I have been browsing for ideas and discovered that finding the number of organisations working towards disarmament is no easy thing. For more about these, search for Nuclear Disarmament Organisations, and you will find quite a number of them, the larger ones being mainly government funded, and many smaller ones, funded by private means, and finding the total number, government and private, is a matter of taking a guess somewhere between about 500 and a thousand.
We should wish all of them well. They have had some success:
After a 1985 peak of 63,600 warheads, numbers decreased to 12,200 at the beginning of 2025. Sadly, there has recently been a slight increase, due mainly to the Ukraine war and by nuclear countries updating their arsenals.
My thoughts are, it would be helpful to their cause to let these organisations know that they have support from below, a kind of public ground swell who, though they might be silent, support what they and we are trying to achieve.
As for me, if our numbers should eventually become significant, I would be very happy to contact these organisations, which are doing such great work, to let them know there are people out here who appreciate their efforts.
Which reminds me, contacting you is something I haven’t been very good at so far. This is because of technical incompetence on my part: sometime in January, I managed to delete some of your valued comments, including, I think, an email or two, before I got around to responding to them.
My daughter fixed things, but the information was gone, and the look she gave me left me in no doubt that from now on I will not touch any switches, push buttons or even the keyboard keys unless I’m pretty sure that they will do what I want them to.
That said, if you are sufficiently disappointed with the fate of your literary masterpieces, resend them and I’ll reply.
I was about to end this post feeling a bit down because things didn’t seem to be working out as well as I had hoped, and self doubt had crept in, when I realised that I, and probably many of you also, didn’t know much about the Doomsday Clock.
I had heard of it, and had a rough idea of what it was about, then I spent most of last night reading the surreal, fascinating, highly disturbing 2026 Doomsday Clock Statement, published just a few weeks ago by the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the AtomicScientists, and the self doubt vanished, and suddenly the late nights at the keyboard didn’t matter any more.
This remarkable report, of just a few hundred words, and learning of the existence of the Bulletin, the name of which which could have been a good title for a short science fiction novel had it not been used for the Bulletin in 1945, as a reaction by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and scientists at the University of Chicago, to the awesome power they had just unleashed, has had a remarkable effect on me, and I dragged myself off to bed exhausted but elated, and wondering if my efforts might yet help wind back the clock a second or two – with everyone’s help, of course.
I awoke still a bit tired but with fresh hope, but also, being only human, feeling gratified that my concerns about the way humanity is behaving, have been validated by the wonderful people involved with the Doomsday Clock and worked to keep it alive and well over the years.
The best way I can thank them is by asking any (hopefully every) one who reads this blog to please read the real-life drama of the Clock.
A good way to start is to search for “The 2026 Doomsday Clock Statement”
A credit to it’s editor, John Mecklin.
S.O.B.
Silly Old Blogger 