Episode 93: If You Love This Planet with Dr Helen Caldicott and Morag Gamble

"What gives me hope is people who have the guts to stand up … like you!"

"There’s an urgency. The earth is in the intensive care unit - acutely ill.  We’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain from speaking up."

This episode takes me to the essence of why I do what I do and why I speak up - the peace movement, my love of this planet, the political precariousness in which we dwell and my deep concern for our common future.

Dr Helen Caldicott (from Melbourne near where I grew up)  is the world’s most articulate and passionate advocate of citizen action to remedy the nuclear and environmental crises. 

She practices global preventative medicine and has spent 5 decades educating world leaders, influencers, physicians and communities of the impacts of the nuclear age - nuclear energy, nuclear war and nuclear disasters on the planet, on life, on humanity and the necessary changes in human behaviour to stop environmental destruction.. She's spoken Presidents, Prime Ministers, celebrities - even the Dalai Lama.

At this point in time, she has never been more concerned. She warns that have never been closer to a major nuclear catastrophe at the same time as being in the midst of climate and biodiversity catastrophes.

This is not easy to hear, but we must.  Let it move you, empower you, stoke the fires in your belly and let it rise up.

The Smithsonian named Helen one of the most influential women of the 20th Century.  She taught at Harvard in the 70s and practiced at Children’s hospitals around the world.  In 1980 she resigned and became a planetary physician.

Helen has: 

• written 7 books
• received 21 honorary doctorates
• been the subject of several films including the oscar-winning IF YOU LOVE THIS PLANET
• received multiple awards, and prizes - including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 as part of a international network - the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War 

When I was a teenager,   I was deeply motivated by Helen's work. I consider her a catalyst of my lifework. And like her, I am astounded that there is so little media attention while we teeter on the edge of nuclear catastrophe.

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Transcript

Morag:

Welcome to the show, Dr. Helen Caldicott. It's my absolute honor to have you here speaking on Sense-making in a Changing World. Your voice is one that has inspired me for decades now. You've been for over 42 years, I understand, working in antinuclear space and I wanted to know from you - have you ever been more concerned than now and where are we at this point in time with everything that's going on in the world?

Dr. Helen:

No, I've never been more concerned than I am now. I think we're close on the brink of a nuclear holocaust and there's not much attention being paid to it at all, except for those in the know in Washington. But the media is giving a little attention, if no attention at all.

Morag:

There's a number of different aspects to this. So maybe we could unpack this a bit more. We have nuclear war, nuclear disaster - the potential of that. So where do you see the biggest challenge that we're facing right now?

Dr. Helen:

Well, it's either slow or fast. It's either global warming and that's definite. We're past the point of no return about that and the oil and coal companies still keep digging up the stuff and exporting it. In fact, our whole economy, the world economy, is based on fossil fuels. We could, with enormous emergency and funding, especially in Australia, transition to renewable energy within a couple of years. I mean we're bathed in sun, blown by wind and we’re perfectly situated to do that. But there's not enough money being put into it and Germany really is forging ahead on that and some other countries, but not enough, and the United States is far far behind. So if I was a kid, I'd be pretty depressed.

Then there's a risk of nuclear war with two major superpowers for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis are confronting each other militarily. Putin is back to the wall. I wouldn't trust him. He's put his nuclear weapons on a high state of alert. The Russians have taken over the separatist nuclear power plant with six reactors and each cooling pool has 20 times more radioactivity than in the reactors themselves. So you've got six cooling pools, 6 x 20 is 120 Chernobyls plus 6 is 126 Chernobyls. If that power plant loses its external power supply (which it has several times), and relies on internal power supplies which requires fossil fuel to run them and they could run out of that, then we could have a meltdown, which would devastate the whole, not just Europe, the whole of the Northern Hemisphere. Interestingly, the two air massers at the equator do not mix. So we'd be relatively safe down here. I've got two grandchildren over there in Europe so I’d have to fly them out immediately. It's pretty damn scary. If the Second World War was fought today, with Europe covered with nuclear reactors, Europe would be uninhabitable for the rest of time, including much of the Northern Hemisphere.

