My Letter in the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal published a letter to the editor from me on Sunday, September 2. It appears as if the Journal is no longer archiving letters to the editor online, so the full text of the letter appears below.

The letters to the editor page is the second-most widely read page of a newspaper after the front page. It is a great way to get your message across to readers, especially in a publication known for coming down on the other side of your issue of interest.

I encourage everyone to write letters to the editor on issues they care about - both local papers and national ones. You can read my suggested guidelines for writing a letter to the editor here.

Here's the text of my letter, which refers to an op-ed that had been published by the Wall Street Journal earlier that week:

Mr. Kozak certainly places a lot of faith in the idea that "rational actors" with their finger on the nuclear trigger will act rationally at all times, even under extreme stress during times of war. This dangerous assumption overlooks the fact that one irrational decision with nuclear weapons could set off a chain of events that could kill hundreds of millions of people around the world through nuclear famine.

Furthering the gap between nuclear "haves" and "have-nots" through military action, as Mr. Kozak not so subtly infers, will only increase the incentive for other countries to develop nuclear weapons quickly. Negotiations for a Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction-Free Zone, which would include both Iran and Israel, are supposed to take place in the coming months. This is a sensible way to halt real and possible nuclear proliferation in this volatile region of the world.

Rick Wayman

Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Santa Barbara, Calif.