Spirit in Action
Dr. Helen Caldicott
Dr. Helen Caldicott spoke at the Forum Series at UW-EC on that fateful day, 9/11/2001. Her topic was "George Bush and the Threat of Nuclear War".
Physicians for Social Responsibility
- Broadcast on:
- 08 Dec 2007
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ Today for Spirit in Action, we'll be listening to a powerful, passionate, and patient advocate for peace. Dr. Helen Caldecott. She spent the last three decades alerting folks around the world to the dangers of nuclear war and nuclear power. Warning about the psychosis that fuels a suicidal rush toward nuclear proliferation. Dr. Caldecott is a mother, a physician, the world's leading spokesperson for the anti-nuclear movement, co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the author of a number of books, including Nuclear Madness, Missile Envy, and the New Nuclear Danger, George Bush's Military Industrial Complex. She spoke at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire Forum Series on George Bush and the threat of nuclear war on a tragic and fateful day, September 11, 2001. With nearly everyone still reeling from the attacks on the Twin Towers that morning, she delivered a courageous speech on the life-threatening policies of the USA under the Bush administration. In addition to the words of warning, she delivered encouragement and hope, a call to action to those present to dig deep, find humility, listen to the spirit and change the world. Dr. Helen Caldecott, Eau Claire, September 11, 2001. I really don't know what to say about today. To use four planes full of people as weapons is almost beyond my comprehension. The number of people kill this beyond imagination. The number of families that haven't, their relatives haven't turned up. They knew they were at the World Trade Center. It's Oklahoma personified by orders of magnitude. Who did it? God only knows. So it was, or some have been laden, who apparently said last week that there would be attacks upon Israel and the United States. What do you do? Go and bomb Afghanistan, kill thousands of innocent people to get one man. You can't do it. How does one retaliate? One can't. What does it say in the Bible? It does say in the Old Testament, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It doesn't make you feel any better. And it also says, thou shalt not kill. So the reaction I've seen thus far of politicians has been quite facile. It has been that we'll get those people, whoever they are. But I think the questions are more profound. Why? Why did it happen? What has this country done to antagonise people now? I know that there are certain people in the world that are mad, and there are certain people in this country that are mad, and we always have to live with psychotics and mad people. And the fact is that this country, amongst others, England and Russia, export weapons to friend and foe alike, and in fact the greatest mode of commerce today is weapon sales, and this country sells more weapons abroad than any other country in the world. Very sophisticated weapons, if I may say. And we've watched it in East Timor with little boys running around killing people, and it happens there are 68 wars in the world today. There's a tremendous amount of poverty. 20% of the world's population, or 80% of the world's wealth, that's us. And the rest live in intense poverty. There was a conference on racism, which this country really wasn't represented at, and I was scared they may be sued for race for the slavery, which would be probably fair enough. But the Palestinian is a mad as hell. And the mad in charge of Israel at the moment is not an appropriate person to be the Prime Minister. He went into those refugee camps and helped to kill hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. When Rabin was killed, I feared the worst, and it's happening. You see, the human race hasn't learnt, I think, from when we were toggler darts living in caves. It was appropriate then for men to go out and use their power in vote by their hormonal system to kill saber-toothed tigers and mammoth elephants to preserve us as we were nursing our babies and caring for the family. But it's not appropriate now to kill anymore. And killing leads to killing leads to killing. And are we animals, or are we noble human beings? Can we arise above our killing instincts? To understand what is happening, can this country rise to its full moral and spiritual height? Which it has in its constitution, which its founders talked about, which is written about in the Bible, and the Quran, and then the Jewish religion and the Torah, and every other religion on earth, and the pantheists and every other religion, or even the atheists, rise to its full moral and spiritual height and look at what is happening and become a true world leader for peace, and stop the killing. Always when something happens to you in your personal life, if your marriage fails, or something dreadful happens, one has to look within. And so what role did I play in that, because we always play a role when something awful happens to us, except I suppose if we get sick. The world is a very scary place, and I was watching a television in a common room this afternoon and one kid walked past and said World War III. And why is it scary? I'll give you a little history of me. I am obviously not American, I'm Australian. I was 15 when I read a book called On the Beach by Neville Shute. For those who remember it, it was made into a film with Ava Gardner, and I think Fred Astaire, and it was shot in Melbourne, the film, and Ava Gardner called Melbourne the armpit of the world, so she wasn't very popular in Australia. But it was about a nuclear war that occurred by accident, like it could happen tonight. And everyone in the world was killed except people living in Melbourne because it was so far south. And gradually we waited, and we waited for the radioactive fallout to come down and engulf the world. And people were having their last gin and tonic in the Melbourne club, and gradually the radiation did come down, and people's hair started to fall out, and they started bleeding as they brushed their teeth and having very bad diarrhea and vomiting. And they died the way AIDS patients died of vomiting, diarrhea, and bleeding to death and infection. And at the end of that book, my beautiful, elegant streets of Melbourne were still there. The trams were in the middle of the street, bits of paper blowing down in the breeze, a blind, gently