Mission Statement

The mission of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico is to provide timely and accurate information to the public on nuclear issues in New Mexico and the Southwest. Through the resulting empowerment of effective citizen action, Nuclear Watch of New Mexico seeks to promote both greater safety and environmental protection at regional nuclear facilities and federal policy changes that genuinely encourage international efforts to curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The Problem

New Mexico is the birthplace of nuclear weapons. It is now the host state for many nuclear weapons research, production and radioactive waste disposal facilities. A decade after the end of the Cold War, the reconfigured nuclear weapons complex has been largely revitalized and consolidated here. Under the so-called Stockpile Stewardship Program, now being implemented by the Department of Energy (DOE), Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories are receiving funding for core nuclear weapons research and production programs that exceeds Cold War levels. The production of plutonium pits, the "heart" of thermonuclear weapons, has been relocated to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) from the notorious Rocky Flats Plant near Denver. The opening of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in southeastern New Mexico gives DOE the ability to falsely claim that it is cleaning the massive environmental degradation caused by the Cold War attitude of production above all else. This, in turn, enables DOE to continue nuclear weapons production.

All of these federal facilities in New Mexico are crucial pieces of the national nuclear weapons complex that explicitly seeks to maintain nuclear weapons indefinitely, in contravention of the 1970 NonProliferation Treaty. In that treaty, the nuclear powers pledged to eventually disarm, in exchange for which the non-weapons states promised to never acquire nuclear weapons, a bargain which the Stockpile Stewardship Program threatens to undermine. As the key state in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, a stark choice between continuing nuclear weapons development and production or eventual disarmament must be made in New Mexico, if nuclear disarmament is to be preserved as a global option at all.

What Nuclear Watch of New Mexico Is Working To Do

Nuclear Watch is committed to combining fact-based public education with an activist stance so that the concerned public can effectively and rapidly respond to nuclear issues. We will:

Who We Are

Jay Coghlan, Executive Director
email: jay@nukewatch.org
Scott Kovac, Operations and Research Director
email: scott@nukewatch.org
John Witham, Communications and IT Specialist
email: john@nukewatch.org

Nuclear Watch's Steering Committee members are:
Elizabeth Billups
Mary Lou Cook
Richard Johnson
Shelby Miller
Sasha Pyle
John Stroud
Cathie Sullivan

Southwest Research and Information Center of Albuquerque, NM, a 501(c)3 organization, is the fiscal agent for Nuclear Watch of New Mexico. Contributions to Nuclear Watch are tax-deductible.