HELEN CALDICOTT, “STOP THE NUCLEAR MADNESS” (17 APRIL 1986)
[1] Thank you very much, it’s–I’m very pleased to be here. First of all, it feels like the middle of nowhere. I had to fly and fly and fly (laughing) hours before I made it. And also, I want to say how impressed I am with the Student Nurses Association, it’s the first time I’ve ever been invited by nurses to speak anywhere and I think it’s definitely–[applause]–it’s definitely a step in the right direction. I think the backbone of the medical profession are nurses. They clean up after our mess, they really do–they really do look after the patients. We don’t, on the whole. And also, I think that probably they are the perfect people to save the world. Most of them are women, and I think women don’t play nearly a big enough role in this issue, partly because they lack self-confidence politically, and partly because they lack self-confidence in their knowledge. But I always say an aroused woman is unstoppable and I think that might be the hope of the world. [laughter and applause]
[2] Okay, now these are very dangerous times, you all know that, don’t you? This Libyan situation is extremely dangerous. I just talked to my husband who watched the news tonight and the whole world is turning against this country, which worries me because a poll today in the New York Times shows that 77 percent of Americans support the President. And he’s more popular than he’s ever been, really, since he’s been elected and the most popular president–almost–in the history of this country. And one wonders why, really. And later on I’ll talk to you about the interview I had with him some two years ago, I spent an hour and a quarter with him, and I’ll discuss that with you from a clinical perspective. I’m serious! I practiced medicine for twenty years and I’m very concerned that the earth continues. And I think that there’s a very dangerous situation in this country at the moment and there are some analogies in history which I might point out to you.
[3] Libya could induce a nuclear war. I only realized today that when America sent those ships into the Gulf of Sidra to cross that firing line, the aircraft carriers, each of them carries two hundred hydrogen bombs, that Libya is a natural ally of the Soviet Union, and that itself in itself is a bit provocative action, that led to the bombing of the disco. And no one seems to be tying those two situations together–which led to the bombing of Tripoli. Now what’s going to happen?
[4] And so, obviously the thing was set up consciously or unconsciously by this country for more terrorism, and more provocation. And there’s a fascinating book I suggest you all read called On Reagan, by Lloyd DeMause, which discusses the psychohistory of this country, and of Reagan. And it’s really fascinating, it’s really Jungian Symbolism that’s occurring at the moment. The deep unconscious–which we find hard to rationalize. And that’s why these people, like the people from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government like Joseph Nye, et cetera, who write big articles and books about all the rational thinking about nuclear war policies are really out to lunch because this issue of war and peace is not about rationality! It’s about the sort of Jungian Symbolism and that’s the way this nation is going at the moment.
[5] If you read a book by Barbara Taftman called The Folly of History, all history as far as she’s concerned is conducted through sheer folly; and it’s about power, particularly power of men. And it’s sort of subliminal and it’s cryptogenic and it’s not very obvious. And it’s certainly nothing to do with the rational left brain at all. And so we have to be aware of that when we’re trying to diagnose why we are about to blow up the world. And if we ignore the emotions and the psyche in this respect, we almost certainly will blow up the world. If we keep being hung up on sort of rationality, we’ll get nowhere. I’ll be somewhat rational tonight; but I will also be talking about the emotions.
[6] Now, how could Libya induce a nuclear war? Well, we don’t know what will happen next but there’ll be planes dropping out of the sky you can be sure. There will be. Today three British hostages were shot in Beirut, because Britain allowed those ones to go out of Britain. The cost of the hostage crisis and the cause of terrorism is not Qaddafi. He’s the whipping boy; he’s the black sheep. The cause of terrorism is the Palestinian problem. And Israel and the Middle East and the Arab nations–that’s the cause.