flapping, but it was the end of the human race. That was 1956 or earlier, and at that time we couldn't have blown up the world, but soon thereafter we could. I never felt protected by the adults. I couldn't understand why they kept building more weapons, and they kept building more weapons. I went to medical school at 17, incidentally it was free, my six years of medical education, because our tax dollars go to education and health, free healthcare and the like. And I started talking at university about, you know, forlucks at that time Russia and America and China were going health, leather, blowing up bombs in the atmosphere, spreading plutonium, strontium, 90, radioactive iodine all over the world, and almost certainly the increased incidence of cancer and now seeing as partly as a response of the fallout, the radioactive fallout that fell down from those tests, concentrated in the food chain by orders of magnitude, the grass, the cattle, the milk, the mother's breast milk and the babies, and the incubation time for cancer is any time from five to sixty years. And when the cancer arises, it doesn't wear a sign saying I was made by fallout, that you ate in a Hershey's milk kiss 20 years ago, three-mile island is 13 miles from Hershey's chocolates. So the cancers don't identify their origin, but there is an increased incidence of cancer, and they kept blowing up more and more bombs till Linus Pauling said, we've got to stop it. And the women got mobilized and they met outside the White House day after day and said to Jack Kennedy, you've got to stop blowing up bombs. And I know his adviser, Jerry Wiesner, his science adviser, and he was standing in the Oval Office, and Jack was standing at the window. You know how he stands looking out? And it was raining, and the rain was falling on the panes of the window, and he said, Jerry, is there radiation in that rain? And he said, yes, Mr. President. And then they measured the radiation in the dental, the teeth of the deciduous teeth of the children and found high levels of strontium 90, and they brought atmospheric testing to an end, but they kept testing underground. An overtime America tested over 1,000 hydrogen bombs, and then Russia did too. What the Russians did, the Americans did, what the Americans did, the Russians did, they propped each other up. Very like my grandchildren arguing all the time about who's got the best toy in the biggest one, and fighting all the time. They're 9, 8, and 6. Over time, America made 70,302 nuclear weapons, most of them hydrogen bombs. What's a hydrogen bomb? A hydrogen bomb basically is like this. It's got an atomic bomb as its trigger, made of 10 pounds of plutonium. Plutonium is made in nuclear reactors, nuclear power plants, so deadly that 1 pound, if adequately distributed, you can't do this, but if you could, could give 6.5 billion people lung cancer, and that's the world's population. Hands up those who know what a half-life is. Okay, so I'll speak to the educated. It's got a half-life of 24,400 years, which you multiply by 20 to get its total life, so it's radioactive for half a million years. And you can never get rid of it. And they've made over 1,000 tons of plutonium, and they don't know where to put it. But they fissioned uranium and nuclear reactors initially to make plutonium, to make the bombs, and you only need 10 pounds. It's very dense the size of a grapefruit. To make yourself a nuclear weapon, you can find the design on the internet. You can buy them at tools in the local hardware store, all you need is your lump of plutonium. Russia's got about 50 tons of plutonium left over from the Cold War. Its scientists are unemployed, they can't even feed their family. They're starting to sell it on the black market. I'm surprised that we haven't had a nuclear weapon tear us to tack yet. Incidentally, there are 103 nuclear power plants in this country. There are two within several hours of hair. In each nuclear reactor is the equivalent of that radiation release by the explosion of 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs. A typical terrorist attack scenario is a plane flying into a nuclear reactor. It may not yet be over, just because today has passed. If a plane flies into a reactor and it releases that material in a meltdown, an area the size of Pennsylvania will be contaminated forever. People dying of acute radiation illness and cancer and leukemia for hundreds of years thereafter. Now, when you have an atomic bomb as a trigger, you have an implosion mechanism set off by chemical explosives, which implodes into this plutonium and it reaches critical mass and explodes. So you have an atomic explosion. Meanwhile, you have lithium and deuterium down here for the secondary and the radiation, the X-rays and gamma rays are reflected off the shiny capsule of the bomb into the secondary and you get fusion, which is the energy released inside the center of the sun. Huge. And then the capsule is made of uranium, depleted uranium, 238, and that then explodes too. So you have fission, fusion, fission. And you can make a bomb. The biggest they ever made was 50 million tons of TNT equivalent. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima's 15,000 tons of TNT equivalent, or 15,000 tons of TNT trinotrotoluine exploding. 50 million tons is absolutely massive. They got such a fright. They never did that again. But you could explode one of these bombs in space above the U.S. and knock out the whole of the United States with what is called electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, which will take out all the wiring, all the computer systems, telephone lines, the whole of society with one bomb above the United States of America in space. So it's pretty easy to paralyze any country with one nuclear weapon. That could be in the future. And as I talk, remember today. Okay, now, because the physicians for social responsibility got going in America, when I first started in '78, most people hated the Russians, like with an absolute paranoia. Now we've got to know the Russians. They're not such bad people. They're quite fascinating. And out of Russia came Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and the Kirov Ballet, and the whole very cultured. But they're also, their society is a bit bumbling and they're a bit third world-ish. But they became a superpower because they too built hydrogen bombs and copied America. America led the way, and Russia followed quite conveniently. So Russia became, or