

1. "Trinity at 80: Leaving the Jornada del Muerto," panel discussion in Santa Fe, July 16, 6-8 pm
2. The Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production is growing, but all-too slowly -- please help!

Dear friends and colleagues --

    1. "Trinity at 80: Leaving the Jornada del Muerto," panel discussion at the Unitarian Universalist church in Santa Fe, ​6-8 pm, 107 West Barcelona Road (map).

Please join us in Santa Fe for what we trust will be an interesting and enlivening panel discussion on this, the 80th anniversary of the first nuclear explosion on this planet. Our speakers will be:

• Dr. Hilario Romero, former New Mexico State Historian and long-time professor of history, Spanish, and education at a number of New Mexico and Colorado colleges and universities, and board member of the Old Santa Fe Association. Dr. Romero will speak to us about the Manhattan Project and the Trinity test in their regional historical context.
  

• Study Group director Greg Mello, who will speak about what might be called "the New Manhattan Project" and the choices it poses for us today, in New Mexico and nationally.

• Dr. Mary DeLuca, who until this year has been a practicing psychiatrist in Albuquerque, will speak on "The Psychology of Propaganda, Mass Formation, and Censorship in Creating Confusion, Chaos, Conflict -- and Totalitarian Compliance."
  

There will be plenty of time for discussion and engagement with our speakers and each other, setting the stage for further events this summer, about which more next time. 

We very much hope that those of you who are local and interested will be able to come. In order to preserve this meeting's vital, face-to-face and in-person qualities, we will not be live-streaming this event.  

If you would like to come but have an irreconcilable schedule conflict do let us know. Your stated interest will help us plan other events.

    2. The Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production is growing, but all-too slowly -- please help!

You can relatively easily do what we cannot, namely reach out to individuals, organizations, and businesses you know to endorse the Call for Sanity, and thereby build opposition to the nuclear arms race and the empire of violence which those weapons protect.

Please, please do. Collectively you can accomplish, with 100- or 1,000-fold greater efficiency than us, the outreach that would require, if we did it out of this office, a 7-figure campaign. There is simply no substitute for what you can do.

It's easy to think that with all our 21st-century methods of communication, it would be easy to reach a lot of people. It isn't. The reverse is true. It is far more difficult to reach and engage people than ever before, apart from particular narratives and directions that align with (and are often stimulated by) major political parties.

We work in Washington, DC (where your correspondent was for a week last month), as well as regionally and at times internationally. We can report that the nuclear disarmament "movement" is in an utterly deplorable state, here and elsewhere. There certainly is no "movement," -- nor will there be, along the lines that the most prominent, best-funded voices are pushing.

As for arms control, the looming expiry of the last remaining treaty limiting nuclear arsenals is just 7 months away, with essentially zero chance of being extended. That's what happens when too many influential parties inside government and out indulge in unprecedented levels of hatred and disrespect toward people and nations with whom we need to negotiate to survive. "Trust but verify" is long dead as a watchword.

There is now a high likelihood that Congress will fund a massive increase in nuclear weapons and military spending overall in the coming days, as our most recent press releases have said. A lot of that money is going to come to New Mexico.

BOTH major parties, with important minority exceptions, want more nuclear weapons and more military spending. Especially in this state, people have been trained to not see the military-nuclear complex, even though it is the highest priority of our congressional delegation and even though it impoverishes and hollows out our country. Thousands of people will protest the Trump presidency to little avail, but only a precious few will speak up and take action against a far more direct and vulnerable threat, namely the bipartisan efforts to build nuclear warhead production in New Mexico.

In this situation, local voices matter more than ever.

Yet in New Mexico, where we live and work, and where there are more nuclear warheads and more warhead spending than anywhere else in the world, there is very little practical opposition to nuclear weapons design and production -- much less than ever before, in our long experience.

Everyone yearns for peace, but many people seem not to understand that just having an opinion, or identifying with a group that supposedly "opposes nuclear weapons," constitutes actual opposition. Vicarious peace-making is not a thing. All are invited.

Greg Mello, for the Study Group