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Fusion Dreams 90 Seconds to Midnight with Dr. Helen Caldicott

• Global Justice Ecology Project / Host Steve Taylor • Season 3 • Episode 2

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It is 90 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock. In large part due to developments in the war in Ukraine, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists  moved the hands of the infamous timepiece forward.

Just weeks earlier the Department of Energy announced the first reported controlled fusion reaction that was touted as a breakthrough for national defense and the future of clean energy.

Given the history of The Lawrence Livermore lab that conducted the experiment, there is reason for skepticism.

In this episode of Breaking Green we will talk with Dr. Helen Caldicott.

Born in Melbourne, Australia in 1938, Dr Caldicott received her medical degree from the University of Adelaide Medical School in 1961. She founded the Cystic Fibrosis Clinic at the Adelaide Children’s Hospital in 1975 and subsequently was an instructor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and on the staff of the Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Boston, Mass., until 1980 when she resigned to work full time on the prevention of nuclear war.

In 1971, Dr Caldicott played a major role in Australia’s opposition to French atmospheric nuclear testing in the Pacific; in 1975 she worked with the Australian trade unions to educate their members about the medical dangers of the nuclear fuel cycle, with particular reference to uranium mining.

While living in the United States from 1977 to 1986, she played a major role in re-invigorating as President,    Physicians for Social Responsibility, an organization of 23,000 doctors committed to educating their colleagues about the dangers of nuclear power, nuclear weapons and nuclear war. On trips abroad she helped start similar medical organizations in many other countries. The international umbrella group (International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War) won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. 

Dr Caldicott has received many prizes and awards for her work, including the Lannan Foundation’s 2003 Prize for Cultural Freedom and twenty one  honorary doctoral degrees. She was personally nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Linus Pauling – himself a Nobel Laureate. The Smithsonian has named Dr Caldicott as one of the most influential women of the 20th Century.

Video of Caldicott's description the effects of Nuclear War.

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Steve Taylor  
Dr. Helen Caldicott Welcome to Breaking Green.

Helen Caldicott  
Thank you very much.

Steve Taylor  
You're best known for your work in preventing nuclear war. But you're also a lifelong environmentalist. In 1992, you wrote the book, If You love this Planet, A Plan to Heal the Earth. Reading it today, it is interesting to see how your book addressed many of the problems we are currently facing with increased awareness now, such as global warming, toxic waste, deforestation, species loss and Third World debt. As the author of that book, how do you think it holds up decades later? And how do you think the world has done in responding to the crises that the book outlines?

Helen Caldicott  
Well, Steve, you've just said that outlines everything that's happening today. And I thought, you know, writing that book, in layman's language, from a medical and environmental perspective, that people would read it in there fix the problems? Well, of course, not many people read it, the problems continue unabated. And we're in a very, very detrimental situation for for the planet. Not not even mentioning the extreme, an imminent threat of a nuclear holocaust.

Steve Taylor  
Yes, and let's talk about that. I believe it's the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently reset the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight. So could you tell our audience a little bit about what the Doomsday Clock is, and some of the major readjustments over the decades and why it's at 90 seconds to midnight now?

Helen Caldicott  
Well, for the last year, it's been at 100 seconds to midnight, which is the closest it's ever been. And each year they reset the clock according to international problems, nuclear problems. 90 seconds to midnight, I don't think it's close enough, it's closer than that. I would put 20 seconds to midnight. I think we're in an extremely invidious position where nuclear war could occur tonight, by accident by design. It's clear to me now that the Americans are arming the Ukrainians. And now the Germans have stepped in and other NATO countries to fight Russia. It's the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, that the two huge nuclear behemoths are facing each other militarily. They pushed Putin's back against the wall. He is a man with great pride. He has threatened to use nuclear weapons. I think his weapons are in a higher state of alert than normal. Almost certainly, the Americans are too. They talk about this war, like they used to talk about the Second World War. Now we'll push you closer, we'll bomb you will do this. But it's totally different now. And these men have got their mind stuck in the Dark Ages. Like they've always been the testosterone imperative. And if Putin does that he's evil. So we'll do this. And this, while a doomsday scenario overhangs all of us and as I look out my window, my roses and my tomatos, and my figs, you know, I could wake up tomorrow, and they won't be here. Nor will I. People aren't taking this seriously enough. And I'm literally I'm very scared. I'm very scared. And it really gives me the dry rot. In fact, to be quite frank, it gives me the shits.  It's very clear to me actually, that America is going to war with Russia. And that means almost certainly nuclear war and that means the end of almost all life on Earth. It's unbelievable. It's indescribable, and it's so juvenile and pathetic and little boys with their toys. You know.