the Soviet Union, became a superpower. And they built thousands of nuclear weapons too. But because we got around to say to America, and America, when I first started in '78, was the dictum was, "It's better to be dead than red." And I said, "Yeah, but what about the pygmies in Africa?" They probably want to live, and they said, "No, it's better for them too to be dead than red." I mean, it was really a psychosis in a certain sense. And many of you won't remember that, but the older ones of you will. And it's really interesting how it just suddenly disappeared. So what happened was we got around and we went to Boston, held a symposium. We said, "Do you know what happens if a bomb drops on you?" "No." "Do you know how long it takes a bomb to come from Russia to America?" "No." "30 minutes." "The buttons press, the bomb lands on Boston in 30 minutes." "Do you know how many bombs the Russians have?" "Oh, about 20,000." "Do you know how many bombs are targeted on Washington, D.C. alone?" "Oh, about 20 to 50 hydrogen bombs." "Do you know what happens when the bombs are launched on their missiles?" "Well, the American satellites pick up the attack." "And within that 30 minutes the buttons press on this side, so the bombs cross mid-space." "And it's all over in an hour." And the fact is that Carl Sagan, you remember Carl Sagan did some work with some others and found that only 1,000 bombs burning 100 cities will create nuclear winter and the end of life on Earth because the Earth becomes enveloped in a cloud of smoke. So thick, toxic, black, radioactive smoke, it blocks out the sun for up to a year and that creates a short ice age and the end of most life on Earth. So we said to people, "Well, a bomb comes in at 20 times the speed of sound and lands on Boston." And you won't even know. Although you know sometimes you've got your radio on, you're here. This is a test of the emergency broadcasting system. Well, I would say this is not a test. We are under nuclear attack, run to the nearest fallout shelter. The trouble is by the time the satellite picks the attack up and radios back through Pine Gap in Australia back to Cheyenne Mountain in America, that takes 15 minutes. And then the president has three minutes to decide whether or not to press the button. Three minutes. Then the button gets pressed. So by the time you hear that message, you'll have 10 minutes maybe to get to a fallout shelter or less. And then I said, "Do you know what happens when the bomb drops?" No. Well, it digs a hole three quarters of a mile wide and 800 feet deep, like maybe here. And the whole area and the building and the people are converted to radioactive fallout. And then five miles from here, every building totally destroyed with winds of 500 miles an hour. Everybody killed many vaporized. They said, "Really?" I said, "There was a little boy in Hiroshima, reaching up to catch a red dragon fly on his hand against the blue of the sky, and there was a blinding flash." And he literally disappeared and left his shadow behind him. They said, "My God." I said, "Further out, if you look at the flash from curiosity, your eyes will melt and run down your cheeks." "Oh my God," they said. And I said, "Right out to 20 miles, a hole of Boston will be destroyed, or the hospital's gone, the doctor's gone, no morphine, no blood supplies." Because at least in New York now, they're getting blood supplies. They've got morphine to treat the burn patients. There are hundreds of burn patients there. You know, a burn patient takes at least six months to treat, and even then we may not save them. They use hundreds of units of blood and fresh frozen plasma. That's what they're going to need in New York now. But this would be a nuclear war, and people said, "Oh my God." And we said every single time and see you with a population of more than 25,000 is targeted. And then they started to say, "Nuclear war is bad for our health." And then the business people said, "Nuclear war is bad for business." And then the architects said, "Nuclear war is going to be bad for architecture." And gradually everyone came in, the psychologist, the architects, the physicians, everyone. And finally I was asked to speak at the annual Morticians Association in America. They're annual meeting. And they didn't want to embalm radioactive bodies. So they were against nuclear war, and I said, "Don't worry, you'll be one too." But anyway, they passed a resolution against it. So what happened was in that five years from '70 to '83, we had a revolution in thinking in America. From better to be dead than red too, we have to stop this madness. However, the Pentagon and the military industrial complex kept building bombs and over time America built over 70,000 nuclear weapons in a kind of nuclear psychosis. Then we were able to get on television in Russia and speak or the Soviet Union uncensored for an hour, the physicians, to describe to the Russian and Soviet Union people the medical effects of nuclear war and Gorbachev was watching. And Gorbachev actually saved the world by allowing the Berlin Wall to come down, Parrish, Joica and Glasnost. I thanked him once for saving the world, he said, "Thank you." And then we were so tired, those of you in the audience who remember those days, all the churches were involved, the Catholic bishops, they said, "Jesus wouldn't be in favor of nuclear war." So they wrote a pastoral letter about it, so did the Methodists. I went and talked to the Southern Baptist, very conservative, and I just quoted Jesus to them, and they were rude. Why mean what could they say? So they passed a resolution against it, the Mennonites, everyone. So it was universal, we got a million people in Central Park. I went and met with Ronald Reagan. I knew his daughter, she took me in, she thought I could change his mind about nuclear war. It was a very unsatisfactory experience, I sat next to him for an hour and a quarter, literally holding his hand to comfort him because he literally knew nothing about nuclear weapons, he didn't have the data, the statistics and numbers, the technology, the Russian policies, the CIA reports nothing. And he read to me from the reader's digest, which he called his intelligence files. So it was a very alarming experience, and I was terribly frightened those years and spent my whole time on the road traveling this country. My son aged about eight, who called me today desperate to find out where I was, he's now 35, said, "Mom, he said if there's a nuclear war