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                     Our last Bulletin (369): Solstice greetings; letter to Congress re pits; fundraising reminder (Dec. 24, 2025)

Dear friends and colleagues -- 

We hope you all had, and are having, a rich and fulfilling holiday season. 

There are less than two days left in 2025. If you have not already done so, please consider a donation to the Study Group this year. There are many possible ways to do so: 

1. Mail a check to our office at: Los Alamos Study Group, 2901 Summit Place NE, Albuquerque, NM, 87106.
2. Contribute by credit card through our PayPal Giving Fund (PPGF) portal. No fees are deducted. Or you can set up a recurring donation through this PayPal portal which charges a 2.9% fee. PayPal gives you the option to cover that fee.
3. Donate stock (thus avoiding capital gains and the associated taxes). Call our office at 505-265-1200, or email Trish.
4. If you are age 70½ or older you can make a contribution directly from your traditional or Roth IRA. You can donate up to $100,000 without it being a taxed distribution.
5. Remember the Study Group in your will and/or estate plans; memorial gifts, or life insurance. Call us (505-265-1200) or email Trish.
6. Donate cars, boats, or real estate. We'll sell them.
7. Some employers will match their employees' contributions; you might investigate this for next year.
8. Become a sustaining donor to the Study Group, contributing a specified amount each month. Being able to depend on a regular income of a certain amount in sustaining donations each month provides organizations such as ours a considerable measure of stability. Just fill in the form linked here and mail it back to us, or use this PayPal portal for a 2.9% fee.
9. You can reach out to your personal connections, email lists, and social media contacts to refer other donors to us. You have contacts we do not. 

We do not publicize our donors. And if you wish, you can donate entirely anonymously at PayPal or through an intermediary like a stock broker. 

As 2025 comes to an end, the risk of nuclear war remains very high. Multiple parties are seeking to prevent peace in Ukraine. A Russian nuclear command center was attacked with several dozen drones just days ago. Commercial ships are being attacked and sometimes sunk on the high seas. In European capitals, there is delusional talk of a large-scale war with Russia. Delusional or not, the illusion of nuclear stability has been pierced. 

Meanwhile here in the U.S., in the factories and the labs, the trillion-dollar nuclear modernization program is hitting snags in almost every project, to one degree or another. Not every project is going to succeed. It is up to small groups of people like us to make sure some projects are canceled. The path to sane foreign and nuclear policies requires humility and we aim to help with that, as we have done before. 

To pick one such project, the plutonium warhead core ("pit") production capability at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), expected to cost a cool $25 billion to acquire, has not been successful so far and may never be. Even if it is "successful," it will shortly be superseded by another facility now under construction in South Carolina. 

Unless, that is, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) attempts to operate both facilities simultaneously to increase output, which will roughly triple NNSA's operating cost. 

Does anybody care about peace, or nuclear war, or the vast financial and political commitments we are making to a nuclear apocalypse? We care. And we want you to join us, if you can.

There is no better place in the U.S. to resist nuclear weaponry than right here in New Mexico, literally the world's center for weapons of mass destruction. 

The world cannot risk – and the U.S. cannot afford – another nuclear arms race. Deploying nuclear weapons and threatening to use them for "defense" is as insane as building "a house made of dynamite." Racing to produce new pits for additional nuclear weapons because of RussiaRussiaRussia and ChinaChinaChina is insanity squared. 

The Los Alamos Study Group has successfully led resistance to nuclear production in New Mexico for more than three decades. We are science-based educators, policy analysts, and nuclear disarmament advocates, with solid grounding in multiple disciplines and the ability to draw on other experts as needed. We work primarily in New Mexico and Washington DC, and internationally as the occasion arises -- as we expect it will in 2026. Our work is widely recognized and respected. We’ve held several hundred Capitol Hill briefings with congressional committee staff, GAO, OMB, and others. We are strictly nonpartisan and factual. As best we can, we anchor policy details in a broad historical and technical perspective. We focus on practical outcomes – on winning. 

This year, we hope to be involving more young people again. Our core staff doesn't cost much, thanks to Social Security. But everything and everybody else do cost real money. People who think it is possible to make a real difference in nuclear weapons policy without real money are not being serious. We do a lot with a little, but we need to do more -- and for that we need your financial help more than ever. 

I have a long list of quite interesting topics here beside me, some with outlines. I would love to write more right now. I don't however want to distract from today's core message. 

I am sorry if the tone of this Bulletin comes off as excessively pragmatic. But if you were sitting in my place, with some of the young people we know wanting to be more involved but lacking even a token level of support with which to do so, you might see, as I do, poetry and spirituality in the donations we and they need. Don't worry about us. We are on the job. Worry about them. Worry about whether we collectively will win against the forces of nuclear darkness in New Mexico specifically, where those forces have impoverished our state spiritually and economically, and beyond. Worry about this country and its violent role in the world, and where that takes us all. 

Work with us if you can. Money is only one way to do so, but it is essential.

Thank you everybody. We wish each of you a wonderful New Year,

Greg Mello, for the Study Group