Defusing the Nuclear Threat

The risk of a nuclear catastrophe is far greater than we think.

Our ability to reduce that risk is far greater than we imagine.

Too few people are interested in nuclear weapons and there's a much larger “market” of people wanting to improve their relationships, so I’m now working with my wife Dorothie on a new approach that combines the personal with the global. Click here to sign up for information, updates, and opportunities to participate.

Lessons From the Cuban Missile Crisis: Did you know that JFK was taking amphetamines? that American destroyers unknowingly attacked Soviet subs armed with nuclear torpedoes? that we are still engaged in very risky behavior? Learn how we can change that!

How Risky is Nuclear Optimism?: Read Prof. Hellman's paper in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and find out.

Soaring, Cryptography and Nuclear Weapons: How could three such different topics be related?

Archive of email #2 to participants

May 13, 2008

Welcome to the second "Defusing the Nuclear Threat" email for the NuclearRisk.org web site. If you missed the first one, it is now accessible from the resource page of the web site at http://nuclearrisk.org/resources.php . I've also added links on that page to news coverage of our project.

The slashdot avalanche (3900 hits on our web site the day the coverage appeared) died down in a few days, and we're back to an average of about 30 visits per day, which is still about 1,000 per month. Not bad, but it's definitely not the exponential growth I'd like to see. It's going to take some tweaking to get there! It might even take some coverage in print media -- something I was hoping to bypass with the potential of the web. So I am working on that possibility as well as others, including replicating the slashdot type of coverage.

Even without going exponential, the web site has proved extremely valuable for disseminating these ideas. When I contact a new person, I can give them a brief summary and refer them to the site for details.

Last week I was in New York and gave a talk on the project at IBM Research, hosted by Dick Garwin, one of the signers of the statement. The talk was also accessible at a number of IBM locations. The next day I gave a talk at the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs. Word is getting out and most people are amazed at this gaping hole in our knowledge. How could changes in our nuclear weapons policy be rejected as too risky when the risk of our current approach was not known?

There are other developments in progress that I hope to report on in the near future. In the meantime, thank you for your efforts to spread the word and Defuse the Nuclear Threat. Working together we can do it!

Martin
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Martin Hellman
Member, National Academy of Engineering
Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering
Stanford University
http://nuclearrisk.org

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