June 4, 2002
Cassandra from the parapet:
Caldicott calls for an end to nukes!
by Stephanie Hiller
Helen Caldicott does not mince words. A doctor, she likens the planetary condition to a terminal illness. The earth is a "patient etherized upon a table" as T.S.Eliot saw it many decades ago, and it is dying.
"People say they don't want to come to my lectures because they don't want to feel bad," Caldicott began, taking a jab at Californian's "have a nice day" mentality. "You can't really feel good about the destruction of the planet!
"The earth is dying. That's the diagnosis."
The Bush presidency threatens to finish the patient off by taking the nuclear arms race to new and unprecedented levels, Caldicott warned some 200 listeners in Sonoma, CA on April 10th; and that is why she felt she had to write her new book, The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military-Industrial Complex. The world is in a terrible mess, she's here to remind us, and we haven't got a moment to waste!
Helen Caldicott has been a strong -- some say, strident -- voice for disarmament since the 70s, when she founded Physicians for Social Responsibility, spearheaded a grassroots disarmament movement which led to the arms reductions treaties after the Cold War. After giving up her medical career, she has spent most of her life speaking all over the world against the dangers of nuclear and environmental catastrophe.
"If you don't know the cause of a disease we can't cure it. What is the etiology of nuclear war? Testosterone poisoning. Quite unapologetic and unashamed they talk about missile erectus, deep penetration, hard lines and soft lines. One general said, We're going to have a nuclear war like one big orgasmic romp.
"Have they never seen a baby slide out of the vagina and lie there, a magical mystical miracle, ten fingers, ten toes. How dare they talk like that? And we let them do it!" she shouted.
"The men who design the weapons actually sleep with the weapons the night before the test, alone. So it's sleeping with death! Sleeping with the annihilation of the creation. They talk about 'giving birth' to the bomb. They talk about having labor pains. We have aberrant people in office at the moment. These people have to be removed from office."
Who's going to replace them? "The women are. We're 53 per cent of the population. And you know, estrogen and progesterone don't behave the same way as testosterone."
Women are biologically different from men, period, though the attractive 63year old pediatrician hastened to add that most men are very very nice whilst some women, like Condi " brutal." Nevertheless, women in general have different priorities.
Here Caldicott joins a growing chorus of women's voices declaring that yes, if given a chance, women will do it differently.
But her job is to deliver the warning. "You're sitting in your car and you hear the alert signal, you know, (she mimics it) This is an alert. And by the time you have heard it the bomb is on its way.
"You have a university here? All universities are targeted. We're sitting here and the bomb is going to drop, 30 minutes after launch, 20 minutes after you hear it on the radio "creating a hole three quarters of a mile wide and 800 feet deep, turning Sonoma into radioactive fallout in the mushroom cloud. Then five miles in all directions every person is vaporized like the little boy in Hiroshima who was reaching up to catch a dragonfly and there's a blinding flash and he disappeared, and all that was left was his shadow on the ground.
"If you look at the flash, your eyes will melt. Winds at 500 miles an hour will suck people out of their homes. The whole area of 3,000 square miles will be engulfed in a firestorm. "Millions of bodies. And as they decay, epidemics of diptheria, plague, cholera, tuberculosis, you name it. Of course there aren't any hospitals, nor any way to get there. No medicines!" No wonder the association of morticians declared that nuclear war would not be good for their industry.
"The end of Shakespeare. Beethoven's Ninth. Taking 20 or 30 million species with us because we haven't controlled this reptilian brain.
And WE," she fairly shrieked, "we sit silently by, don't we? Like the Germans."
People have become complacent, she said, thinking that the nuclear danger ended with the Cold War. But in fact, not a single bomb has been decommissioned, 2500 missiles are still aimed at both countries, and the chance of an accident has increased due to deterioration of Russia's surveillance technology, not to speak of terrorism. What's ahead will be even worse: nukes in space. Promoted as a protective-sounding "missile shield", this Star Wars adventure is actually an offensive move to dominate space and control the whole planet from there. "During the year 2000," she writes in her book, "a coalition of aerospace corporations engaged in a campaign called 'the declaration of space leadership,' [that] calls for funding of 'defensive' systems and MASA at levels that 'guarantee American leadership in the exploration of space." There are satellites to protect and resources to be mined on the moon!
"Let me read you something Goering said. No one wants war but it's a simple matter to drag the people along. All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism."
Sound familiar?
"Lockheed Martin is stealing your money. The military budget is nearly half a trillion dollars. Now you have no health insurance! That's obscene in the richest country in the world. That 370 billion dollars is your money. You need it!
"The Pentagon should be closed down. You've got to get rid of nuclear weapons bilaterally now. You're the greatest country on earth because you can save us all, and we're all waiting for it.
"This is my prescription. I'm founding the Nuclear Policy Research Institute. We're going to eradicate nuclear power plants in the next five years and we're going to eliminate nuclear weapons in five years.This is a conservative issue. Conserving the creation.
"I actually need a million dollars a year for five years. I know it can work. I did it in the 80s. But I need your help, I can't do it without you."
"How do you sleep at night?" asked one woman at the very end of the question period.
"A few years ago I stopped doing this work, and I was so depressed I had to take zoloft. And I realized unless I'm doing the work, I have no raison d'etre. So doing the work keeps me happy, altruistic and sleeping at night."
Caldicott got a standing ovation, as well as some donations for her new think tank, and we all went home to our hot tubs. And I was reminded of a song by Jennifer Berezan about Cassandra:
Crazy saints are all around
muttering an urgent prayer
When the wall comes tumbling down
Crazy saints are there.
Perhaps this time Cassandra's prophecy will be heard.
The website for Caldicott's Nuclear Policy Research Institute is www.nuclearpolicy.org
This article also appeared in the North Bay Progressive, Sonoma County, CA, May 1