Steve Taylor  
I'm old enough. I remember the the Cold War. And there was a healthy fear or appreciation, maybe not as much as there should have been, but for what a nuclear war meant. It was unthinkable. It was incomprehensible. Do you think that we've become a bit inured to that threat over time?

Helen Caldicott  
Yeah. I've just published a book called sleepwalking to Armageddon. I was so worried about the threat of nuclear war and it was predicted they're now putting nuclear weapons on artificial intelligence, which the great physicist Stephen Hawking said, could automatically lead to nuclear war. And because of that, I organized a symposium at the New York Academy of Medicine, about the threat of nuclear war and I had people from all over the world that thinkers work about it. And I mean, but it hasn't made any any god damn difference. And Biden, Biden is, you know, a product of conservative America- spent all his life in the Senate. And now that the NATO is being admitted to Sweden, which has always been a neutral country. Germany is sending in Leopard tanks. First time since the Second World War where Germany invaded Russia, and they lost millions and millions of people. Putin was crazy to invade the Ukraine, clearly in its weakened what's happening. But Putin asked Biden to do two things. He asked Biden not to let the Ukraine join NATO, and two to remove all the missiles that America has placed in the newly joined NATO countries, which are all facing into Russia. And Biden didn't do it. And that and so Putin, in his stupidity, and wickedness invaded the Ukraine, and one thing is leading to another and you know, it could be a nuclear war. Why don't I describe what happens if a bomb drops on the city.

Steve Taylor  
I would like you to share with us as a physician and as a person who's studied this, what a nuclear attack would look like.

Helen Caldicott  
It'll come in on a missile traveling at 20 times the speed of sound. And the radars pick that up and as the weapons are, crossing in space. It takes half an hour. The other countries radar picks it up, and then they launched their weapons so that their weapons aren't destroyed by the incoming weapons. And then the whole thing goes off. Launch on warning it's called. If it explodes at ground level on a clear day, 20 megatons. It will be dig a hole three quarters of a mile wide, and 800 feet deep turning all the buildings in the earth below to radioactive fallout shot up in the mushroom cloud. At that, at those temperatures, marble and steel, they vaporize let alone human bodies. Six miles from the Epi Center every building flattened and every person killed. People are vaporized. In Hiroshima. There was a little boy reaching up to catch a red dragon fly in his hand against the blue of the sky. There was a blinding flash and he left his shadow on the pavement behind him which is in the Hiroshima Museum. 20 miles from the Epi Center. All people will be killed or lethally injured all buildings destroyed. People who glanced at the flesh six miles away, their eyes will melt and run down their cheeks. John Hershey wrote a book called Hiroshima and he said, there are about 30 men all in exactly the same nightmarish state. Their faces were wholly burnt. Their eye sockets were hollow. The fluid from their melted eyes had rundown their cheeks. Their mouths were mere swollen puss covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit a spout of a teapot. There was one woman running holding a baby and she and the baby had been converted to a charcoal statute. Think about you and your own people and your own town. Enormous of over pressures will create winds of 500 miles an hour, sucking people out of buildings turning them into human missiles. Chards of glass traveling and 120 miles an hour will lacerate people. And the Pentagon's written the book was equations about how far a piece of glass driving 120 miles an hour will penetrate human flesh. The overpressure this will cause ruptured tympanic membranes, ruptured lungs human thoraxs and the like. Huge buildings will collapse into the streets and a huge amount of radiant heat will be produced producing 1000s of severe burns. A burn patient is the most difficult patient we ever treat. It takes months and months, transfusions skin grafts and even then often the patient dies. 26 miles from the epicenter the heat will cause buildings to spontaneously burn. As the fires burn they will coelesce coast to coast north, south and the whole of the United States will burn. And a huge cloud of black radioactive oily smoke will be lofted into the stratosphere. And this will be in Russia and Europe and all over covering the earth, with a cloud so thick, it will block out the sun for a year. Temperatures will drop below freezing, and it will be dark. And everyone will freeze to death in the dark. That's called nuclear winter. People don't know this, they don't know this. And as Jefferson said, an informed democracy will behave in a responsible fashion. People are uninformed, and they they're kept occupied by the crap that Murdoch puts on Fox, etc. He is the most evil man in the world. And he's an Australian. And he once lauded me in a front page editorial when I was fighting the French tests in Australia. I mean, what are we gonna do, Steve? I need an hour with Putin an hour with Biden and say, Biden, stop it, go and speak to Putin, and negotiate because all wars end by negotiation. And stop all this. And don't have a nuclear war. Biden don't. I would have grabbed him by the shoulders and shake him. I would talk to him as a physician, like I did to Reagan, scare the bejesus out of him.

