As with my web site, Defusing the Nuclear Threat, the goals of this blog are two-fold:
- To help society recognize the unacceptable level of risk posed by nuclear weapons. Conventional wisdom mistakenly sees much greater risk in modifying our current nuclear posture than in maintaining it.
- To help create societal demand for change. Without such grass-roots support, little will change. Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, a 19th century French politician, put it well when he said, “There go the people. I must follow them for I am their leader.” Any leader who gets too far in front of the crowd ceases to be a leader.
Thanks very much.
Martin Hellman
Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering
Stanford University
Defusing the Nuclear Threat 
Why do you not have an email link on your bio site ?
MUST SEE
http://www.EinsteinMagnetism.com
I would like to comment on Professor Hellman’s short piece on Pakistan. First may I say, you are doing a great service towards diffusing the nuclear threat! I commend you greatly, and I hope to meet you soon..
First I would like to state that I am honored and throughly enjoy receiving your blog, and I read it through voraciously when it arrives.
I believe I contacted you before. Part of my academic interests are the very dangerous nuclear threat in South Asia. I am working on a project to revisit the current status of the Israeli-Pakistani nuclear sword rattling during the Sharon Prime Ministership which I discovered, and presented at a Conference at the East-West Center in Honolulu about five years back.
There are five nuclear-armed powers within the Arabian Sea region as you are well aware – India, Pakistan, the United States, France and Israel.
India and Pakistan are indigenous to the area. France and the United States are there under the water mainly to protect the oil routes from the Gulf. Avner Cohen has sated to me that the Israeli subramarine base is still there, but, politically, he said he didn’t know whether it was still supporting a nuclear-armed submarine. Succinctly, if so, it is stupidity because Tel Aviv does not have a threat from Rawalpindi at the moment, and it is a most provacative act.
As you can see, Pakistan does feel a very real threat, and confidence will be hard to build because it is so multifaeceted (Sp.?). Besides, in the next Indian election, the BJP very well might be able to form a government, and that Party has been irresponsible with their nuclear capibility in the past (e.g., 2001-2002). The Indo-Pak theater is the second most dangerous in the world to produce a large (World?) War, and I have done a report for the State Department on creating peace negotiations on Kashmir at the request of a senior Senate Foreign Relations Committee memeber some time ago. Succinctly, Islamabad did not create the threat but is merely reacting to the environment in which it finds itself.
(On the positive side, Brigadier-General Khan (retired), who was a recent diretor of the Command and Control of Pak’s nuclear forces, told me two years back that his and the Indiian military regularly call each other up, and were on good terms with their counterparts, and he was confident that the two militaries could reign in any irrationality of their civilian Governments.)
I have been informed by a questionable source (i.e., I cannot footnote it) that Pakistan may be making & manning weapons for a third party who are paying for them because the United States had withdrawn their guarantees of a nuclear shield for that nation during the Bush ascendancy. That would answer why they are they producing so many weapons if true.
Thank you for getting me thinking by writing this memo to you! It has given me an opportunity to start focusing on my upcoming research.
(510) 845-1990
Hello Martin,
As a group working to raise awareness to the dangers in Iran reaching nuclear capabilities (among other goals), we deeply relate with the ideas you present on this blog and on your website. You are invited to look into some ideas we develop on our blog, including recent opinions on EU sanctions and the loopholes used by some players
We would appreciate re-post or shout outs 🙂
Contact us on twitter too- @iran2407
Thanks in Advance