So we've got two nuclear problems, you've got the threat of nuclear war and the threat of nuclear reactors melting down or you can have both simultaneously. These physicists who love E=MC2, it's sort of almost an orgasmic thing. The energy equals mass of the atom times the speed of light squared, that's Einstein's theory. They think it's fantastic and they're men and they're sort of dosed up with their testosterone (or lack thereof) and we're on the course of annihilation.

Morag:

So with this knowledge, why is it that we are now starting to see nuclear back on the agenda as being clean energy?

Dr. Helen:

Because they're addicted to it and they're crazy. Small modular reactors are very, very expensive. I wrote an article about small modular reactors a while ago, go to my web page helencaldicott.com and read it. They don't work. They're very dangerous. Couple of some of them are cooled by liquid sodium. If there's a leak, liquid sodium explodes and burns. They're terribly expensive. They're keystone reactors.

In other words, the corporation that builds them has to sell lots of them to make a profit and they've had them sold anyway. So it's a physicist's wet dream, really. But politicians who know nothing, who are not scientifically or medically literate, think it's a great idea because they're fed this information by the nuclear corporations. So we're in the hands of uninformed, not ill informed, uninformed people, mostly men and that really irritates me. Because the fact is that 52% of the population is women. We have hormones to nurture life, oxytocin, estrogen, progesterone, and men have testosterone and we are in the hands of men. Why do we allow that to happen? I don't know.

There was a play in Greece where the men kept fighting and fighting and the women said, “Okay, no more sex” and guess what? They stopped fighting. There's a country in Africa where a similar thing happened recently and the men stopped fighting. So apparently, they want sex more than killing each other, which is a very interesting equation.

Morag:

But do you think this is a solution to our current predicament?

Dr. Helen:

Well, I think we should cut off sex. Yeah, absolutely.

Morag:

Coming back to that point about how nuclear energy is back on the agenda. I think I read somewhere that you said that, in actual fact, it takes more fossil fuels to actually create and dig up, that it's not actually a carbon solution anyway.

Dr. Helen:

That's right. I wrote a book called ‘Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer’. There's a very wonderful physicist in Europe who I've worked with and worked out the equation of how much fossil fuel is used to mine the uranium, mill the uranium, enrich the uranium, build a reactor (concrete produces a huge amount of CO2), run the reactor, then decommission the reactor, then store the radioactive waste for the next million years according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The whole thing's a fantasy and it's absolute rubbish that it's the answer to global warming. 

f only people understood science and had researched the facts, it’s interesting that the premier of South Australia came out for nuclear. It's very interesting and then Prime Minister Albanese got on him and castigated him and the next day, he was saying, “It's too dangerous. It's too expensive. We can't have it.” So Prime Minister Albanese is on the right track in terms of nuclear power and that's because I educated the unions in the 80s about the dangers of mining uranium and nuclear power. The ACG passed a resolution to stop mining, transport and export of uranium, which Bob Hawke and talked about the three mind policy that's like saying to a woman, “ Well, don't worry dear. You're only a little bit pregnant.” I don’t like Hawke.

Morag:

So what do you see as our way forward if we're on the brink of this disaster globally?

Dr. Helen:

Good question, Morag. My solution is education and the only way to educate people is through the media and we've got goddamn Murdoch running the world. When he went to Cambridge, he was quite radical, actually, as a young man. But he changed and he's an evil man. He's put in Prime Ministers, he's put out Prime Ministers, he really runs much of the world. He informs the people through absolute crap on his television stations and Fox News giving out lies. President Jefferson once said “an informed democracy will behave in a responsible fashion.” That's what I've spent my life doing.

