Our last Bulletin: Bulletin 367: (11/21/2025) We seek your support; issue updates on pits, nuclear testing, "A House of Dynamite," more. Also, since then, there was this letter to our more local list, ICYMI. These observations may be interesting to a broader audience:

...What we mostly see around us in New Mexico is a kind of colonial education system, right through university studies, which typically prepare students for their humble places within the existing power structure, one where nuclear weapons and all they entail are fully accepted and indeed praised. For many, nuclear weapons become not just unassailable facts of life but sought-after ways of life -- or more accurately ways of death. "And all the Arts of Life. they changd into the Arts of Death in Albion," sang the prophetic Blake.

We don't see any resistance in New Mexico. We have been full-time peace and disarmament activists since 1992, and the present historical moment is the all-time nadir of peace activism in this state. We see none at UNM, and none anywhere else for that matter. The Democratic Party, which long ago had an antiwar wing, continues to support the meat-grinder in Ukraine and makes only gestures to stop the horrendous genocide in Gaza and the looming war in Venezuela. Our own congressional delegation is pro-war and pro-nuclear-weapons. They smile through the crocodile tears they summon for victim groups, so valuable for distracting audiences from these representatives' unwavering support for the nuclear-military complex and its wars. No one is holding them accountable.

Dear friends and colleagues -- 

Good morning to all. As we approach the winter solstice and enter the holiday (holy day) season, there hopefully will be time not just to enjoy our families and friends, but also to reflect on what we each can most effectively do to make our communities and society more resilient and less violent at every level. To have peace we must build peace and the institutions of peace. It's not a given, and it is under siege. 

All of you on this list are doing that now, step by step, as your circumstances allow.  We mostly take baby steps, but everyone also knows that babies trying to walk are determined little creatures. They try to walk, and they fall. They try again, and they fall. Eventually, they succeed beautifully. They walk, then they run. Some become brilliant at it, like the university track team we sometimes see on our daily walks. 

In our peace work, we may start with gestures merely. Gestures, spectacle, and pure narrative aka hypocrisy are the norm in our society now and difficult to transcend or even notice, in part because what is virtual, which is to say unreal, appears to offer us all so much. And we want -- and need -- to "fit in," of course, at least to some extent. 

Yet if we persist and keep our eyes and ears open, the work gets under our skin. There is sacrifice, and thereby new knowledge of oneself and others. One's judgment improves. New vistas appear. Joy, suffering, and new companions arrive. We change. What was outside us and for that reason seemingly insurmountable becomes part of us and our world, something we know intimately from the inside. Power, that evanescent political phenomenon both necessary and dangerous, makes its flickering appearance, like a will-o'-the-wisp. 

Perhaps most important, we begin to notice that we are standing in a long line, an invisible assembly running back into the Pleistocene as well as visibly around us right now, in our life and our work for peace. We carry a torch that has been passed to us. We become aware, as Wordsworth put it, that "vows were then made for me."*

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit.

How do we share such quiet joy, we who are also much like Charlie Chaplin in "Modern Times," caught in the gears of the nuclear-military industrial complex that is systematically killing the future? This seems to be our central task, in our respective peace and disarmament groups, religious communities, and political tribes. From shared values and commitment come a vertically-grounded identity, and political traction. Everybody is ennobled, including our so-called adversaries. 

Leaving this unresolved reflection, and given the time of year, I must turn to the challenge of fundraising, starting with the gratitude everyone in the Los Alamos Study Group community feels to one degree or another, for those who have enabled our work financially from 1992 up to now. I have not yet written an end-of-year letter but for the moment I invite you to peruse the letter we sent out last year. Only the details change. 

Thanks to your support we in turn are able to support interested and qualified interns and visiting team members. We aren't advertising in the usual sense, so think about it. 

We also need to build our volunteer outreach team, which is part of why some of us are meeting later today as mentioned in yesterday's letter to local members (not yet posted). How can we help you work with us?

Our series of advertisements in the Santa Fe Reporter continues. Tomorrow, this new ad will appear: "Please join us in calling for sanity, not nuclear production, Hundreds of businesses, organizations, and individuals have joined. Go to stopthebomb.org to add your name, Dec 10, 2025. It is more overtly political than the previous one, which was more geared to the thousands of LANL employees who will see it ("Will LANL’s weapons production mission succeed – and why should it?," LASG ad in Santa Fe Reporter, Dec 3, 2025). We hope to begin some local radio ads very soon to compliment these. These print ads reach about 60,000 people directly, for a modest (but non-trivial) cost. 

There is some new information in that 12/3/25 ad, and a bit of classified information too, as a tease. See if you can find it! The new information -- that LANL's pit production goal for the W87-1 has apparently been cut in half in favor of reusing W78 pits, apparently since LANL is so slow -- comes from former NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby, via Dylan Spaulding of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), who virtually attended a seminar with Jill and shared one of her slides. (For the record, we continue to disagree in part with UCS about pit production, which UCS believes should take place entirely at LANL. That, we hope they and others soon understand, will never happen. It is a fantasy, not a policy.) 

Advertising is necessary because the mass media has largely failed to offer much in the way of useful critique. Nuclear weapons are increasingly normalized. Nationally, big liberal philanthropists have undertaken the job of influencing the media. The results uniformly support U.S. foreign policy, including nuclear weapons and their leading institutions, and are largely inane. They fill the "nuclear" media space with engineered distractions, largely framed by today's political fads. In short, the foundations which want to "guide" public discourse are terribly mistaken in what they do. They are funding propaganda. One might be forgiven if one thought that what we are seeing is yet another attempt, witting or unwitting -- to snuff out the remaining embers of the nuclear disarmament movement. 

The fear expressed in tomorrow's ad -- that the Senate version of pit production goals would prevail in negotiations on the annual defense authorization bill -- has since been allayed. Quantitatively, those goals remain the same. However we now see that there are multiple parallel plans afoot. There is not time to discuss that this morning, or to review that bill.

Best wishes to all, and more to follow as soon as we can, 

Greg Mello, for the Study Group