Soaring, Cryptography and Nuclear Weapons: Nuclear weapons are the elephant in the room that almost no one wants to talk about, so this article approaches the issue from the less threatening perspectives of soaring and cryptography. How could three such different topics be related? Find out by reading this article! Also available in PDF and on YouTube.

Permission is granted to those wishing to copy the HTML to their own web sites provided a link is maintained to this site. (The short bio at the beginning of the article contains such a link.)

 

The Primer: After reading the Home and Overview pages, the Primer is the suggested next reading. As its name implies, it provides a basic understanding of the issues involved in defusing the nuclear threat.

 

The Statement: Seven prominent individuals "urgently petition the international scientific community to undertake in-depth risk analyses of nuclear deterrence and, if the results so indicate, to raise an alarm alerting society to the unacceptable risk it faces as well as initiating a second phase effort to identify potential solutions." We hope you too will join the effort.

While the proposed studies are only a first step, they have the potential to lead us to discover and take later steps that are hard to envision in the current world environment. The first step in a long journey does not take us very far but, without it, the journey never starts.

 

The Paper (1.8 MB PDF): "Risk Analysis of Nuclear Deterrence" was published in the Spring 2008 issue of the magazine of the national engineering honor society, The Bent of Tau Beta Pi. The statement referenced above condenses the paper's key ideas into one page. Sections 2 and 3 of this site's primer are adapted from sections of the paper that can be skimmed or skipped over to avoid repetition. While the paper has a few places with math that may look like Greek (they use Greek letters for symbols), it is possible to skip the math and still get the main thrust of the paper. The Risk Analysis section of this site explains the key ideas of the paper in non-mathematical language.

 

Sample emails and letters: Bringing up such a weighty subject may seem daunting. These samples are intended to help get you started.

 

Business cards: To encourage people to visit this site and become involved, print this sheet and cut it into business-card-sized handouts to carry in your wallet or purse.

 

News coverage:
IEEE Spectrum (31 March 2008): The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is the world's largest technical society. Its magazine reached 385,000 readers with coverage of our project.

Stanford Magazine (September-October 2008): Stanford's alumni magazine brought news of our project to over 180,000 readers.

The Stanford News Service has a July 17, 2009 story on our project, both in written form and a short video.

 

Archive of emails sent to participants in this effort:
email #31 (10 Mar 2010) NATO and Russia
email #30 (7 Feb 2010) Effective Messaging
email #29 (25 Jan 2010) The Stanford Project
email #28 (27 Dec 2009) Nuclear Weapons and the Circus
email #27 (20 Dec 2009) How It Works, version 1.1
email #26 (9 Oct 2009) The Nobel Peace Prize and You
email #25 (25 Sep 2009) How Risky Are Nuclear Weapons?
email #24 (17 Sep 2009) Missile Defense: A Play in One Act?
email #23 (7 Sep 2009) How Confident Should a Nuclear Optimist Be?
email #22 (29 Aug 2009) How Civilized Are We?
email #21 (22 Aug 2009) The Man in the TNT Vest
email #20 (12 Aug 2009) Differing Perspectives: Could They Prove Fatal?
email #19 (4 Aug 2009) Understanding North Korea
email #18 (3 July 2009) Understanding Iran
email #17 (26 June 2009) "Soaring" article now on YouTube!
email #16 (29 May 2009) Evidence of the Need for Risk Analysis
email #15 (7 May 2009) Bipartisan Report on Improving Russian-American Relations
email #14 (14 Apr 2009) Cassandra or Oracle?
email #13 (5 Apr 2009) A Miracle?
email #12 (2 Apr 2009) Hope and Realism
email #11 (1 Mar 2009) An Amazing Article in TIME Magazine
email #10 (24 Nov 2008) Digg the Soaring article!
email #9 (17 Nov 2008) Updates
email #8 (21 Oct 2008) Soaring, Cryptography and Nuclear Weapons
email #7 (21 Sep 2008) Stanford Coverage, and More on Georgia
email #6 (12 Sep 2008) More on the Georgian Crisis
email #5 (19 Aug 2008) Russia's war with Georgia
email #4 (23 July 2008) A Second Cuban Missile Crisis?
email #3 (02 July 2008)
email #2 (13 May 2008)
email #1 (27 April 2008)