I want to be on the top of the state, house in Boston." And I said, "Why will?" He said, "Because I'll be the first to die." So when the Berlin Wall came down, we all thought, "Thank God, we were so tired." And we all went home and lay on our couches. And then Clinton got elected, and Clinton had a major deficit. He had never been to Vietnam, and he was not game to take on the military who are very tough. So he didn't go near the Pentagon. His secretary of defense led us, Aspen, though, ordered a nuclear posture of you and said, "This is stupid having 30,000 nuclear weapons. We haven't got any enemy." So they tried to get rid of the nuclear weapons. Suffice it to say, Aspen died during a process, someone else set it up, and the joint chiefs literally trounced the person in charge called Ashton Carter. And the weapons remain on high state of alert, hair trigger alert. Nothing has changed since the Berlin Wall came down. Clinton will go down in history, might be charming man, he might be intelligent, he might have done a few naughty things. He will go down in history as a man who failed to abolish nuclear weapons, because on the Russian side, he had Yeltsin, who was a very hard-bitten alcoholic, who would have done anything Clinton asked him to do. If he'd flown over and said, "Yeltsin, sign here, we're going to abolish our nuclear weapons." He would have. Now we have George Bush. So where are we today? Let me just tell you that we still have five and a half thousand nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert quite near you in the Dakotas. They're all around you. If you fly over, you can see actually the missile silos. We've got 18 Trident submarines. In each Trident submarine, there are 24 missiles. On each missile, there are eight hydrogen bombs, eight. That's called moving, multiple independent reentry vehicle. They get launched, the missile, they go out into space, the missile drops off, and the bus, this is Pentagon language with its passengers, eight, continues through space, dropping the passengers off at the appropriate places, and they all have computers in their noses, and they land absolutely accurately on their targets. So if you multiply 18 by 8 by 24, you've got, I'm not doing it right now, but you've got enough probably to produce nuclear winter three times just with the Trident submarines. And you've got 50 MX missiles near here, which Reagan named the peacekeepers, and they've each got 10 hydrogen bombs in them, so that's 500. You've got minute men three all around here, and they've got their move to, I don't know how many bombs they've got in them, maybe three. And then you've got planes like B1s and B2s who can take off with nuclear weapons, but they take a long time to get there much longer than half an hour. So there are about five and a half thousand nuclear weapons that can be launched with the press of the button, and Russia's got the same. So nothing changed. In 1995, America launched a missile, an old military missile with a Norwegian weather satellite atop, and they told Russia they're going to do it, but in Moscow, things get forgotten, and they forgot. The missile got launched, and the telemetry from the missile, which is the radio signals it sends, reached Moscow, and they said, "My God, we're under nuclear attack." For the first time in history, the football was opened with the nuclear codes, Yeltsin sitting there, I don't know his state of inebriation at the time, with his general standing over his shoulder, saying, "Mr. President, press that button." He had a three-minute window to press that button, as I've described. At the last couple of seconds, the missile veered off course and they realized they weren't under attack. So in 1995, we were seconds within annihilation. This happens a lot. The Russian early warning system is breaking down for one-third of the day. They can't see if missiles are coming or not. Clinton was setting up a joint early warning system where Russia and America would be together at all times to say, "Hey, we've accidentally launched a missile, please don't press your button." Bush has canceled the funding for that. They set up a joint system whereby they could dispose of and use somehow those 50 tons of plutonium, so they wouldn't be stolen from Russia. Bush has cut the funding on that. Bush hasn't cut the funding, Cheney has. Let's be frank, Bush doesn't make the decisions. Cheney does. (Applause) So where are we at now? We are in a state of heightened alert, probably tonight down to Def Con 2. Bush flew from Florida to Omaha, Nebraska, which is the head of the Strategic Air Command, and I've been there underneath these huge screens like in war games with the missiles. You can watch the missiles coming or not. Bush flew there. They've got a big gate, and over the gate it says, "Peace is our profession." That's their motto, "Peace is our profession." They're on guard and on alert at any time of the day and night to press the button if necessary. America's official policy is to fight and win a nuclear war. How do you win a nuclear war? I'll tell you. Cities are called counter-value targets. City full of people, soft people, out of the World Trade Center where pretty soft we mostly water. Hard targets are missile solos. So the way you win the nuclear war is, first you knock out the Russian satellites so they can't see the fire coming out of your rockets and radio back to Moscow so they press their button. Then you launch your missiles secretly so they don't know, and you target only their missile solos and their command centers, which is Wash Is Moscow and the like. And you hope to knock out every single one of their missile solos because your missiles are terribly accurate. Now if any missiles are not knocked out in the first strike and they are launched by accident, Star Wars, which I'll explain in a minute, will just mop up a few of the remaining missiles that get through the first strike and you've won the nuclear war. This is the official strategy and it began during the Carter era at the Democratic Convention that they had when he was president. You've won the nuclear war, but it will create nuclear winter, but the Pentagon never talks about nuclear winter. They don't know what to do about it so they ignore it as if it doesn't exist as a scientific entity. So that's the policy now. So now we've got a president, George W. Bush, who has virtually read very few books, who's virtually never travelled outside the United States, has virtually