Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Dr Helen Caldicott .. a very interesting and informative interview.

My guest scared the pants off the world nearly a quarter of a century ago with her extraordinary, yet somehow
level-headed descriptions of nuclear Armageddon. She became Australia's best-known voice of protest, taking
the case for nuclear disarmament to the world stage — a case that is somehow even more urgent today. She still
campaigns for a nuclear-free world — a campaign that's come at some cost. Please welcome Helen Caldicott.

Andrew Denton: Welcome to a TV experience.

Dr Helen Caldicott, anti-nuclear campaigner: Thanks.

Andrew Denton: Helen, in 1982, you made a famous speech to the people of New York, where you
described to them what a nuclear bomb would do to their city. Perhaps it's time you refreshed our memory.

Dr Helen Caldicott: Yeah, well, I got up on the stage and there were a million people in front of me — like an ocean of faces — and I had three minutes. I never prepare my speeches and I thought, "What am I going to say?" So I dropped a bomb on them. And I said that nuclear war could occur by accident, now, and the bomb's coming in at 20 times the speed of sound — you won't hear it — in five minutes. And it's going to land right here in Central Park and explode with the heat inside the centre of the sun. And dig a hole three quarters of a mile wide and 800ft deep, turning us and the earth below to radioactive fall-out in a mushroom cloud. Five miles from the epicentre, everyone will be, literally, vaporised, like a little boy in Hiroshima was reaching up to catch a red dragonfly in his hand against the blue sky and there was a blinding flash and he literally disappeared and left his shadow on the pavement. Winds of 500 miles an hour just literally turn people into missiles — sucked out of buildings travelling at 100 miles an hour till they hit the nearest solid object. Internal organ injuries, compound fractures and the like, and death.

Andrew Denton: How close are we to the threat of a nuclear winter?

Dr Helen Caldicott: On September 11, we got to DefCon II, which was the highest state of alert. Russia and America still have each other targeted with 2,500 hydrogen bombs — that's 5,000. 1,000 bombs dropping on 100 cities creates such a pall of thick, black, radioactive smoke, it covers the globe, blocks out the sun for a year, stops photosynthesis, and there's a short ice age and we and all the animals and plants will freeze to death in the dark. In '95, we got to within 10 seconds of that happening when the Russians made a mistake. So every second of every day, we live on borrowed time.

Andrew Denton: I've heard about this concept of 'usable nukes'. What is a usable nuke?

Dr Helen Caldicott: Oh, the Americans are big into this — this Administration, they want to use nuclear weapons everywhere. And they've decided to build 500 new ones a year. They've built none since the end of the Cold War so they're building little ones.

Andrew Denton: Oh. Friendly ones?

Dr Helen Caldicott: Mini nukes. Yeah, no, friendly.

Andrew Denton: Mmm.

Dr Helen Caldicott: So they're crossing the Rubicon between conventional and nuclear war. So, five kilotons? Hiroshima was 13 kilotons. "Yeah, it's OK. We'll just drop them on the bunker, you know, on Saddam Hussein." But then they're developing 'robust earth penetrators'. Very sexy.

Andrew Denton: I love it when you talk like that.

Dr Helen Caldicott: Yeah, I knew you would. I knew it would get you going. That's a megaton. That's a million tons of TNT. That's huge. But they're into it big-time, and the nuclear weapons labs are conducting the second Manhattan Project. The first was to make three bombs. The first was called 'Ever Trinity', named after the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. And if it didn't explode as planned, the telegram to the President was to read, "It's a girl." The telegram read, "It's a boy." The next one was called 'Little Boy', dropped on Hiroshima, killing 120,000 people in a flash. The next one on Nagasaki called 'Fat Man' — 80,000 people in a flash. But we've got…I mean, America's got about 15,000 hydrogen bombs and Russia's got a lot too. It's only Russia and America that can produce the end of life on earth.

Andrew Denton: The Japanese had different names for them, didn't they? They were called 'Shit, what was that?' and 'Fuck, here comes another one'.

Dr Helen Caldicott: If they had time to think before they got vaporised, yeah.

Andrew Denton: If they had time to think about it.

Dr Helen Caldicott: Yeah.

Andrew Denton: This language of 'usable nukes' — is that an
attempt to make the concept of nuclear war somehow seem acceptable?

Dr Helen Caldicott: Oh, absolutely. These people in this Administration, um, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle — the Prince of Darkness — Rumsfeld — really scary guy — and Cheney, they're really into using nuclear weapons now. They've written a Nuclear Policy Review about it, and they've got a new thing called the Project for a New American Century and they say they're gonna use nuclear weapons on anyone they want.

Andrew Denton: That explanation you gave of a relatively small device dropped on New York City
— they KNOW the impact of these bombs. How can there be a concept of a winnable nuclear war?

