May, 1986 

Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev, USSR 

    Enclosed you will find a copy of a letter I sent to the Mayor of Hiroshima, Japan, last September 16, along with a list of other people and agencies to whom it has been sent. 
     As you will see from that letter, my father, Leon Gay, was killed in action in Germany during that war, along with fathers from your country fighting the same enemy as my father.  Again, we have a common enemy, an inescapable, ultimately pervasive enemy, an insidious enemy of two parts and I’m not sure which comes first at this time…fear…or nuclear development. 
     I didn’t send the letter to you last September because, to put it quite simply, I was afraid.  I was afraid you might construe something to reflect negatively on the United States providing grist for a propaganda machine.  I decided if I, as an impotent nobody, can’t overcome my own fear, how can I expect those in awesome positions of power to even begin to reach beyond theirs.  So I’m exercising my right of open communication as an American citizen purely in the spirit of child-like hope. 
     There are people in your country just like me, the little people, objectified as “the masses.”  Many of us don’t understand politics, but we do understand pain.  Our children have to live with the effects of what happens on the other side of this planet.  No longer can any of us become refugees in a foreign land for there is no place on Planet Earth far enough away to be safe from nuclear disaster.  And though we anthropocentrically pat ourselves on the back for our smug superior intellectual development, the bottom line is, we really don’t know much about what we’re doing to our planet. 
     It has been suggested to me that I’m not appropriately serious while addressing such a serious matter as world peace.  I’m sure in the world of men, warring to find a reason for their existence, that my ideas seem “frivolous.”  Let me assure you, my life has been anything but frivolous. 
     You will also see enclosed a copy of a letter to the people of Chernobyl expressing my sympathy and concern. 

The time will come… 
    when I can send a letter to you without having to 
    overcome paranoid suspicions…. 
The time will come… 
    when we can concentrate on the cancers and future cancers 
    we’ve already caused 
The time will come… 
    when the silent tears of the mothers and children will have 
    finally pierced the souls of men… 
The time will come… 
    or we will have no time. 
                    *** 

     I sent it all to a few churches in Moscow, too, and was very excited when I received a very nice response from a church in Moscow.