Steve Taylor  
What's scary to me right now is watching this proxy war between the United States and the Soviet, well, Russia, not the Soviet Union, but Russia. And you have Putin, who in an editorial, I believe in the Australian independent, you you refer to as an evil leader, I'm paraphrasing something like that. Who was who's invading and, you know, another country?

Helen Caldicott  
Not that America hasn't invaded? Since 911, America's over a million people, right.

Steve Taylor  
But what I'm saying is he's hinting at nuclear war. 

Helen Caldicott  
Yeah, 

Steve Taylor  
It almost seems as if it's people are just rather blase a about that. I in 1962, there was the Cuban Missile Crisis. And, and to me, there seems to be some similarities?

Helen Caldicott  
Yes. I got to know Robert McNamara, who was Kennedy Secretary of State or Defense. And he was in the Oval Office at the time, he said, Helen, we came so close to nuclear war, three minutes, three minutes. We're in a similar situation now. And Biden isn't surrounded by people who are very clever.

Steve Taylor  
So back then, though, famously, the world held its breath during the missile crisis. 

Helen Caldicott  
Oh, we were terrified. Terrified, absolutely terrified.

Steve Taylor  
Doesn't seem to be the case today.

Helen Caldicott  
Well, first of all, they're not being informed adequately about what this really means that the consequences could be so bizarre and so horrifying.

Steve Taylor  
I think we've almost sublimated this idea of nuclear war in popular culture in a way. But if you think about, if this happens, it would probably mean the destruction of the entire planet, everybody. But just let's say there was a limited exchange,

Helen Caldicott  
There won't be. There won't be. What do you mean limited?

Steve Taylor  
Well, hell, and I'm just saying what's really scary and terrifying about the potential of a nuclear exchange is that you might live through it for several days. And, and and experience, the lack of medical help for anybody. There's not going to be there's going to be no calling 911 after a nuclear exchange. I remember you talking about what happened in Dresden with this asphyxiation and bomb shelters and World War Two,

Helen Caldicott  
Yes, that in dressed and people were in the bomb shelters, and the fires were so extreme, they sucked all the oxygen out of their shelters and they died. Yeah, same thing would happen. And it's very funny, New York City is put out just put out a video showing a woman in the street and it says the bombs are coming its going to be a nuclear war. What you do is you go inside, you don't stand in the windows, you stand in the center of the room, and you'll be alright. I mean, it's absolutely absurd.