[7] And at the moment, actually, in the Middle East there’s an interesting situation. There’s Peres, who I think is a good prime minister of Israel, compared with Begin and Sharon and what they did; that Mubarak is a fairly sensible guy; that Hussein has been trying hard, that Arafat is ready to talk peace; so the situation in the Middle East now or was–it was conducive to solving a lot of very complex problems there that are almost archetypal, they’re so ancient. And this country should be playing a role of statesmanship and going in there, and sorting it out as it did with the Marshall Plan after the Second World War. This country has shown great leadership in the past. It certainly isn’t doing it now. And the whole world is condemning this country.
[8] And what scares me is as the world condemns it, it says, “We’re the greatest! We’re the best!” The Rambo mentality. But that’s what Hitler did! As the whole world condemned him, as he went into the Sudetenland and Austria and Czechoslovakia, he didn’t take any notice. And the German people totally stood behind him and said, “We’re the greatest!” And he said, “We’re the greatest!” And they believed him, like a father. And the same thing is happening in here. Now, Hitler killed fifty million people, about–this country could blow up the world!
[9] But it’s the same dynamic that’s occurring now that occurred in Germany. I know that some of you will find that offensive but I’m now reading a book by Alice Miller, who’s a famous psychoanalyst in Germany, who really hasn’t understood a lot what happened in the Third Reich and is trying to analyze it. And she’s talking about Hitler’s childhood, and how on earth the Germans got themselves into that situation, the most civilized nation in the world. From whence came Mendelssohn, and Bach, and Beethoven, et cetera. And what she says is that many Germans were brought up in very dictatorial homes where there’s quite a lot of child-beating and where the child’s instincts for vitality and enthusiasm and life were suppressed by these sort of parents that were brought up to be very good. And many of us were brought up like that too. I was. I was beaten as a child, as was Hitler, so I sort of understand this–and so was Reagan. His father was an alcoholic and beat him, quite severely, and this is described in that book by Lloyd DeMause. And the Germans grew up to respect authority and to do anything they were told to do like children. And Hitler became the authority, the father figure. And Himmler, and Eichmann and all the rest obeyed authority above all else. And when they were psychoanalyzed after the war, after they gassed millions of people, they’re found to be clinically sane. Clinically sane. So you don’t have to be insane to do the most insufferable evil in the world.
[10] And what I’m seeing in this country is that the people don’t want to be adults. They want to be children with a Daddy. And I spoke recently… Where was I? Pittsburgh? No. Marquette? No. I’m at Marquette now, aren’t I? So I was at a college somewhere recently, in Pennsylvania somewhere. And I was told that on the night of the Libyan crisis that the student’s father found it really frightening. Reagan came on, spoke for ten minutes, and they went out thoroughly reassured. And what they’re looking for is a Daddy to comfort them and make them feel better. And we have abrogated our adulthood to a man who is really not even a daddy himself! It’s a very serious situation. And what we have to learn is that we’re the adults and we’re the parents for our children and in a democracy, the President is not your leader! You are his leader. He is your representative: that is what a republic or a democracy means! They represent you. [applause] Yeah! [applause]
[11] And I don’t know why the people abrogate–their responsibility. I think it’s hard to invoke an active democracy when people’s tummies are full and when they feel comfortable and they’re warm and not cold, et cetera. And when there are so many things on television you can buy and there are so many choices that you don’t have time to think about anything else. But it’s a very serious situation.
[12] I will, I think, tell you now about my meeting with the President because it’s relevant to what I’ve just said. Umm . . . Oh, I’ll go just back to Libya for a slight moment. Libya is an ally with the Soviet Union. And the world is laced with nuclear weapons, they’re everywhere. And any war in the world right now could induce a nuclear war and I’ll go into that later. But war is obsolete. Period. And that’s what Einstein’s meant when he said, “The splitting of the atom changed everything, save man’s mode of thinking.” He still thinks he can fight, thus we drift towards unparallel catastrophe, in other words nuclear winter and the end of life on earth.
[13] So war is obsolete, and yet you’re right next to a SAC base here, right? Your economy depends upon the military, you got your ROTC here on campus. I mean it’s ridiculous–kids being dropped into the army these days? Any war will lead to a nuclear war! [applause] It’s obsolete! You’ve got–um–I just passed a whole lot of ice removing things there, and they’re all painted with camouflage, and I said, “What are those? They’re part of the National Guard?” Obsolete! Yeah, it’s good for them to remove ice and snow from the streets, that’s what they should be doing, looking after the people–not being part of the system to blow up the world. And that’s what war is about now, period.
