How It Works

How can you change the world just by sharing your concern about the risk of nuclear weapons? Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller The Tipping Point describes connectivity – the number of people a person influences – as a key characteristic of those able to propagate new ideas. If you share your concern with just one person each week for the next year, you increase your connectivity on this issue 52-fold. If one in ten decide to participate, the number of participants still grows by a factor of 140 per year. (For the mathematically inclined, 1.152 ≈ 140. The "obvious" growth rate, a factor of 5 per year, ignores compounding.)

Theoretically, that growth rate would multiply our numbers by 3,000,000 in three years, but the process will slow before that point as the idea permeates society – and our goal will be achieved. Well before that point, conventional wisdom starts to change, public debate becomes more thoughtful, and concrete steps begin to be considered more seriously.

Email is fast and efficient for sharing your concern, and you can probably do a whole year's worth of work (reaching 52 people) in a fraction of that time. We therefore hope you will take a minute to email friends who might be interested and give them our address, NuclearRisk.org.

That's how it works! But it only works if you will participate. To do that, just enter your email address in the box to the left. You then will receive occasional emails – no more than one a week – with news on ways to accelerate our progress, and your email address will be kept in strict confidence.

These periodic emails also will include reports on growth in the number of participants, which is extremely important for maintaining motivation in the early stages of the process. Before we reach 50% of the population and can affect policy we first must reach 1%. Somewhere in between those two numbers, mass media coverage becomes signficant and provides visible signs of success. But there are few such signs while working to reach the first 1%, making that step in the process the most difficult. Keeping informed of progress via our email updates will help to maintain motivation in the early stages when there will be little other direct evidence of success.

So please sign up!


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