Through the media, I had a wonderful agent in Hollywood who represented the film stars, like Tom Cruise and those buddies. She would get me on television, not as this boring, old Australian doctor talking about nuclear power and boring the hell out of people, but putting me on with Lily Tomlin and Sally Phil. So of course, they would have me on and she put me in Vogue and Life & Time and Family Circle. So the average Joe with his six pack sitting back with his family at night watching television, learned about the dangers of nuclear war and in the end of the 80s and I was all over the place, I'd go to three cities a day - address 1000 people and then get the plane and go somewhere else and do the same thing. I apparently turned out to be quite a good public speaker.

In fact, you have to be an actress to engage the audience and then make them cry and so Joe Six-Pack, sitting back with his family, knew the dangers of nuclear war. 80% of Americans at the end of the 80s were opposed to nuclear war. Gorbachev heard the doctors talking and he and Reagan got together - I spent an hour and a quarter with Reagan in the White House trying to teach him about the dangers. After, I came out and said he had impending Alzheimer's, which he did, he was a very stupid man. He had the best role in his life being the president, he’s an actor. But he and Gorbachev got together in 1988 and almost agreed to abolish nuclear weapons, but got stuck up on Star Wars. So we nearly made it.

Morag:

Any plans to abolish it now? How do we get rid of this? My understanding is that since that point, we've actually got so many more weapons.

Morag:

I was saying, what chance have we got now of two weapons of mass destruction?

Dr. Helen:

Yeah, for Clinton, in fact, it's an interesting history. Putin asked Clinton if Russia could join NATO. Way back then Clinton said no, because Russia is too big. Clinton was an idiot.

Clinton wants to pass the step one treaty through the Senate, which would lower the level of nuclear weapons bilaterally in Russia and America. But there was a man called Senator Kyle, and he said, “look, I'll allow it to pass if you spend $1 trillion in the next 30 years replacing every single bomb, missile, plane, ship, and the likes” and he agreed to that, Clinton did.

So they are now spending a trillion dollars replacing every single plane, missile, etc. It's absolutely obscene. And the Congress just passed a bill for $858 billion just now for weapons of mass destruction and it's not the Department of Defense. Let's be frank, it's the Department of Murder. These weapons, murder people. They've killed over a million people since 9/11. People had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.

I've just got a note here: the weapons industry gave $285 million into political donations. Boeing, Lockheed, Martin Marietta - in the last year they’ve taken over Canberra. They spent $2.5 billion on lobbying, 47 members of Congress and their spouses' own stock in the military industrial complex. The Pentagon is asking for $30 billion dollars more to buy 375 F-35 bombers, which don’t really work and they can hardly take off. They don't fly very well and Australia wants to buy them. America has 400 inch intercontinental ballistic missiles, 14 Trident submarines each with 240 hydrogen bombs. It's got 60 Long Range Nuclear Bombers and they're bringing some of these into Darwin and we're becoming the fifth 51st State of the United States. America spends more on defense - killing - than the next nine countries on the list. 400,000 people have been killed since 2014. It's murder.

I took the Hippocratic Oath, I try and practice global preventive medicine. But these people are deranged, they're psychopaths. And we’re joining them. Myles is the Secretary of Defense now goes to America and you think his speeches were written by the Pentagon and they're allowing B-52’s into Darwin. Pine Gap, in the middle of the Northern Territory, orchestrates a whole nuclear war scenario. So, we are the 51st state of America. Whitlam would not have allowed that. Whitlam was removed from Parliament the day before he was to announce the operatives at Pine Gap (CIA operative), so removed him from parliament. So we're being run by the United States which really, really really pisses me off. It's time we took a stand - that we realized how we're being used to join the race for annihilation.

Morag:

But doesn't that then make us more of a target in all of this as well?

Dr. Helen:

Of course. But we're sort of the frontline now, according to the Pentagon, to fight China, but for God sake, America has to dominate the world. It's metastasized like a cancer. It's got 800 bases in 80 countries. How dare they? Who do they think they are? They're monsters and we join them. Why? What's wrong with us? Why can't we stand up for ourselves and for the world and for the world's children in the future? I'm very worried about it, Morag. What are we going to do, have a revolution?