Steve Taylor  
Well, that's what you were fighting back in the 70s and 80s. Was this notion that a nuclear war is survivable.

Helen Caldicott  
Yeah, yes, there was a man called T.K. Jones. That's there was meant called T. K. Jones, who said, don't worry if there are enough shovels to go round, we'll all make it. And his plan was to too, if the bombs are coming and they take half an hour to come, you get out the trusty shovel. You dig a hole, three feet by six feet. You get in the hole. Some one puts on two doors on top and dirt. And he said it's the dirt that does it. I mean, they had plans. But the thing about it is Steve, that evolution will be destroyed. We may be the only life in the universe. And if you've ever looked at the structure of a single cell, or the beauty of the birds or or a rose, I mean, what responsibility do we have?

Steve Taylor  
You mentioned how out of all these galaxies we so far we are it? And we've been listening for a while. And we're not getting anything. So I wanted to ask you, have you ever ever heard of the Fermi Paradox? The physicist who basically said that there's probably life out there, mathematically, he believed there was but where is everybody?

Helen Caldicott  
I once asked Carl Sagan, the greatest astronomer, who was a friend of mine, do you think there is other life in the universe? And he paused for a long time? And he said no. And I said, why? He said, Because if any other species have reached our stage of evolution, they would have destroyed themselves. QED.

Steve Taylor  
So so back to Earth, I wanted to ask you about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Do you see similarities to what's happening? I mean, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we did not want missiles pointed at us from Cuba, but Russia didn't want missiles, pointed at them from Turkey. Do you see any similarities in the conflict here with with the Ukraine?

Helen Caldicott  
Oh, sure. You know, America's got nuclear weapons, I think in nine European countries all ready to go and land on Russia? I mean, how do you think Russia feels like a little bit paranoid? Imagine if the Warsaw Pact moved into Canada, all along the north northern border of America, and put missiles all along the northern border. What would Americans do? She probably blow up the planet like she nearly did with the Cuban Missile Crisis. I mean, it's so extraordinarily unilateral in the thinking, not putting ourselves in the, in the minds of the Russian people who lost 54 million people during the Second World War.

Steve Taylor  
So you, do you feel we're more at risk now than we were during the Cold War?

Helen Caldicott  
Yeah. We're close to nuclear war than we've ever been. And that's what the Bulletin of the Atomic scientist indicated by moving stock to 90 seconds to midnight. I'd put it to 20.

Steve Taylor  
Does it seem like political leaders are more cavalier about nuclear exchange now? 

Helen Caldicott  
Yeah, because they haven't taken in what nuclear war would really mean. And the Pentagon's pathetic, I mean, Department of Murder. It'srun by these Cavalier folks who are making millions and squillions out of selling weapons and making weapons and you know, that almost the whole of the American budget goes to killing and murder. Health care and education and, you know, just the children in Yemen, who are millions of them are starving. I mean, we've got the money to fix everything on Earth, and also to power the youth with renewable energy. The money's there. It's going into killing and murder instead of into life.

Steve Taylor  
So you mentioned energy, the Department of Energy, was saying, look, we've had this fusion breakthrough. And I believe it was an experiment at Lawrence Livermore laboratories, saying, look, we got more energy out of this reaction than we put in, what do you think about the claims that fusion may be our energy future?

Helen Caldicott  
The technology that they had Lawrence Livermore Labs where the first bombs were designed by Edward Teller was taken place under the stockpile and stewardship regime was part of a nuclear weapons experiment. It wasn't a part of an energy experiment. The amount of energy they used to fuse and An atom of deuterium and a native atom of tritium was huge, and they just got a tiny little bit out. It's inappropriate, it will never be used for the human race to provide energy. The physicists are lying. They are so excited because they thought they could never do it. Fusion Energy is what powers the sun. But the sun's got huge magnetic fields, which pound these these ions together to produce fusion energy. The sun provides energy for us for everything that we need. And it's easy enough to capture now. So it was a storm in a teacup. It means not a goddamn thing. It's terribly terribly expensive, and hardly energy any energy was was produced. Plus, it produced an enormous amount of tritium, which infiltrates all the structures around the the experiment. Tritium is highly carcinogenic. It emits a betta electron, which is very carcinogenic when getting into the body. So the place where all the physicists were located becomes extremely radioactive. And a huge flux of neutrons are created, which make all the material and metal surrounding the experiment intensely radioactive. So all of that becomes radioactive waste, which will have to be transferred to a radioactive waste facility. Shall I go on? It's absolutely nuts. Nuts.

