Dr. Helen Caldicott. I heard her speak on the local community radio last week after a speech in Boulder, Colorado, at the University. Thirty years ago, Dr. Caldicott was making news headlines often enough, though not quite as much as the brothers Berrigan who went to prison for hammering on nuclear missiles and pouring blood on them. She wrote the stirring book "Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War," in which she described the protection fallacy of a world with enough nuclear warheads to kill the world's population many times over -- mutually assured destruction. (She has just finished a book which will be published in September: "Coming Nuclear War: Manhattan Project II, the National Missile Defense and How to Avert the Catastrophe.")
At that time the best known group working to prevent nuclear war was Physicians for Social Responsibility (and still is, see website below), of which Dr. Caldicott, a pediatrician, was a leader. She spoke from her medical training of taking the known results of nuclear bomb blasts, which the United States had "tested" on the people of Japan, and extrapolating them to the bombs of many megatons more that were being manufactured and placed on missiles.
In 1983 or so, I became a member of the board of directors of a non-profit called Parents & Teachers for Social Responsibility (PTSR) and in 1986, worked part-time as one of two paid staff members, the other being its executive director, Dr. Glenn Hawkes.
PTSR put all its strength into writing, printing, and distributing a small but powerful booklet called "What About the Children?" Its banner was a toddler's undershirt. Its question was first posed by concerned parents to the local school board in Moretown, Vermont, where Glenn's children went to school. In the event of a nuclear war, they asked, what will the schools do to protect the children, if it happens during a school day? At the end of numerous discussions, the stark realization arose that there was nothing that could be done to protect children from the effects of nuclear bomb blasts, if they survived.
By 1987, there were German, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, and Japanese translations of that booklet in print. Copies were making their way into the Soviet Union. I like to think, euphemistically more than likely, that it had a little bit to do with the breaking of the Iron Curtain.
By 1990, it seemed that the concern about the immediacy of nuclear war had ebbed, that there was a marked decrease in the population's general fear that Russia and the U.S. would nuke each other into oblivion. Certainly, it was no longer high profile, a worry to send children under the covers when a plane flew overhead, as it did me in the mid-1950s.
Aside from some publicity in the past year about the removal of missiles from their silos in North Dakota and the subsequent blowing up of the silos, the armaments of nuclear war has been below the media's radar screen. And the possibility of nuclear destruction, whether purposeful or accidental, has been but dust under the feet of the hordes of consumers reaching ever harder to get theirs in the "developed" world. And in the lesser "developed" world, the scourges of civil wars and the devastating contagion of AIDS keep nuclear weapons and war out of the communal consciousness.
However, other than the official destruction of a relatively few weapons under the terms of the arms reduction accords, thousands of nuclear warheads are still in place, armed, and ready to go at the press of a button. Two buttons, actually, one each always in close proximity to the President of the United States and the President of Russia. Scary, scary thought.
On the radio program, Dr. Caldicott told of an episode in 1995 when then Russian President Yeltsin came within seconds – had the box unlocked and opened, with military advisors saying push it – because a rocket had appeared to be heading for Russia. We were saved because it veered away. Turned out that the Norwegians had launched a two-stage rocket carrying some kind of space payload. This is the insanity which governs us.
We in the United States will rarely hear news of such unpleasantness because nearly all of our media is bought and paid for by multi-national corporate interests who hew to their bottom line of making sure that nothing disturbs their profit-taking.
The time has returned for people who truly care about Earth and all its inhabitants to get back out there and be the voices which:
demand peaceful resolutions to conflicts;The explosion of nuclear warheads is the ultimate in environmental and ecological and human disasters. There is none greater.
call shame down on those who would incinerate half the earth and leave the other half suffering;
make all countries stop their incessant drive for nuclear weapons capability;
and demand the total elimination of nuclear weapons on this planet.
For some further information about this issue, please step into the Physicians for Social Responsibility website.
And if you don't have access to a true community, alternative news radio, visit KGNU for radio on the web out of Boulder, Colorado.
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