Morag:

I think so. I think we need one, don't we?

Dr. Helen:

The thing that I think that what people don't understand is that the parliament belongs to us. The people who are in parliament are our representatives and we are their leaders and we need to educate them when they come back to their districts and say, “Look, if you don't read this book and do justice, we'll make sure you are not elected next time.” We can do that! The independent politicians need to really, really get onto it. The women need to get on to it. I think women are the saving grace of the world.

Morag:

I do too. I was thinking about it years ago thinking, “how can we create a women's parliament that rises up as a separate group that kind of responds to everything that's happening, but through our perspective and puts that out into the world?” 

Dr. Helen:

Well, I wanted to start in America, the Women's Party for Survival and they said, “we can't have a third party, we've only got two parties.” So I started Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament and we were pretty effective, but not nearly as effective as a party.

Morag:

So what do you think would be the most effective response to this? You're saying it's everywhere and that here's this huge power that's coming out.

Dr. Helen:

As we talk, I'd like to address the independent politicians from the perspective of an imminent nuclear war and the role that we're playing in this and learn and teach them what's going on - educate them about America and see if we can't get them to stand up against this suicidal nonsense.

Morag:

What can you tell us a bit more about AI and nuclear?

Dr. Helen:

Well, Stephen Hawking, the great physicist who was bound to his wheelchair with motor neurone disease. Brilliant guy. About four or five years ago, he said they're starting to put their nuclear weapons on AI, and he said, that means almost certain nuclear war within 10 years. So I helped with a symposium in New York Academy of Medicine and brought in the best brains of the world to talk about this, including McNamara, who was Kennedy Secretary of Defense, and the book that came out of this was called ‘Sleepwalking To Armageddon’.

They set up their computers to decide what to do using human reasoning and then the computers make the decision. Then we’re on the path of almost certain nuclear war, if the weapons are on AI. These people are mad and every day I read some new things in the news about a new weapon of mass destruction. Meanwhile, two thirds of the world's children are not being fed properly. What are we doing? We're obsessed with murder.

Morag:

How do you speak with your grandchildren about this?

Dr. Helen:

Well, they all know. They've all followed me. My grandson in Malmo, Sweden is a filmmaker and he came out and filmed me because a film that was made about me giving a speech 40 years ago called, ‘If You Love This Planet’ by the Canadian film board, which won an Oscar, is only half an hour long and it breaks through people's psychic numbing and makes them cry. So he came out and filmed me doing introductory talks to the film and if you go to my web page, the link helencaldicott.com, the film is there. We've put it on Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and people are watching it, but not enough.

Morag:

What response are you getting to it 40 years down the track?

Dr. Helen:

The same response when they watch it, for sure. But not enough people. If everyone watched it, well, we'd have a movement.

Morag:

If people want to watch it or to take it and share it with the community, do you have ways to encourage people to unpack it? Do you have questions or support material that would help people?

Dr. Helen:

If you go to my website, there are lots of suggestions about what to do. All the churches should be playing it on Sunday. It should be played on national television. The ABC should play it. Why not? That'd be good. It's an Oscar winning film.

Morag:

So there's this thing though, isn't there that ‘we don't want to scare people’?

Dr. Helen:

Oh, no, we mustn't be scared. No, not until the bombs drop and we're all dying of acute radiation, illness, vomiting and bleeding to death. That's what will happen. But we mustn't be scared, oh no.

Morag:

So how close do you think we are with this current situation?

Dr. Helen:

Well, I got to know Robert McNamara, who was Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense quite well and he was in the Oval Office during the Cuban Missile Crisis and he said to me, “Helen, we came so close to within three minutes of annihilation.” WIthin three minutes of annihilation. Well, we're as close as that, I have no doubt. And so many things can go wrong - the mechanism for a nuclear war is so delicate. The President has a three minute decision time whether or not to launch if the satellite sees weapons coming. Once it was set up by a flock of geese or a rising moon, this happens all the time! There's a man walking behind him all the time with an officer with his codes to start a nuclear war and he has a three minute decision time. He's not totally on the ball. He's a little bit vague as the President. But there are so many ways accidental nuclear war can start, particularly at a time of heightened international crisis.