Steve Taylor  
Could you tell us a little bit about the history of the Lawrence Livermore Labs?

Helen Caldicott  
Like yeah, the Lawrence Livermore Labs was set up by Edward Teller that wicked wicked man who destroyed Oppenheimer's life, who designed the hydrogen bomb and destroyed Oppenheimer because he was opposed to the hydrogen bomb. The hydrogen bomb can be you know, as large as anyone really wants 20 megatons 30 megatons you can make 100 megaton bomb. He's an evil man. And someone came to me some years ago, and they're gonna write his obituary for when he died. And they asked me what I thought of him. And I said, there's a hot place reserved in hell for Edward Teller. So he was he set up the Lawrence Livermore Labs, and they've been working on the bombs ever since. I spoke at Sandia Labs where they put together the bombs in I think it's New Mexico. And I spoke for an hour describing bombs dropping and what happens to the human body and environment. And afterwards, they lined up in queues to ask me questions and thanked me and they said they needed to hear this plenty of blokes behind them, not themselves. So they knew that I was speaking the truth.

Steve Taylor  
I read the book On the Beach, several years ago.

Helen Caldicott  
What impression did it make? 

Steve Taylor  
I thought it was a very interesting book. It was written in the 50s it I think the main character was in Australia. And it talked about, maybe it was before we had this just completely destroying the earth, it would have been a more limited nuclear exchange. But the only people left alive basically were in Australian moved. And the radiation cloud was was was coming in. And it was a story about how different people responded to that. And a little bit of of a submariner in the military, going to these various places looking for life and finding none. I thought was very interesting in that it was one of the first books that really just I think talked to me that I read about how, how insidious this invention, if you want to call it that is and how insane it is that we have these devices on the planet.

Helen Caldicott  
I know. I know. And the physicists who designed them and made them knew that they could never be used. That's that's what's been bugging me the last few days. That they've built all this stuff knowing it could never be used. Knowing it could never be used but theytkeep on building the things. I read that book when I was 18 and destroyed my adolescence because I lived in Melbourne. And at the end of the book, all life has gone everyone's dead. And I've never been the same again.

Steve Taylor  
We're in something similar to the 1962 missile crisis. We're not holding our breath. We seem not concerned about this. a potential anymore. It's almost like there's a cognitive dissonance that we can't hold such a grim picture in our, in our minds,

Helen Caldicott  
it's because people aren't being Yeah, people aren't being fed the information. I mean, in the 80s, I had a Hollywood agent who worked for me for free. She handled Tom Cruise and Lily Tomlin, all of them. And she got me on all know, Phil Donahue and Merv Griffin, all the television, I was all over the media, Vogue life, time. And so Mr. And Mrs. Joe sixpack, who was sitting there watching television, learned the medical effects of nuclear war. And that's why the movement became so powerful in the 80s. And as Jefferson said, your profoundly important president, an informed democracy will behave in a responsible fashion. This democracy is totally uninformed. And also many are practicing what are called psychic numbing, blocking it out.

Steve Taylor  
So in the film, If You Love the Planet, you talk about maybe an appropriate response to these weapons is taking over a Strategic Air Command base. Do you miss the maybe the fervency of the 70s and 80s when, and maybe even 90s, when it came to protests against nuclear war?

