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Join us at the Santa Fe City Council this Wednesday evening, 8/26/26, at 6:30 pm August 24, 2026 Good afternoon, friends -- The Santa Fe City Council is meeting this coming Wednesday evening, in its normal location (200 Lincoln Ave., map). Again some of us will speak there at circa 7 pm during "Petitions from the Floor" in favor of a Council resolution opposing plutonium warhead core ("pit") production at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). A virtual attendance option is available (see the agenda), but in-person attendance is much better. You can bring your own sign; we will also have some. You will have two minutes to speak. Trish and I have been out of town for two weeks and are excited to be back in action! We hope to see some of you at this meeting! As mentioned previously, there is definitely interest on the Council (as was evident at the meeting on the 12th -- thank you if you went), but there is also hesitancy. It would be helpful if councilors heard from more people than just a few of us. If you haven't written or called your councilor (or all of them!), please do! Their contact information is here. To repeat what was said earlier, you can see the "nut" of the proposed resolution in this July 8 ad: Will Santa Fe aspire to be a "City of Peace," or will it be a City of War?; Without formal City opposition, a factory for weapons of mass destruction will continue to harm Santa Fe's identity. "Without a vision, the people will perish." Other ads in the same series provide more background, but I have to warn you that the situation is not static. In the absence of firm political opposition -- which is the present situation -- LANL's pit production role is growing and is likely to continue to do so. For example, the House of Representatives passed a requirement to build more than 200 plutonium nuclear warhead cores annually by 2050. What the Senate will do with this absurd proposal is still up in the air. The bill is agnostic as to where these pits would be made, but should it pass it will be like a long-term whip in the appropriations process, just what the contractors want. Bear in mind that Senate liberals on the Committee -- notably, Elizabeth Warren, supported by the Union of Concerned Scientists and others -- want LANL to make all the pits. Last year, it was the Senate that sought to greatly increase LANL pit production ("Senate bill would relax near-term production deadlines for nuclear warhead cores at Los Alamos, double outyear production requirements for Los Alamos, and cement Savannah River's production role," Aug 15, 2025). The Senate-proposed growth in LANL's statutory production mission did NOT pass the House last year. Returning to this year's House proposal, please note that by 2050, LANL's main plutonium facility "PF-4" will be 75 years old. This facility already does not meet modern safety standards. Minor accidents are frequent. The Trump Administration meanwhile has been loosening safety and other standards left and right, as we have often explained. By 2050, PF-4 is unlikely to be operating as LANL's sole pit production facility. Something else will have to be built -- either a brand new, larger pit factory as NNSA previous proposed for LANL, in the event LANL assumed this mission, or facilities nearby and connected by tunnels to PF-4 that would be capable of handling higher levels of (nuclear) "material at risk" (MAR). LANL pits are desired solely for the purpose of making new warheads, which in turn are desired in order to keep the warhead complex busy on the one hand, and to produce new kinds of warheads for potential nuclear war-fighting missions, on the other. Producing new pits right now has nothing to do with "pit aging," a slow process. What LANL pit production does serve is expanding the nuclear arsenal right now, including with new so-called "tactical" nuclear weapons ("Pentagon Drafting New Nuclear Strategy To Expand Options for Tactical Nuclear Weapons Use," Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, Aug 9, 2026; Bulletin 373: NNSA to leave "life extension," "stewardship" paradigm to build new weapons; LANL pit aspirations triple; LANL rad exposure standards loosened fivefold; Zoom discussion this Thursday noon MST, Feb. 2, 2026). Thank you again for your participation! Greg PS #1: We are just back. We have extensive unanswered correspondence. Bear with us. We are also dying to properly explain to you what enormous possibilities lie latent in the present confusions, and how they might be accessed with what is really just a little bit of effort, looking at the big picture. Those things will go to the larger mailing list, of which this is a subset. PS#2: A few people thanked me for sending that pertinent Pushkin poem, "The Upas Tree." You may also find this poem by Richard Wilbur useful. When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.
Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?
Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,
If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip
On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,
These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken
In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.
Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.
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Home page; Press releases; Bulletins; Plutonium Pit Production; Nuclear weapons modernization Contact Greg or Trish; What You Can Do Ukraine war and peace page, updated daily more or less Please help us build the "Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production" --
Greg Mello To subscribe to our New Mexico Activist Leaders listserve send a blank email here. To unsubscribe send a blank email here. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead |
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