Toward a World Free of Nuclear Weapons
July 2007
Banner photo: Jozef Szentpeteri/Getty Images
Speaking Out for Life
Dr. Helen Caldicott, an Australian medical doctor, first campaigned against French nuclear tests in the South Pacific in Australia in the 1970s and then took her campaigning work to the U.S. and the international stage. In 1979 she founded PSR, Physicians for Social Responsibility, which led the campaign to end atmospheric nuclear testing. In 1985 PSR shared the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. In 1995, Dr. Caldicott founded the Nuclear Policy Research Institute. She has written several books on nuclear and environmental issues.
SGI Quarterly: How has being a doctor influenced your perspective on nuclear weapons?
Helen Caldicott: I come at it from a biological perspective. I know what radiation does and what nuclear isotopes do to the body, and I know what nuclear war does. It's all medical. I see this campaign as a form of preventive medicine--the way we stopped many people smoking, because it was killing them. Likewise, the nuclear industry is much more serious than the tobacco industry--because it will affect people that are not yet conceived for many generations to come, and that is really wicked.
I'm not alone; for instance, I spoke recently at Harvard at the Children's Hospital Boston. People were absolutely astonished by what I had to say about the medical consequences of the nuclear fuel chain. The reason I know about it is because I once wrote an article for the New England Journal of Medicine about the medical consequences of nuclear power. I spent a year researching it. We are not taught this specific information in medical schools, but when I give presentations in hospitals, around the world, the doctors are uniformly extremely concerned. And there is no disagreement at all about the medical facts, none.
Doctors have an imperative role to speak out, and the question is how to mobilize them effectively to do that.
SGIQ: You must have seen many situations change that had seemed impossible to change.
HC: I was elated when the French were forced to test underground, when I saw the whole of the Australian population rise up against the French tests, and when I saw the Australian unions ban uranium mining for five years because then they understood the dangers. I felt very fulfilled and relieved, also knowing that there was more work to be done in other areas on this issue.
I've always known, since I was a little girl, that anything was possible. But being a doctor, if you cure a patient or fix a patient, you're onto the next patient, so it is never enough. And that's how I feel about this campaign of my life.
SGIQ: How do you see the current situation?
HC: Things are even more dangerous now than they were at the height of the Cold War. At the press of a button either by President Bush or President Putin, the whole of life on Earth could be destroyed because America and Russia still target each other with thousands of hydrogen bombs on hair-trigger alert. This potentially catastrophic situation is in fact much more serious than global warming and no one is addressing it.
Some 10,000 Australians protest in Sydney in July 1995 against proposed French nuclear tests in the South Pacific
[DAVID HANCOCK/AFP/Getty Images]
Then there is a so-called renaissance of nuclear power because the nuclear industry says that nuclear power produces no global warming gases, which is an absolute fabrication. Because a nuclear power plant, if you count how much diesel and fossil fuel is used to mine the uranium to produce the fuel, to build the reactor and transport the waste and store it safely for half a million years, it produces large amounts of carbon dioxide, almost as much as gas-fired electricity plants. It makes me very annoyed when scientists lie, and the nuclear industry is spending hundreds and millions of dollars on a propaganda exercise to convince people that nuclear power is emission-free and safe.
SGIQ: Do you see any way in which physicists and physicians will be able to work together?
HC: I don't see that the nuclear community is interested at all in hearing the truth about the medical consequences of the nuclear fuel chain. I would concentrate on the broad general public, and for me, that's always produced change. Firstly, when I educated the Australian public about the medical effects of French atmospheric nuclear tests in 1971 and 1972; secondly, when I educated the Australian union movement about the medical consequences of mining uranium; thirdly, when I led the movement of physicians both in the United States and globally to teach people about the medical effects of nuclear power and nuclear war. Those three campaigns had enormous effects and were extremely successful. They happened because of the cooperation of national media in many countries. And that's what we need to get going again. The media needs to be educated, concerned and ready to broadcast the truth and not to be used as tools promoting propaganda from the nuclear industry.
