Meeting Report

The odds of a person who is ten years old today not being killed in a nuclear blast are approximately 50%. Wait, let’s think about this statement again: There is a 50% chance that any current ten-year-old will have his life cut short by a nuclear blast. That was perhaps the most gripping concept that Dr. Tad Daley laid upon us at our meeting. His point was, of course, that these dire odds stand unless we take action.

The meeting was jointly sponsored by HAGSA, UUSS, Grandmothers for Peace, the Franklin Memorial Fund, and the Sacramento Chapter of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). There were well over fifty people in attendance in the UUSS auditorium.

After pointing out that even after the demise of the Cold War, there are literally thousands of nuclear weapons all over the world, Dr. Daley listed four scenarios in which one or more might be used:

Then, after scaring us silly, he tossed us a rope: We can improve our average ten-year-old’s odds by eliminating nuclear weapons entirely.
Sounds a little utopian, doesn’t it? But consider the alternative: nuclear holocaust. We simply must do it, or else.

Exactly how nuclear weapons might be eliminated worldwide is laid out in Dr. Daley’s book, Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapons-Free World. It’s available on Amazon.com. Please read it. I did, and it gave me hope.

Report prepared by Roger Zabkie, Secretary

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2010 Meetings