no curiosity at all about anything. Who is a laracon? Do you know what a laracon is? No cowboy boots and sort of oars sharks and he calls, what does he call Vincent E. Foxy calls him Montezuma, as in Montezuma's revenge. You know what Montezuma's revenge is, don't you? It's the awful diary you can catch in Mexico. He's got a nickname for everyone. He's an oars sharks guy, but he doesn't know anything. Now the chain of command to initiate a nuclear war goes from the commander in chief, that's Bush, and then it goes to the vice president who's Cheney, who's had about five heart attacks. He must be under tremendous anxiety tonight. I speak now as a physician. He could drop dead. And then I think, then I think it goes to the speaker of the house, who used to be one Tip O'Neill, who I knew well, a very fine man. It's now Dennis Hassett, who I think is an okay guy, but doesn't show much of his intelligence, but he probably is a fine-ish type man. And then I'm not sure who it goes to. I remember when Reagan was shot, and remember Alexander Hague got on television and said, "I'm in charge now." And he wasn't, because he wasn't in the chain of command. He was the secretary of state, but he wasn't in the chain of command. So we're in a very tenuous position tonight. The weapons are on the highest state of alert. There may be an accident with one of the satellites or the computers easily. In fact, we've nearly had a nuclear war when a 46 cent computer chip failed in the early warning system, when a flight of geese set off, one of the satellites then said we're under attack, when a moon rose and said it was a nuclear attack. So we're in a tenuous situation, but the other thing is to consider the psychology of this. When human beings are under a lot of stress, we all know this. We make mistakes. When we're angry with other people, we move out of revenge and not out of wisdom. We also see a rise of patriotism in this country which I consider extremely dangerous. Patriotism is not appropriate in a nuclear world. This is only five per cent of the Earth's population. There's 95 per cent of the world to think about. My relatives in Australia are terrified at the moment and you may be sure that everyone around the world who knows about this is literally terrified, simply because of the nuclear situation. So your country doesn't just represent America. You are now responsible for life on the planet, for 30 million species, for the creation. For swords into plowshares, the hammer has to fall. Dean Hammer is my name. Micah and Isaiah, my tradition. Oh, I tried to be their scholar, but could not escape their logic in the end. My name is Philip Berrigan. In World War II, I flew the bombing missions. Now with every blow I strike today, I say the bombs will never fall again. I hear the prophets cry, oh, ring through the prison wall. We've waited 30 centuries to see that hammer fall. If we think we've got 30 more, we cannot see at all. For swords into plowshares, the hammer has to fall. ♪♪♪ You just heard a little from a song by Charlie King. The hammer has to fall. I'm Mark Helps meat of Northern Spirit Radio, your host for Spirit in Action, and you're listening to an address by Dr. Helen Caldicott, co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility and the world's leading spokesperson for the anti-nuclear movement. This speech was delivered in Eau Claire on a historically fateful day, September 11, 2001, on the topic of George Bush and the threat of nuclear war. You can find links about Dr. Helen Caldicott and her work on the web at my site, NorthernSpiritRadio.org. Let's return to Dr. Caldicott's presentation. Now I need to move on to what George Bush et al. are actually planning for the future. He's not, he just reads his speeches, but I need to tell you who has staffed this administration. Hands up those of you who know who the Heritage Foundation is, or what it is. Good. Now I've written a book called, if you love this planet that is over there, that talks about the Heritage Foundation, but for those who don't know who it is, it was founded during the 70s. It is financed by Hertz-Renderkah, Holidays, Coors, Beer, Ocean Spray Cranberries, and Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin is the biggest military corporation in the world today, and the Heritage Foundation has decided most of the administration appointees and Lockheed Martin occupies many of the top jobs. So we don't have an administration representing you, and you know that. We have an administration representing the corporations. The Heritage Foundation is a propaganda wing of the corporations. When you turn on McNealer now, who is on, but some guy from the Heritage Foundation who has no right to be there because he's really an advertising agent, looking like a think tank man. They're usually very intelligent. They don't say they represent Lockheed Martin, but they're all for first strike nuclear war. They mightn't say it, therefore American dominance and the whole thing. The Heritage Foundation wrote the mandate for leadership for Reagan's first term in office, which means canceling all decent medical care for you, privatizing the schools and doing all sorts of awful things. He enacted all of their points, and then they wrote his second mandate for leadership. And they're doing the same with George Bush, who's just a puppet. Now, what are they really planning? Who saw Rumsfeld's speech last night on CNN? Hands up those who know who Donald Rumsfeld is. Good. Rumsfeld is your secretary of defence. It's not defence, it's war. The Pentagon used to be called appropriately the Department of War, and it still is. Rumsfeld is called by Henry Kissinger, the most ruthless man he's ever known. Now, Henry Kissinger initiated the killing of three million Cambodians. For those of you who think I'm a bit mad, please don't leave the room. I'm not mad. I'm quoting from historical documents. He helped to initiate the killing of half a million people in these Timor. Henry Kissinger's a war criminal, and there's a book just recently written about this by Christopher Hitchens. Henry Kissinger calls Donald Rumsfeld the most ruthless man he's ever known. When Kissinger was Secretary of State for Gerald Ford, Rumsfeld was, I don't know what he was, Secretary of Defence. And Kissinger was in Moscow to negotiate one of the salt treaties to bring nuclear weapons down, and Rumsfeld didn't like it. So he called a National Security Council meeting in Kissinger's absence, brought in the Joint Chiefs. He didn't even go, and within an hour, because the Joint Chiefs didn't like any of the arms control treaties. Within hours, the salt treaty was dead. And Gerald Ford was absolutely furious. But Rumsfeld is very, very smart. Now, Rumsfeld gave a good speech last night. He said that there's so much waste and redundancy in the Pentagon. It's unbelievable. How much do they spend of your tax dollars a year? Well, this year it's $329 billion. That's a third of a trillion dollars. I think if you spend a million dollars a minute since Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have spent a trillion dollars. But you haven't got an enemy. Yeah, this happened today. It might have been one or a few men. You have not got an enemy. Even the Pentagon now is saying that maybe Canada might invade America. They're writing papers about it. They're setting China up as a new Cold War enemy. China's only got 20 missiles at Virginia America. 