For reasons explained on our BUILD AWARENESS tab (or just click here ) you will be most effective if your efforts to get friends involved focus on a small, interconnected group such as a neighborhood, a school, or a church. But, there is one very effective action we hope you will take that does not exactly fit that mold.
Your list of email addresses allows you to efficiently share your concern with friends. Some of them will be members of the group on which you will be focusing, while others have the potential to act as seeds for new pockets of nuclear awareness elsewhere.
To help get you started, we've developed the following sample message. Of course, feel free to change it to better fit your own style. With many mail programs, you can copy the picture below by right clicking and pasting it into your email message. If that doesn't work, here's a link to the JPEG itself.
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SAMPLE EMAIL MESSAGE
Something I just read prompted me to contact you about an issue most of us have tuned out, but one that we cannot afford to ignore. Nuclear weapons are the elephant in the room that almost no one wants to talk about. But, as the attached drawing conveys all too well, ignoring this threat is not an acceptable option. I've decided to do something about it and am sending you this message as part of my commitment to help create a safer, saner, more secure world for us and for future generations.
To put the problem in perspective, imagine that a man wearing a TNT vest were to come into the room and, before you could escape, managed to tell you that he wasn't a suicide bomber. He didn't have the button to set off the explosives. Rather, there were two buttons in very safe hands. One was in Washington with President Obama and the other in Moscow with President Medvedev, so there was nothing to worry about. You'd still get out of that room as fast as you can!
Just because we can't see the nuclear weapons controlled by those two buttons, why do we stay here? As if confronted by that man, we need to be plotting a rapid escape. Instead, we have sat here complacently for over 50 years, trusting that because Earth's explosive vest hasn't yet gone off, it never will. Instead of solving the problem, things have gotten a lot worse during that time, with new buttons popping up in London, Paris, Beijing, Jerusalem, New Delhi, Islamabad and Pyongyang. And, if we don't start to give this issue the attention it deserves, al-Qaeda may get a button of its own!
If you agree that it's high time we stopped sitting around and started solving this problem, please visit http://nuclearrisk.org. It will take you less than five minutes to read that page and you'll come away ready to make your own decision on whether or not to get involved. A few simple, effective actions that anyone can take -- one of them was to send this email -- are listed at the end of the page. I hope you'll consider joining me in this effort to preserve all that we hold dear. Thanks very much.
