Urgent call to action: NNSA Town Hall near Santa Fe July 22, 6 pm MDT, on the huge LANL program to build plutonium cores ("pits")
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Dear friends --
National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Jill Hruby and Department of Energy Environmental Management's (DOE EM's) Candice Robertson will host a
Town Hall Meeting from 6-7:30 pm MDT Monday, July 22, at the
Hilton Santa Fe Buffalo Thunder (
map), 13 miles north of downtown Santa Fe on U.S. 84.
We hope you will join us at this meeting, and bring as many others with you as you can, to protest the creation of a plutonium warhead core ("pit") factory at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
This is a really, really important opportunity!
In addition to other people, please bring signs (cloth may be best, as sticks may not be allowed inside). The single, core message we want to get across to national and local audiences alike is the depth and breadth of opposition to pit production at LANL. It is likely that very few people will be allowed to ask questions or make comments at the microphone, so we must communicate effectively in other nonviolent ways.
We will be happy to work with you (and your group, as applicable) on preparations for this meeting. Write or call us.
This is not just a NIMBY ("not in my back yard") issue, although it certainly is that, and a cultural survival issue with it. If LANL pit production can be halted, there can be no nuclear arms race over at least the coming decade. For compelling reasons we need not get into here, a decade's delay is likely to be essentially permanent.
We will be reaching out to organizations in other states and national organizations to join us in Pojoaque on the 22nd. As you know, many arms control and other pro-nuclear-weapons organizations have up to now wanted LANL to be a pit factory. Others have acquiesced with their silence. This meeting constitutes an unparalleled educational opportunity to reach these and other audiences who are otherwise hard to reach. If we can broaden the movement against the emergency push for pit production we will win, and there will not be a new nuclear arms race. Pits -- LANL pits, specifically -- are needed for that.
Quick background review
As readers of these letters know, the current $22 billion (see slides 34-36 here) creation (or attempted creation) of a pit factory at LANL is by far the largest single project in New Mexico history in dollar terms, with enormous negative ramifications for the environment, economy, society, and governance of the region and the state.
LANL's pit factory, to be centered within a 50-year-old existing facility ("PF-4") designed for other purposes, is for "temporary" use until some time after a permanent factory, currently under construction at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, is completed.
The sole production mission of the LANL factory complex is to make pits for the all-new "W87-1" warhead which will be used to augment the existing stock of (roughly 530) modern W87-0 warheads available for the proposed "Sentinel" intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). According to Dr. Hruby, the factory at SRS will not make pits for W87-1 warheads. Only LANL will do that.
The additional LANL-enabled warheads are "needed" only in order to put multiple, super-accurate warheads on the Sentinel system. There are already enough existing W87-0 warheads to outfit all the planned Sentinel missiles, without making any new warheads. The LANL warheads are "bonus" -- "extras warheads" -- for building out the U.S. nuclear arsenal in what is rapidly becoming a (hopeless) arms race against Russia and China.
Each new LANL pit will be the core of a circa 300-kiloton warhead. That is 20 times the explosive yield of the Hiroshima bomb. LANL has promised to make at least 30 of these per year -- in energy terms, the equivalent of at least 600 Hiroshima explosions.
LANL's production, if successful, would enable a truly vast nuclear rearmament effort. Nobody should want that.
Thank you so much for helping all of us with this. Stay tuned for more information.
Greg