Helen Caldicott  
Of course I do. You know, we had a million people in Central Park. I address them and I had three minutes, and it was an ocean of faces. So I dropped the bomb on them. And my quote was a quote that week in The New York Times. It was a quote from Nixon don't listen to what we say, watch what we do. Miss them? I mean, it's imperative that we get back to that, but you can't move an uninformed democracy because they won't respond because they don't know. It's like having to tell a patient they've got leukemia, and walk them through their shock, their grief. Explain what it is, explain their treatment. That's it's practicing global preventive medicine, that I don't have the platform to do that anymore. And although my fellow physicians are trying, they don't have the platform either. I guess if Putin did explode as a tactical nuclear weapon, God help them, in the Ukraine, vaporize people. And that only was one weapon, that I might be asked to talk about what the medical effects are, well everyone would know anyway. But it won't be just one you see, because America will respond in kind. It's all set up to do that with all computers and the satellites, the whole thing.

Steve Taylor  
So we have this promotion of nuclear energy as a possible green alternative. And there's this this this resurgence and an interest in nuclear power. And we have this announcement of fusion. We have people still building nuclear weapons is is the nuclear energy industry, tied to the nuclear weapons industry?

Helen Caldicott  
Of course, there was a psychologist in the Pentagon in the 60s, and people were scared stiff of nuclear weapons. And he said, look, if we have peaceful nuclear energy, that will alleviate the people's fear. And that's why they started nuclear power. They wanted the same thing. I mean, each reactor makes a huge amount of plutonium a year. You need five kilos to make a bomb. And I think it makes 300 kilos of plutonium a year. Plutonium lasts for has a half life of 24,400 years, lasts for half a million years and millions of the gram of plutonium, if it enters your lung will definitely give you lung cancer. There's nowhere to put us. Plutonium is scattered all over Europe at the moment from the Chernobyl disaster. And you you can never get rid of it. And the nuclear waste from nuclear power, you've got to store it isolated from the ecosphere for a million years, according to the EPA. There's nowhere to put it. And they keep making more. 

Steve Taylor  
So I have I wanted to read to you just just just quickly a little the end of your book. And you said, hope for the Earth lies not with leaders but in your own heart and soul. If you decide to save the Earth, it will be saved. Each person can be as powerful as the most powerful person who ever lived. And that is you if you love this planet. Do you stand by that?

Helen Caldicott  
Well Look what I did, I came to America. I was a woman, an alien. Australian, working at Harvard, and I would turn into a Joan of Arc. And I traveled, you know, I used to go to three cities a day. You can't imagine how tired I was addressing audiences of 1000 people and the like. I mean, I just spent my life on the road, neglecting my family and my kids. We can all be John's and Joan of Arc, if we're scared enough, you know, it's like, we're being told we've got a lethal disease. And when you've got a lethal disease, you do everything you can to save your own life, chemotherapy, radiation, everything. Well, we've got a lethal, terminal disease on the planet. And every one of you can save the planet. And what you need to understand is that the people in Congress are not your leaders. You are their leaders. They are your representatives. And if you don't use your democracy. You need to go to the office of your congressperson every week, when he or she comes home and say, read this book, do this. And if you don't, make sure you're not elected next time, and that's power. And then you just door knock you go round like they did in Georgia recently for the election, and door, knock everyone and get them to vote against this person. And maybe run yourself for Congress. But you've got to be very powerful and determined, like you've got a lethal disease and you do. Or think of your children and how much you love them and what what sort of future they might not have if you don't do that. It's part of being a parent. It's an exhibition of love.

Steve Taylor  
Dr. Helen Caldicott. Thank you for being or breaking green.

Helen Caldicott  
It's my pleasure. Your a sweetie Steve. OK bye.

Steve Taylor  
You have been listening to breaking green, a global justice Ecology Project podcast. To learn more about global justice ecology project, visit global justice ecology.org. Breaking green is made possible by tax deductible donations by people like you. Please help us lift up the voices of those working to protect forests, defend human rights and expose all solutions. Simply text give g i v e to 1-716-257-4187 That's 1-716-257-4187