For instance, America launched a missile, a weather missile, in Norway some years ago and they informed the Kremlin and the Kremlin lost the data and saw this missile going up. So because to start a nuclear war, America first targets Moscow and takes Moscow out so that Moscow can't respond and they thought this was going to be a first strike, they sort of got and they got ready to launch their weapons. Moscow is so concerned about this, that they have dug a hole in the Ural Mountains and they've put a computerized weapon in that to be launched. If America launches her weapons, called the Dead Hand. The Dead Hand goes up and automatically launches all the weapons in Moscow in Russia.

Morag:

Can you just say out loud, who where these are targeted to?

Dr. Helen:

About 10 bombs were targeted on New York, that's such a redundancy of weapons that they've got very few targets for all their weapons now. Each bridge was targeted and each airport. Every city in America with a population of 50,000 or more is targeted with at least one bomb. We're clearly targeted. What turned me on was a book called ‘On the Beach’ by Neville Susan. I read it when I was about 18 and it was about a nuclear war that occurred by accident in the Northern Hemisphere. Everyone was killed and gradually the radioactive cloud came down to Melbourne and people had their last drink of gin and tonic in the Melbourne club. The government dispenses cyanide capsules, so people could kill their babies immediately instead of dying a lingering death, vomiting and bleeding to death. The end was the end - there were no people left in the world. That marked my soul. I was 18 now doing medicine. And the thing is, it's not a fallacy. It’s reality. Neville was very smart.

Morag:

What about the whole question about well, how do you prepare for the incident of a nuclear war?

Dr. Helen:

You can’t prepare! What do you mean, prepare?

Morag:

I was thinking in terms of...

Dr. Helen:

…it’s like preparing for death!

Morag:

I know! You were talking to me earlier about in Australia it’s a little bit okay because it’d be more in the northern hemisphere. But as you said, if it happens in the northern hemisphere, it's here too.

Dr. Helen:

If it even happens we're targeted too, so let's be frank.

Morag:

What cause is there for hope? Do you have any cause for hope?

Dr. Helen:

Only people with any guts will get up and stand up and take on the government and take on the parliament, take on the media, like you! I did it. I was an alien. I was a woman in America and I didn't know I turned into a Joan of Arc. Of course, you can do it if you're smart and you use your intelligence and work out what to do. We all live in a democracy and that's what it's about, using democracy. We've got the guts, we'll do it. If you don't have any guts, we'll all die.

Morag:

You talked before about how this requires us to be like actresses, actors. You know, recently there was that movie called ‘Don’t Look Up.’

Dr. Helen:

Yeah, I did. I saw that. It was good.

Morag:

It was and there was that moment at the end that reminded me of how you describe the end of ‘On the Beach’. I wonder if you know of people taking on this challenge to do a blockbuster movie on this topic? It feels like it needs to be happening.

Dr. Helen:

No, not really. Some people are approaching me. I'm an old dame now. Some people have thought they want to do a documentary about me. I won't say who. Trying to get money, I think from the ABC and the Australian Film Institute, etc. But that'll take a while to happen and there's an urgency. The Earth is in the intensive care unit, acutely ill. We're all physicians to a dying planet and we're not attending to it at all. At all!

Morag:

How do you stay well and grounded when you know this?

Dr. Helen:

Ah well. I don’t know. I love my garden. I know this all the time and when I wake up in the morning and my roses are still there. I think, I guess I've lived with this, accepted this. At the age of 84 I really can't do much about it. I would if I could - I'd like to address a joint session of Congress. I would like to address parliament and just describe the medical effects of nuclear war and get into people's souls. I haven't been asked to do that.

Morag:

Where do you get your information from? How do you find it?

Dr. Helen:

A lot on the internet. I read the Department of Defense stuff from America. There’s a huge amount of information that I gather, I read it all the time, I'm immersed in it, I drown in it.