Dr Helen Caldicott: They…you can't think rationally when analysing these characters. The American policy is to fight and win a nuclear war against Russia. Do you know how you do it? Knock out their eyes and ears — their satellites — so they can't see your weapons coming. Knock out Moscow, the command centre, then send all your weapons over — 3,500 or whatever, very accurate — and they land on the missile silos and 'kill' the missiles. People being killed, that's called 'disassembly' — of human bodies — so we're inanimate objects, but the missiles get 'killed'. Now, if you miss a few, then they're setting up their 'Star Wars' thing, National Missile Defense, so they'll clean up a few remaining that get launched and you've won the nuclear war. The fact that that will create nuclear winter and the end of life on earth is irrelevant for the Pentagon, and they just turn around and pretend it doesn't exist, nuclear winter. They don't want to talk about it. If you were a psychiatrist sitting on Mars, psychoanalysing these people, they clearly need therapy and need to be removed from office for the public health of the people of the planet.

Andrew Denton: Let me switch to another focus of this, which is al-Qaeda, and the threat,
purported, that they could get a hold of a nuclear weapon. In your opinion, what is the likelihood?

Dr Helen Caldicott: Oh, it's high. I don't know why there hasn't been a nuclear terrorist attack already. I mean, it's easy. You get the design off the Internet to make a nuclear weapon, buy the stuff at the local hardware shop, get a lump of plutonium and Bob's your uncle. I could make one if I had some plutonium.

Andrew Denton: But there's the trick — where do you get plutonium?

Dr Helen Caldicott: Well, there's lots of it in Russia, virtually unguarded, and highly enriched uranium. Some of it's missing. Japan stockpiled tons of plutonium and now the White House — to make us feel better — is telling Japan that she maybe had better build nuclear weapons 'cause of North Korea and what they're doing. That's scary.

Andrew Denton: Isn't, however, the genie out of the bottle? You said you can get the information off the Internet. Last year, in Britain, they realised that all the information necessary to make a transportable nuke had been in the public records for some years.

Dr Helen Caldicott: Oh, yeah.

Andrew Denton: Full engineer's specs. So that information is clearly out there.
How do we ever put that genie back in the bottle? How do you remove this risk?

Dr Helen Caldicott: The way you do it is through education. President Jefferson said, "An INFORMED democracy will behave in a responsible fashion." So I started in '78, when most people said, "Better dead than red." In five years of education, with 23,000 doctors we recruited, talking about this…for which we got the Nobel prize, actually…um, 80% of Americans were opposed to nuclear war on the grounds that it was bad for their health. That was the second American revolution and it led to the end of the Cold War with Gorbachev. But then Clinton got into office. And Clinton…his legacy is not the blue dress, his legacy is that he didn't have the courage to take on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Pentagon and fly to Boris Yeltsin, who was totally compliant, major alcoholic, and said, "Boris, sign here. We're abolishing nuclear weapons." And Boris would have done that. Clinton was scared of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and that's his legacy — the weapons are still there. That's Clinton's legacy.

Andrew Denton: Let's talk about another US president. You campaigned around the world in
the '70s and '80s and you got a rare one on one with President Ronald Reagan.

Dr Helen Caldicott: I did.

Andrew Denton: What was that experience like?

Dr Helen Caldicott: Well, I met his daughter in the Playboy Mansion. There
is such a place. There was Hugh Hefner with the Playgirls, you know?

Andrew Denton: How did you come to be in the Playboy Mansion?

Dr Helen Caldicott: Well, um, Hefner was excerpting a book called 'With Enough Shovels' about, "Don't worry about nuclear war." If there are enough shovels to go round, you dig your hole — "we'll all make it." It was called 'With Enough Shovels'. That was a Federal Emergency Management Agency. And he had a lot of film stars that night and I was to address them with Paul Newman. And my agent said, "Look, be emotional." She said, "They're film stars. You can be emotional tonight." So I dropped the bomb and I said, "Look, go out tonight and look at the stars and realise we're probably the only life in the whole universe and realise how precious this is and what we're going to do about it." So…and Kris Kristofferson was crying and stuff…

Andrew Denton: Well, that's because you mentioned other stars. He wouldn't like that. This is Hollywood.

Dr Helen Caldicott: He's a darling. Anyway, so, um, up came this tall, slender girl with long black hair and she said, "I'm Patti Davis." She said, "I want you to see my father. You're the only one who can change his mind about nuclear war." I said, "OK, but I want to see him alone." She rang me two days later and said we've got an hour at the end of his working day. And I said, "What time?" She said, "4 o'clock."

Andrew Denton: He was an old man, fair enough.

Dr Helen Caldicott: So we swept into the southern portico in the black limo with the walkie-talkies
and secrets. Went into the downstairs library in which there were no books.

