Competing Native markets go head-to-head Local News, C-1
Locally owned and independent
Roadrunners face manpower shortage as season nears Sports, D-1
Sunday, August 24, 2014
www.santafenewmexican.com $1.25
Federal plan to make more nuke triggers at LANL raises questions
Speed SUVs to return?
U.S. rethinks weapons
Our View: Step down
City committee set to consider new Redflex contract. Local News, C-1
Feds to review practice of arming local police with military equipment. Page A-7
An indicted sheriff who can’t do his job should move aside. Opinions, B-2
Los Alamos is best site for increased production, report says, but ‘brittle’ facility needs work to meet goals
getaway
By Patrick Malone The New Mexican
Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb, could ramp up production of triggers for nuclear weapons to levels not seen since the Cold War, if federal defense and energy officials get their way. The federal government sees the site atop a rugged canyon cliff overlooking the vast expanse of plateaus and distant hills in Northern New Mexico as the perfect place — really, the only one — for an ambitious mission to massively increase production of plutonium pits — the softball-sized cores that can have the explosive power of the Nagasaki bomb. The pits are used to set off thermonuclear reactions in weapons tens of thousands of times more powerful than the pits themselves. The new pits would not be used for new weapons, proponents of the plan say, but to replace aging pits in the nation’s nuclear stockpile. But questions abound over the proposal. Foremost among them: Are more pits needed? Thousands of pits already are warehoused at a storage facility in Texas that scientists
A justice’s
Miles from the Supreme Court in Washington, the sounds, sights, people and skies long have drawn Ruth Bader Ginsburg back each summer to Santa Fe, where the jurist is mutually admired by many
Please see NUKE, Page A-5
Plutonium pits: Nuclear weapon triggers A modern thermonuclear weapon consists of “primary” and “secondary” components. X-rays
Explosives Plutonium pit
Primary
From left, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s granddaughter Abby Ginsburg, 14, son James Ginsburg and daughter-in-law Patrice Michaels visit with the U.S. Supreme Court justice at a cocktail party Aug. 15 in Santa Fe. Jane Phillips/The New Mexican
Secondary
By Anne Constable
When conventional explosives in the outer shell of the primary go off, it causes the plutonium pit to implode, which triggers X-rays that cause the rest of the nuclear weapon to detonate.
The New Mexican
R
SOURCE: NATURE
Obituaries Teresa Bustos Borrego, 91, Pojoaque, Aug. 21 Mary Helen Espinosa, 70, Aug. 21
Harold Brown, Aug. 14 Gonzalo Cobos Macias, 87, Santa Fe, Aug. 19 Patricia Ann McFate, Santa Fe, Aug. 16
Albino “Al” Montaño, La Cienega, Aug. 20 James Martin Padilla, 58, July 17
uth Bader Ginsburg was on her way out of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe when a front desk employee came running up. “I just adore you,” gushed Louise Ortiz. “You totally rock.” The 81-year-old U.S. Supreme Court justice, clearly pleased, or so it seemed, posed for cellphone pictures with Ortiz and others before making her way through a cloudburst to her waiting SUV. For years, first with her late husband, Martin Ginsburg, and more recently with her children and grandchildren, Ginsburg has been visiting Santa Fe in late summer.
sculpture — and caught four of this season’s five productions at The Santa Fe Opera. Everywhere she goes here, Ginsburg, an icon to women’s rights advocates, seems to be revered. JoAnn Balzer, an arts supporter, suggested, “Santa Feans especially love her because she’s one of us.” Besides the mutual love of opera, Balzer said, “We live in a city that shares her sensibilities and beliefs.” And Ginsburg loves the city back. Not only the opera, and her friends here, but also the skies. The day before she was scheduled to go back to Washington to prepare for the court’s next session, she said, “I will think, ‘What happened to my beautiful skies?’ ”
Please see JUSTICE, Page A-4
Page C-2
Teen pregnancy plummets under Colorado policy
Pasapick
State says decline is result of its initiative to provide low-cost, long-acting contraception
www.pasatiempomagazine.com
93rd annual Indian Market
Today
The Washington Post
8 a.m.-5 p.m.; SWAIA Fashion and Designer Challenge, 9 a.m.noon, the Plaza; Classification X award winners film screening, 1 p.m., New Mexico History Museum, no charge.
An afternoon thunderstorm or shower likely. High 83, low 54.
DENVER — She was 15 and adrift. Her mother long dead. Her father otherwise occupied — he did not seem to notice when one of the young men who hung out in his corner market playing Street Fighter
By Tina Griego
Page D-8
Index
She comes mainly for the opera, which she adores, but also tours museums and galleries and lunches with friends she’s made here over the years. She’s scrambled up the ladders — 140 feet of them — leading to Alcove House (formerly the Ceremonial Cave) at Bandelier National Monument, visited Abiquiú, and met Bataan Death March survivor and former Taos Pueblo Gov. Tony Reyna. This year, Ginsburg toured Museum Hill, performed a same-sex wedding ceremony for a French couple in a private home, spoke at a sold-out symposium on women at the new Drury Plaza Hotel downtown, visited with artist Juan Hamilton at his home/studio on Canyon Road — she picked up a piece of
took an interest in her. Or that the interest was mutual. She could not say that this video game player was particularly good-looking, but he was 19, did not speak of women as conquests and when he flirted with her, he used her childhood nickname, “China,” instead of
her given name of Arlin. “I liked the way he said ‘Cheena,’ ” she says. “He used sweet words like beautiful. He said he liked my smile and my eyes.” She started sneaking out at night to meet him in the alley, where he waited to take her to his house or a friend’s house. She did not love him but was curious. They hung out for three months before having sex and, she says, it happened
maybe three or four times before she moved, leaving behind her video game Valentino for high school in Aurora, Colo. She had already started picturing graduation and life as someone her dad would be proud of — a detective, maybe. “When the doctor said I was pregnant, I couldn’t stop crying,” she says. “I was just really scared, you know.”
Please see DECLINE, Page A-8
Six sections, 52 pages
Calendar A-2 Classifieds E-10 Lotteries A-2 Family C-7 Opinions B-1 Real Estate E-1 Sports D-1 Time Out/crossword D-7
Main office: 983-3303 Late paper: 986-3010 News tips: 983-3035
AffordAble Cremation and Burial
165th year, No. 236 Publication No. 596-440
Breaking news at www.santafenewmexican.com
Direct Cremation from
$695
Plus $300 additional mileage fee when death occurs in Santa Fe area.
Affordable Cremation and Burial 621 Columbia Drive SE • Albuquerque, New Mexico 87106
505-262-1456
www.affordablecremationabq.com