Morag:

So is that also on your website? Where people can find what you're sharing what you're finding out all the time?

Dr. Helen:

Absolutely and there are lots and lots of videos on my web page, some of them are quite fun actually, trying to teach the Dalai Lama about nuclear power!

Morag:

What does he feel?

Dr. Helen:

He’s like a child. He was like ‘really?’ He’s so innocent.

Morag:

So who do you think are the key leaders in the world that need to come together? How can we cultivate the kind of leadership that's going to take us in the right direction? I feel like the world leaders that we call world leaders at the moment are not at all going in that direction.

Dr. Helen:

Well, Gorchov did.

Morag:

Your silence is everything.

Dr. Helen:

Yeah, I actually think King Charles III is a very intelligent bloke who has thought very deeply about this sort of thing. Whether he'll do anything or not, I don't know. But he's in a perfect position to do so. George Galloway, who's in the British Parliament. He's a terrific guy. Bernie Sanders, I really wanted him to be president, but the F-35 is made in Vermont in his district so he supports that. You know, they're all compromised… maybe I’d like to be Prime Minister (laughs).

Morag:

How do we educate people on the broad enough scale to get this?

Dr. Helen:

It has to be through the media. I was in the media all the time in America. Teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching. That's the only way.

Morag:

Shifting the public perception so that then shifts the message.

Dr. Helen:

Education is the key, it really is. Most people are blindly ignorant. Not understanding this huge nuclear umbrella that is unfolding us and the global warming umbrella. Now they're kind of aware of that, but not really. We've got to stop digging up coal like now! We've got to stop getting gas out of the earth now! And maybe turning off our computers and our lights and working like buggery to build renewable energy systems, every single house should have top solar panels. Every garage should have solar panels. So the electric vehicles are powered by the sun, not coal. By plugging in the car you’re still powering it by coal. It’s just one step removed from the source. Boy, that would be exciting, wouldn’t it?

Morag:

Well, I guess this is kind of where I've tried to go with permaculture. It’s looking how we can live a life that is a one planet way of life that has, at its core, Earth care and people care and think about people on the other side of the planet. But I really feel like what you're saying now is that that's not enough.

Dr. Helen:

No, it's not enough. No, Morag, not enough at all. Well, maybe we should work together.

Morag:

Maybe we should. I was activated as a 12 year old by your words because I grew up in Melbourne and I used to hear you a lot in the media and that changed my way of thinking - it was a wake up call. It feels like we need that courageous voice in the media.

Dr. Helen:

Yeah, we do. You're younger than me. How old are you? 

Morag:

53? I think.

Dr. Helen:

You're perfect. So maybe we can work hand in hand.

Morag:

Maybe we can. Helen, you have activated me! It’s like a fire in the belly!

Dr. Helen:

A fire in the belly, Morag. That's what we need!

Morag:

Yeah, absolutely and to speak up. We've got nothing to lose. This is the thing, is it? 

Dr. Helen:

There’s nothing to lose, but everything to gain. We've got everything to lose if we don’t. Everything. And that play in Greece is called Lysistrata, where the men only stop fighting when they couldn’t have sex.

Morag:

There's lots of really interesting strategies (laughs). Do you want to tell us a little bit more about If You Love This Planet and how people can access this film?

Dr. Helen:

Yes, you can just go to my website helencaldicott.com and there it is. It has suggestions about what you can do. But allow yourself to just sit there, take it in to bust your psychic numbing, it's like me telling a patient they've got leukemia or something and you have to support a patient, help them through that shock and grief and help them with their diagnosis and their treatment and so it's really practicing preventive medicine.

Morag:

Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

Dr. Helen:

My great pleasure and it's lovely to get to know you.

Morag:

Well, thank you for everything that you've done in the world up until this point! I hope to be able to continue and carry and speak out. 

Dr. Helen:

Okay, let's join forces. 

Morag:

Fantastic. All right. Take care.

Dr. Helen:

Bye bye!