(Andrew laughs)

Dr Helen Caldicott: We waited a while, and I was nervous because it was the President, and he came in all dithery. He didn't shake my hand, so I shook his, and I said, "You probably don't know who I am, do you?" He said, "Yes, you're an Australian, you read 'On the Beach' when you were young and you're scared of nuclear war." I said, "That's right." He said, "I, too, am scared, but our way is to prevent it — I believe in building more bombs." So we were off to a fantastic start.

Andrew Denton: Yeah. I'd just written my book, 'Missile Envy', and I just had facts and figures just… You're a good audience — you recognise what I'm talking about…facts and figures pouring out of my eyes, ears and that and every single thing he said was wrong. So I'd stop him. And do you remember when he used to get anxious, he used to get what we call a malar flush — red cheeks. And he'd get really upset, so I had to pat his hand and reassure him and I'd correct him and then we'd go onto the next subject, which was wrong again. So I spent about half the time holding his hand, and as a clinician able to assess his IQ, which was about 100 — average. That takes in all the very mentally retarded people and the very smart people, like you — he was in the middle.

(Audience titters.)

Dr Helen Caldicott: And then he said, "Look, I…I took some notes before I came down," and reached into his pocket and pulled them out. In his childish writing he had written, "People who work for the nuclear weapons freeze are either KGB dupes or Soviet agents." I said, "That's from last month's 'Reader's Digest', verbatim." He said, "No, it's from my intelligence files." Which Patti later told me was one and the same thing. He'd virtually never read a book but he subscribed religiously to the 'Reader's Digest'.

Andrew Denton: So…

Dr Helen Caldicott: It was actually…was… He's a nice old man. He was a nice old man, but tot… Would have been a nice chicken
farmer or something, you know? But totally inappropriate to be president. Now, the one we've got now is not as intelligent.

Andrew Denton: Did…

(Shocked laughter and cheering.)

Andrew Denton: Clearly, despite his low IQ, you were unable to persuade him to your case.

Dr Helen Caldicott: Well, do you know, I thought I did have no impact, but then he
started working with Gorbachev. Do remember those two men went to Reykjavik?

Andrew Denton: Yeah.

Dr Helen Caldicott: And over a weekend, two mere mortals almost agreed to abolish nuclear
weapons. It was the most amazing situation and I think, in fact, in retrospect, I might have.

Andrew Denton: I think if you asked most Australians today, "Where's Helen Caldicott been for the last 10
years?" they'd be hard-pressed to answer. Did all this campaigning create a need for you to pull back?

Dr Helen Caldicott: Yeah, I got pretty tired, yeah. And, um, and then, when the Cold War ended, I thought, "Well, that's it. We've done it," you know? And, er, then I lost my marriage, which was pretty painful — like, very painful — and, er, and I was pretty…in the wilderness for some time after that.

Andrew Denton: So you'd been saving the world but you'd lost yourself.

Dr Helen Caldicott: I guess that's probably true.

Andrew Denton: And what was the effect on your family, Helen?

Dr Helen Caldicott: Well, it was hard. The kids — I wasn't home a lot during their adolescence. My daughter was fairly resentful. But they knew why I was doing it and I had to do it because of them. I mean, I'm a paediatrician, so I took the Hippocratic oath. Potentially all the world's children are my patients. I could feel the heat of the nuclear explosions, I just…I could not not have done it. On the other hand, my family did suffer and, um… But if I had my time again, I couldn't not have done it again. I…I, in a way, was born to do it. And I'm not finished yet. I'm going to fix it in five years. I'm fed up with this.

(Applause and cheering.)

Andrew Denton: Alright, so, hypothetical for you. Speaking on behalf of an unnamed Australian.
I marched in the '80s. I did my best. Nothing happened, I moved on. Now we've got refugees,
we've got SARS, we've got terrorism. How do I fit this into my busy agenda of social concerns?

Dr Helen Caldicott: Have you got a child?

Andrew Denton: I do.

Dr Helen Caldicott: How old?

Andrew Denton: He's eight.

Dr Helen Caldicott: I'm talking to you now as your paediatrician. It doesn't matter if the child cleans his teeth, or if he has his immunisations up-to-date, or he has a good education, if within the next 10 years, there'll be no planet for him to inhabit…Andrew.

Andrew Denton: Can I get a second opinion?

(Laughter.)

Dr Helen Caldicott: Yes, you can. But only go to one who's well-educated.

Andrew Denton: You've seen some of these people up close. You've seen the machinations
of world politics over three decades. Do you genuinely believe it's possible to effect change?

Dr Helen Caldicott: Yeah. Yeah, you educate the people. I have tremendous faith in the goodness of all
people. And if the politicians are inappropriate, we're their leaders, and they have to follow us. And
so Australia actually needs a revolution too. We're in terrible trouble here. Terrible trouble.

(Applause.)

Andrew Denton: Helen, I admire the fight and I wish you well with it. Thank you for coming in.

Dr Helen Caldicott: Thank you very much.

(Applause and cheering.)

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s886411.htm