20, she's got nothing in there, liquid fuel. They take days to fuel, to be ready to launch. They're not a threat. They've joined the World Trade Organization. They want to trade with you. But Rumsfeld hates them. And so does Richard Pearl, who works with Rumsfeld, who is called the Prince of Darkness in the Pentagon when he worked with Reagan. The people, wolf events, arm-a-teach, or un-reconstructed hawks from the Reagan era. I'd have to say they need therapy. They should not be in a position they're in now. And the American people don't really know what's happening because your media is not really telling you. Rumsfeld's charming. He's like a snake oil salesman. And he talked last night about cutting spending in the Pentagon. But what does he want to do? He wants to spend it on militarizing space and this missile defense thing. America has no right to be spending your money on these weapons. Do you know where it all goes? Into the coffers of Boeing, TRW, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. And they get filthy, filthy, filthy rich. And the CEOs pay themselves millions of dollars a year. Millions of your hard-earned tax dollars. I go to the doctor, very good medical care system in Australia. I pay. I go next door and into my hand is put the dollars by my government that I paid my doctor. That's what you deserve. You deserve a totally free world-class, uniform egalitarian medical care system. You deserve a totally free educational system. No education should be paid for. And the money's there. There should be no homeless people in America. None. They should all be cared for. The people who are mentally sick should be treated with love and compassion. We shouldn't be stepping over them in the streets in New York. The alcoholics should be treated. Remember the good Samaritan? We need to start caring for each other. And the money is being stolen from you by the robber barons, and you mustn't sit back anymore and take it. It's enough. Remember the guy in the network who said, "I can't take it anymore." You mustn't take it anymore. It's your money. And it's nothing to do with defense because there are no enemies. All you need is a Coast Guard to surveil your shores, and you need to get rid of the nuclear weapons in Russia. Or you might be blown up tonight. And you can do that because they're friends now. And Putin wants to get down to below a thousand. But the State Department said, "No, we need to stay above two and a half thousand because we still need our first strike nuclear war strategy." These guys are mad. And China, do you know what they said to China the other day? The administration said, "Look, we'd like you to build more nuclear weapons than we want you to start testing them again." They said that to China. How dare they say that? How dare they? Meanwhile, they're violating. They're about to violate the anti-ballistic missile treaty. What's that? It was signed anti-ballistic missile treaty. Now I'm signed in 1972 and it said, "Look, we can blow you up and you can blow us up. And that security, we feel safe with that policy. It's called MAD, mutually assured destruction. But we don't want you to have any missile defenses because then we mightn't be sure that we can blow you up and then we'll build lots more weapons and it'll destabilise the MAD policy." That's before you had a first strike nuclear war winnable situation. Upon the anti-ballistic missile treaty, which is a cornerstone 30 other anti-nuclear weapons treaties have been signed with very careful negotiations. Condoleezza Rice says, "We don't believe in treaties anymore." Rumsfeld says, "ABM, it's ancient history." He said, "We signed that with the Soviet Union. They don't exist anymore. It doesn't matter." He said, "We'll obey some treaties, but we won't obey others." And it's up to us. We're America. It's like George Bush saying, "Well, we're not signing the Kyoto Accords." Yeah, the Pacific Islands are starting to drown. We're having dreadful cyclones and floods and droughts and it's going to get worse and ecological refugees and epidemics of malaria as the earth eats. But we're America. We've got to drive our SUVs. It's good for the economy. How dare they? Do you think the rest of the world is very annoyed? It's furious. Meanwhile, they say, "Well, we're not going to a conference on racism. We're not going to sign the anti-German warfare treaty. We're not going to sign the anti-chemical weapons treaty." I mean, they're spitting in the face of the whole world, which is not what a civilized nation does. George Bush wouldn't even know what he's doing. He just reads his speeches. But behind him are these men who just don't give a damn about, I suppose, their children or their future, because there's not going to be a future if this continues. Because what they really are about to do, well, first I have to tell you, the nuclear labs, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia are actually right now involved in a Manhattan II project. Hands up those who knew what Manhattan, the Manhattan project, was good. Well, they're now spending more money than they did at the height of the Cold War, designing, testing, developing and building new nuclear weapons. How's that for evil? When there's no enemy and the Cold War is over, they're building up to 500 new bombs a year and it's very good for the scientists and it's very good for their economy and it's your tax dollars. That's number one. Number two, on they're about to start testing again and they're about to violate the complete test