July 28, 2025

Join us this Wednesday at Santa Fe City Hall, 6:30 pm, to gently remind the City of its peace-oriented, anti-nuclear, anti-pit-production identity

Dear friends --

As part of our ramp-up in preparation for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversaries, some of us will appear before the Santa Fe City Council this coming Wednesday, July 30, during the "Petitions from the Floor" comment period, which typically occurs around 7 pm. The Council will be meeting at City Hall, 200 Lincoln Ave.

We will remind the Council of the City's identification with its namesake, St. Francis, and his non-denominational, pan-religious message of peace.

We will point out the social, economic, and political importance of identification with peace in the present time. There are so many facets of this -- please help us on this theme in particular!

The City is a member of Mayors for Peace, an international league of 8,497 cities entirely opposed to nuclear weapons. But the City hasn't acted like it lately. There are three LANL buildings in Santa Fe now. About 500 employees work in the City Different, according to LANL. 87% of LANL is devoted to nuclear weapons directly, and nearly all the rest supports nuclear weapons indirectly. LANL is a bomb lab that is trying to become a bomb plant.

LANL has been in communication with local land developers and "the Mayor's Team" to possibly construct "12-15 buildings" totaling "800,000 to 1,000,000 sq. ft." in what would be a new, "approximately 60" -acre Santa Fe campus. We have the emails. We had to sue the City to get them. We do not know the status of this project. The City is balking at supplying further information, That is something we will also ask about on Wednesday.

Strong, thoughtful City resolutions have opposed plutonium pit production at LANL specifically, as well as nuclear weapons in general (see for example here, here, here, and here).

We will point out that for the first time, Santa Fe County has spoken out directly and clearly against LANL expansion and pit production (Santa Fe County Commissioners Letter re: LANL SWEIS, "We firmly oppose any expansion of Los Alamos National Laboratory that continues to produce plutonium pits," Apr 8, 2025). 

We want the City to reaffirm its opposition to plutonium pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). This gigantic program is by far the largest project ever undertaken in northern New Mexico. The cost of building and operating the LANL pit project through its (semi-)completion in 2032 will be about $25 billion. This is, in constant dollars, twenty (20) times what was spent at Los Alamos preparing to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A journalist just returning from Nagasaki asked me today, "How did we get here?" By "here," he meant a situation in which the U.S. nuclear warhead workforce has almost tripled in this century, with expanding factories for weapons of mass death -- for much, much larger weapons than the one dropped on Nagasaki. Santa Fe may host one of the most important of these -- the only one capable of supplying new plutonium pits for a new generation of land-based missiles. LANL pits are needed to support nuclear weapons labs and plants -- especially the one in California.

There are many answers to that reporter's question of course, some of which I suggested. But perhaps the simplest answer is, as I said to him, "We learned to love the money." It is Faust's bargain.

Don't take completion of this factory as a done deal. It isn't. It's vastly over budget and years behind schedule, as we have often pointed out.

It has other problems also. LANL's pit factory is a 1-minute drone flight from many public streets and roads. Uh-oh.

Will Santa Fe's greed pave the way for more Hiroshimas and Nagasakis? Or perhaps it will simply be Santa Fe's distractions, many of which have been engineered and supported to avoid the topic of building a pit factory a few miles from the City Different.

"How well we meant," recalled I. I. Rabi, reflecting on the Manhattan Project. (Here's Rabi, visiting Los Alamos in 1983, being interviewed by Bill Moyers of CBS News; he called LANL "an abomination.")

In 1945, few really knew what they were doing, historically speaking, or knew what would follow. Today, there are no such excuses.

We hope some of you will be able to join us at Santa Fe City Hall this Wednesday at 6:30 pm -- and if you are moved to do so, please speak. This is an opening event, a down payment as it were, in a campaign that will "take a minute or two." But don't doubt that we can win. Most of the world is behind us.

Finally, as a reminder please do contact us if you can in any way join our efforts during the week of 8/4-8/8! We need you! 

Have a wonderful evening,

Greg, for the Study Group