(Webmaster's note: If you are a UC student who is interested in taking Greg Mello up on the following offer to volunteer at the Los Alamos Study Group during the summer, please contact UC Nuclear Free campaign coordinator Will Parrish.)

Dear UC and other colleagues,

Greetings from the Los Alamos Study Group and New Mexico. I'd like to invite you to join us this summer (and after), if you want to help stop a new generation of nuclear warheads and the resumption of nuclear weapons production. It's a good opportunity to learn first-hand about the nuclear weapons complex in a rather intimate way. There is no more pivotal issue, place, or time; and in many ways this is the historical moment of truth for U.S. nuclear weapons. There is also a relative vacuum of opposition to nuclear weapons in New Mexico, more than most folks far away in relatively progressive states like California can easily understand, so even a small contribution can loom large in the scheme of things.

From the academic perspective, textbook knowledge of nuclear weapons issues, gained without talking to the people and managers directly involved, is a one-dimensional thing. Want to understand the Reliable Replacement Warhead program? Why not talk to the guy in charge?

As the dust settles on the 1990s, some of us now think that the single most enduring blow in the last 20 years to nuclear weapons and the ideology that sustains them happened in 1989, when the Rocky Flats Plant closed. That plant, which made the plutonium bomb cores ("pits") for U.S. nuclear weapons, has never been replaced. As a result, there is no way to make new weapons except by using old pits, and the complex as a whole is starved for the "end-to-end work" which rationalizes and justifies the whole. Weapons scientists are retiring and dying, and almost an entire generation of workers will have passed before production is able to re-start, if indeed it ever does. Policies and doctrines can change overnight, but weapons plants take years to plan and build, in the case of plutonium facilities more than a decade.

Existing facilities age further in the meantime, increasing danger, downtime, and difficulty. As Ev Beckner, former #2 guy in the NNSA, said to me a few months ago, LANL is now the "pivotal" site for production of new weapons, with success not at all a sure thing.

The managers of the weapons complex consider this overall situation nothing less than a crisis. At LANL, skills are deteriorating and the quality of science is declining further, as is the fraction of the laboratory's total effort available for science. By my calculation, no more than one fourth of lab personnel are scientists today and probably the number is less. This number can be expected to decline further as program funding is impacted by a combination of new factors related to the plutonium production mission and the imminent change of contractor, an impact amounting to several hundred million dollars per year in aggregate, much or even most of which will fall on the so-called "science" programs. The weapons system is weaker overall than it appears.

Things are difficult on The Hill. Trish (my wife and co-conspirator) and I heard on Wednesday night at a Los Alamos County Council meeting, where I was an invited speaker, that stress and depression are now considered endemic "environmental" health issues in Los Alamos. It's in the air, so to speak. Also the rate of attempted youth suicide is very high -- the mental health professional we heard speak said that in her opinion it is the biggest mental health problem in Los Alamos.

One member of the Council urged us to host more public discussions of nuclear weapons policy, which we could do more often if we had a little more help (this is a hint).

As I think you all know, the House Appropriations committee thinks that building up the plutonium infrastructure at LANL is "irrational," given the inherent problems of the site and the age of existing plutonium and ancillary facilities at LANL as well as the age and security liabilities of facilities at other locations around the weapons complex. In the Committee's view, a consolidated shiny new bomb factory in the desert is the more attractive option. We don't agree about the shiny new factory, but in the meantime we do have powerful semi-allies. We have allies in other places you wouldn't suspect either. The situation is far from hopeless. We have defeated pit production at Los Alamos twice so far (1990 and 1997), but we are now in quite a different and extremely sobering political situation.

Therefore I am asking you to think about a working vacation in New Mexico. We can work out the practical details if you have sufficient interest. We have offices in Albuquerque and Los Alamos. We have very little money but we do have a devoted team of volunteers, which largely runs the Los Alamos Disarmament Center, from which the face-to-face aspects of our Los Alamos activities largely emanate.

We very much need help with research -- some highly specialized, some less so -- as well as with certain key organizing functions (very time-intensive and hard to fund), and we need help in Albuquerque as well as in Los Alamos. We work with nonprofits, businesses, and local governments throughout central and northern New Mexico as time and talent allow.

If you came, the week beginning June 11 would be a good time to start, as would the weeks beginning July 2, July 9, or July 30. We'll be starting an internship program August 21, so that also would be a good time to come.

It might not be worth while to come for just a week, although a whole swarm of people here for a week could accomplish a lot and would be worth facilitating. In general, a longer time, say a month, would be better.

Talk to your friends and write [Will Parrish of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation] if you are interested in discussing further details!

In solidarity for nuclear disarmament,

Greg Mello, Director

P.S. Please feel free to forward this message to others who might be interested.

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