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Our careful, reasoned approach has gained us many friends, and built bridges even with people in the nuclear labs and plants. Since September 11, 2001, our work has increasingly placed nuclear weapons in the context of aggression abroad and the militarization of our society at home.
The Study Group is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Our board of directors includes both New Mexico and national members, and the work of our staff is supplemented by the contributions of interns and volunteers.
Mission and Method
The Los Alamos Study Group seeks nuclear disarmament, environmental protection and enhancement, social justice, and economic sustainability – goals which are closely interrelated, mutually reinforcing, and essential to one another. These goals are very widely supported in American society and we construe them as essentially conservative, however revolutionary they would be in actual practice.
We aim not only to change public policy but also to prevent the implementation of bad policies. The latter is often easier to achieve; it comprises de facto policy change and often leads to de jure change.
The central ideal in these four goals can be stated approximately as respect for the human person in the living landscape. Such an ideal is as intellectually, morally, economically, and politically incompatible with nuclear weapons as it is necessary for economic, social, and spiritual renewal in this state and nationally.
Within this overall framework of goals and ideals, in 2006 we aim to:
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Every activity we will undertake next year will be directed toward the practical achievement of these objective goals. Each program element will contribute to all five goals, and we believe each element fits with the others to make a harmonious whole. Based on our experience, we believe the proposed program can achieve these goals, assuming we can inspire funders and volunteers, and we also think it is the most efficient way available to us to do so in the present circumstances.
These external goals are served by internal goals. Briefly, these are:
- To increase and stabilize our income and broaden its sources.
- To routinize some of our most complicated work, making it simpler and more efficient.
- To coordinate most “retail” outreach through a) volunteers and b) allied organizations.
- To recruit long-term, skilled, committed staff, board, advisors, and volunteers.
- To re-emphasize intellectual work and accessible publications.
- To increase the public and political stature of Study Group issues, perspectives, and people.
- To provide staff, board, volunteers, and donors paths of maturity, fulfillment, and transcendence.
- To uncover, strengthen, and build traditions that ground our work in our particular location.
- To understand our work and configure it as service to society and to the land.
- To make respect the hallmark of our work in both substance and process, as the central touchstone of our political ideals.
- To conserve energy and other resources in our operations and strategies.
Everything we will do to achieve both our external and our internal goals falls into one of three program categories:
- Research, writing, and publication: activities primarily involving research, writing, publication, public speaking, and the education of news media, federal decisionmakers and legislators;
- Organizing and outreach: activities primarily involving building and evoking strong public commitment in New Mexico, the U.S., and the world to nuclear disarmament and related goals; and
- Sustaining the organization: activities primarily devoted to institutional development, maintenance, accountability, and sustainability.
In practice, all three kinds of programs work together, like the frame of a bicycle with its two wheels.
Greg and Trish Mello are excellent leaders when it comes to this issues
Greg"s Op ed piece on the stimulus
Economic Stimulus through Nuclear Warheads?
(650 words)
Every recent year, Senate appropriators have sought more nuclear warhead spending than the House. Last week, Senate appropriators outdid themselves, tacking an extra billion dollars into the stimulus bill, a 16% increase in total warhead spending.
The House rightly disagrees, and has approved no stimulus funds for nuclear weapons. Traditionally, the House asks for a more focused, somewhat more modest, warhead program. House appropriators want fewer redundant facilities and programs, fewer big construction projects, and no new warheads. They want management accountability and fewer semi-abandoned buildings. They want a serious effort to dismantle the stockpile of obsolete, retired warheads.
Republican David Hobson, who until January was the ranking member of the panel that reviews warhead spending, described the warhead business as “a jobs program for Ph.D.s – the ultimate in white collar welfare.” In his view, the bomb labs and plants were places “where the federal oversight organization did not demand accountability and where the business practices were two decades behind the times.”
His just-retired counterpart in the Senate, Pete Domenici (R-NM), saw things differently. Or if he did see the bloat and redundancy seen by so many others, he found reasons to overlook them. For 36 years he shepherded nuclear appropriations through the Senate, with a special emphasis on his home state, which houses two of the three weapons labs. Now 43% of warhead spending occurs in New Mexico, a remarkable concentration of high-income jobs in a sparsely-populated, low-income state. Today’s Los Alamos budget of $2.1 billion is more than two and a half times its 1946-1989 average, in constant dollars.
There are now eight labs and production plants, all run by the same few contractors in various combinations. The National Nuclear Security Administration hires these contractors, spending about 96% of its budget on them. The warhead stimulus proposed by the Senate is targeted at these few corporations. Average employee compensation is roughly $100,000 per year, about 30% higher than the defense industry overall. Much of this stimulus is directed toward a single state, as if Senator Domenici’s spirit still hovers over the Senate.
The Senate says it would use these funds for “maintenance and general plant project backlogs” and, tellingly, “other construction activities.” Odd – senior NNSA officials have repeatedly assured me that there is no maintenance backlog urgent enough to warrant refocusing resources.
In fact these funds would be used to build new production facilities, and pay for cost overruns on some of NNSA’s badly-managed projects. Construction and maintenance are a single account. A dollar freed here is available there, and shifting money from one vague account to another is just a way of life at the nuclear labs. Realistically, Congress would have little or no control where this money goes.
The Senate’s nuclear Valentine’s Day present comes just when the Obama administration has announced its desire to begin nuclear arms reduction talks with the Russians, with a stated goal of bringing each nation’s arsenal down to about 1,000 warheads. Even President Bush aimed to cut the U.S. arsenal by 40%. The future involves fewer nuclear weapons, smaller facilities, and, most agree, lower budgets.
So why add this money now? Because right now the NNSA is still being run by Bush appointees, whose grandiose plans for new production facilities require these funds. Their plans include over $3 billion for new plutonium processing and manufacturing facilities in Los Alamos, a comparably-expensive uranium component factory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and more.
These big plans – the core of the Bush Administration’s grandiose warhead complex “transformation” plan – cost money, much more money than has been available. Hence this stimulus. To fund its plans, the Bush Administration indeed cut back on maintenance in a few places, creating the very excuse the Senate is offering. Don’t be deceived. There is plenty of money sloshing around the nuclear complex. Not enough to build every new factory the outgoing Administration wanted, but more than the nation needs.