ban treaty and the administration has said they're going to, they're going to. I mean, I think we need to take over the White House, just go in and take them hostage and lock them up in our laundries or something. I don't know, but it's not appropriate to leave them there because it's dangerous. Maybe we should, you should be president. You know, we need a democracy. Well, we need to save the earth. So what are they going to do now? As well as having a policy to fight and win a nuclear war and weapons on hair trigger alert, they're going to set up Reagan's Star Wars. That's what they're going to do and why is that good? Because Lockheed Martin is making most of the Star Wars equipment. There are four layers. The theater missile defense, TMD, and that is for missiles to shoot enemy missiles in mid-air and knock them out, like the scuds. But you know what? Not one scud was knocked out during the Gulf War, not one. And all those videos you saw were just Pentagon videos that they played over and over and over again. None of the Patriot missiles hit any scuds. That's the first layer. Then the next layer, well, they've got various things. You know the one they launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base to hit a missile that was launched from one of the islands in the Pacific, and they keep missing each other? Well, that's called ground-based interceptors. So they launch, they get the message from the satellites and expand radars in fuel-green land in Farlingdale's Britain in Pine Gap Australia. And it sends it back to the Pentagon or back to Cheyenne Mountain, and the satellites send the message back to to locate the missile, and then they launch another missile to hit it. But they've only got 15 minutes lead time. It's all orchestrated by a computer, and the computer can never be tested, and it's called a battle management computer. So none of those tests have ever worked, but it's great, and each test costs over $100 million of your money. Then the next thing is they're going to have planes with a laser beam technology. So if a missile is launched, it will hit the missile in the boost phase. So there's a boost phase going through the atmosphere, and it's best to hit it there, because if it's got 10 hydrogen bombs on it, you'll get all the bombs. The trouble is, if you hit it, A) the bombs might explode, especially, and it might explode over Europe, too. And B) that the plutonium could be released and totally contaminate the country over which it's flying. But it's very good because you get them all in one shot. You've got three minutes lead time to launch, so there's absolutely no chance of human intervention. It's computerised nuclear war. Then you've got the transit phase with the bombs tumbling through space, but it's very easy for an enemy to confuse America because you can put decoys in mylar balloons that look like nuclear weapons in space. So the missile, the kill vehicle, can't tell which is the bomb and which is the mylar balloon, and there's a big problem there, and they've never tested this with the decoys. And furthermore, Russia can just build lots and lots more bombs to saturate the system. The next thing is that they're going to militarise space. I'm not going through the whole technology because it's very complex. Now, you know NASA? NASA. It's great. You know, it sends men up and the Challenger and the International Space Station? Much of it is funded now by the military, and they have for years been mapping the planets, the moon and the asteroids for rare minerals. And what they plan to do is actually put up colonies of people with nuclear reactors to fuel the colonies, to mine the rare minerals and bring them back to Earth. Now, if America invests so much in space, she has to dominate space. So, Rumsfeld and others have set up a thing called the U.S. Space Command, which they've been folded into the Air Force, and General Myers, who's now about to become the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ran the U.S. Space Command. And what they're going to do is militarise space. They're going to have laser beam technology. They're going to have anti-satellite weapons to shoot out other countries' satellites, which is serious, because we depend on satellites for our phone systems, our computers, the whole thing. So, they're big into anti-satellite, and America is going to, quote, dominate space. The other most effective way to knock down missiles is actually to blow up a nuclear weapons space, which takes out all the weapons, and that's on the drawing board. So, I'm in Australia, and I say to my grandson, "Look, Mickey, there's the Southern Cross. Oh, there's a hydrogen bomb." And they're big into this. The complex is the technology. It's extremely complex. It's extremely expensive. They're making it now before the Congress has even said they could. Bush wouldn't even know what's happening. Cheney's all for it, and Rumsfeld's big into it. And the man behind it is an iconoclasts in the Pentagon called Andrew Marshall, who's 78, who's a little bit nuts, who the military have always sort of sidelined, but he is now the man orchestrating the whole new nuclear policy and space policy of the United States. This could cost billions and billions and billions of dollars, and that's on the drawing board. So, what it will do is, it will violate all the arms control treaties, 30 of them, and it will initiate a new nuclear arms race, because China will say, "Okay, we'll build more weapons because of this." Russia will, and if China does, whose China's ancient enemy, India, she's a nuclear nation, so she'll build more. Who hates India? Pakistan. She'll build more. Japan can make a nuclear weapon in a week. She's so highly sophisticated. She can build them. So, I predict that if this goes ahead within 20 years, we'll have at least 20 more countries with nuclear weapons, and I predict that you won't have a future. That's if we survived the present time. That's what Bush is about in his administration. So, that's what I came to tell you today, which superimposed upon today's events makes it terribly serious, and I'm sorry if I rushed through it. I'm sorry if it was a little bit complex for you to understand when my book comes out, you can read it, but we're on the verge of something more dangerous than I've ever seen in my life. And space actually belongs to all the world. It's a commons owned by the human race. The moon is a commons owned by us, the people of the earth, but America says it's going to mine it and take it over. So, you can understand why the world's a little bit annoyed, can't you? And what gets to me is that I know the American people so well, I've worked with millions of them over time, and they're such good kind people who so want to do the right thing. I think it's time now for you to really use your democracy and get this passion in your gut and just get going and say to hell with this, I'm going to make sure that life only survives because I was born to save the planet. Well, that's how I feel anyway. I can't die until my work's done, I hope. And I think that we all need to do that and almost make a solemn pledge tonight that we will spend the rest of our lives and not get up in the morning and look in the mirror and face ourselves until we know we've decided to do something today. And I mean big, big. Most people don't even vote. This is a democracy, but it's a vacuum and it's not being used. There are enough people in this room to turn around the policies of the United States. I know that in your hearts and souls that you have the strength, the wisdom and the capacity and the love and the generosity and the humility, I know that you do. I know to save the planet. So thank you for having me. [applause] That was the main address by Dr. Helen Caldecott at the UW Eau Claire Forum Series on September 11, 2001. She answered a number of questions from the audience, but I've selected for you just a couple of responses which address the same concerns that I normally raise when I interview my guests. Here are some excerpts of her interchanges with the audience. Living in a country just like any other country who has a large amount of our psyche and confidence invested in patriotism and a lot of that is centered around supremacy of economy and especially military pertaining to this. I'm wondering how you would suggest we channel the concept of patriotism or forget about it or where we should move that instead of into ethnocentric military supremacy. That's a very good question and that's easy. And I really said it that America has a very powerful spiritual base and that you are the nation. All the people of the world came here to settle and immigrated. You are the nation that can save the earth. Is that enough? Would that do, do you think? Would that settle the patriotic feelings that need to be satisfied? Well, I think a lot of Americans have a need for like a sense of pride. That would give you enormous pride. When I save a patient I'm terribly proud and deeply satisfied. This patient, the planet is the patient. It's in the intensive care unit. The doctor is America. What is your vision of a sustainable world over the horizon, the 21st century? If we can imagine the kind of world we really want after we really begin to make peace? Yeah. Well, first of all, I think we all have to really work with the United Nations as brothers and sisters nations working together with real humility. And we need to develop humility, which is what Jesus talked about. And really what I talked about tonight is the ultimate religious quest, that is to save God's creation. And the prophets all spoke about this and Jesus did it most articulately. So we need to have peace. We need to redistribute the wealth so that everyone has an equal standard of living. I don't believe in people being extremely rich and other people having not enough to eat. So we have to not be rich and we have to tighten our belts and transfer the money in this country. That's the ultimate to the poor nations so they can have enough to eat. The women of the world need to be educated, be fed and provided with free contraception so that the overpopulation problem is solved. And when you educate women and you elevate their standard of living, they stop having babies. You need a new deal so that people are cared for in this country. The infrastructure is fixed and then you go out and fix infrastructure of the world. We need to look at ourselves as you know about Thomas Merton. Thomas Merton was a wonderful man who lived a dreadful, reprobate life. He went to prostitute and he drank and he did all sorts of things and he went into a cathedral when he was quite a young man and he had a conversion. He became a trapper's monk. He went down to a seminary in Kentucky. He scrubbed the floors for a year and did not speak for a year and he developed humility. That's what this nation needs to do, is to develop humility. And we all need to do that or we will not have a spiritual journey. And that's when you get in touch with God or your intuition or whatever it is and then you start doing the right thing. More silence, no more TV, you don't learn a thing on TV, turn the radios off. Stay with yourself, that's when you're spoken to. Teach the people of America what the right thing to do is. Now, money is God, God is money. There is no God in this country. I remember going to a Catholic church during the height of the Cold War and I said, "You should be teaching us for me pulpit." He said, "Oh, I couldn't do that." I said, "Why?" I said, "Because I wouldn't get enough donations to fix the roof of the church." And I said, "Well, what would Jesus do?" So actually, all the teachings are there. You know, what did Jesus do? He kicked over the money tables. We're not here to have sick chandeliers and 10 cars. We're here to have enough to eat to sustain ourselves so that we can help the planet and leave it in a better position than it is now. We've got to stop being hedonistic and throw post-centric. So we are a special species, but we need to really, really evolve spiritually and psychologically. I don't see many peace organisations that really inspire me at the moment. I think that they've settled down into conformity and conservatism on the whole. We need the churches to get going again. That's what we need. Where's the religious man? We need the church. Yeah, we need the churches. We've got to get the churches mobilised again. The religions. They're the ones. That was Dr. Helen Caldecott and some excerpts I patched together from the Q&A session that followed her main address at the UW Eau Claire Forum Series back on September 11th, 2001. She said a lot of powerful things and I hope you'll visit the associated links. I've added on my northernspiritradio.org webpage. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website. northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host Mark Helpsmeet and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. You