[14] The Falklands, you know they had aircraft carriers down there with them with nuclear weapons on them. And Argentina was within, we don’t know, years or months of building her first hydrogen bomb. The Russians sided with Argentina, and America with Britain and there you are once again a confrontation between the super powers. There is no war in the world now which doesn’t involve a latent confrontation between Russia and America. War is obsolete. Now people used to say, well people say, “Well, war is natural.” We’ve always killed each other. Anyway, it’s fun, right? Lots of guys say it’s fun. I bet a lot of guys are joining up right now, they can’t wait to get out there. It’s called androgen-poisoning. Anyway, they used to say that slavery was natural. We, you know, we have to have slaves. Then we learnt that that wasn’t natural. We used to sacrifice our children to the gods. You’d be very surprised if the woman next to you stood up tonight and said, “Well, goodbye, good night, I’m going home to sacrifice Mary to the gods tonight.” That used to be routine. We learnt [sic] that that was uncivilized. We used to be cannibals. They still are in New Guinea; they eat their brains, get sleeping sickness and die. But we have civilized ourselves.
[15] Now the next step is and the most significant step in 3 million years of human evolution is that war is obsolete. And if we can overcome that, we’ll grow up emotionally, and we will propagate the human race further. If we don’t, we’ll know in our lifetime that we failed, you and I. ‘Cause it’s soon. We’re right on the verge. Right on the verge.
[16] In a while I’ll go into how a nuclear war could start by accident, but let me go back to my meeting with the president. I met his daughter Patti years ago, she heard me talk in the Playboy Mansion in Hollywood with Hugh Hefner some years ago. And she and I were talking to film stars with Paul Newman–and when you talk to film stars you have to be very emotional ’cause they are very emotional and I was. And she came up and said, “I want you to see my dad ’cause I think you can change his mind.” And I said, “Well, I will see him, but on one condition–I don’t want Baker or Ed Meese there or Deaver, I want to see him alone. So she rang up in a week and said, “We’ve got an hour, with him.” So I met him in the downstairs library and he came in all affable, nodding his head the way he does [laughter]. He was… he didn’t know where to sit so he found a place and I sat right next to him so I could hold his hand intimately. And which I did.
[17] I started off by saying “You probably don’t know who I am.” He said, “Yes, you’re an Australian. You read On the Beach when you were a young girl, and you’re scared of nuclear war.” I said, “That’s right!” He said, “I too believe in preventing nuclear war, but our ways to prevent it differ. I believe in building more bombs.” That is correct–he is building seventeen thousand hydrogen bombs right now. If you want to read the whole transcript, buy my book, Missile Envy, which is for sale downstairs, I believe.
[18] Anyway, then he said, “The Russians are totally evil godless communists.” So being a good clinician, I asked him for objective data and said, “Have you ever met one?” And to my surprise he said, “No.” That’s the sign of clinical paranoia! Knowing something without having objective evidence. All right? You have to know that.
[19] Then I wanted to talk to him about his great responsibility towards the world and how he could be a famous statesman like Nixon was, who had the temerity to go to China and make friends with a billion Communists. Right? So, once and for all let’s get this straight, this issue has nothing to do with Communism because America has one billion Communists on her side–far more than Russia has on hers. All right? So let’s get that out of the way [applause]. Communism is not the issue! We’re friendly with the Communists in China. We’ve just been there. I verify to you that they are definitely Communists [slight laugher]. And they don’t have horns and purple tails. They’re ordinary people. Okay.
[20] So then he didn’t want to listen to the medical effect of nuclear war, wasn’t interested, but moved into sort of anecdotes about numbers and strategies and numbers of bombs and planes and stuff. And it was all wrong. Everything he said to me was inaccurate. So I let him anecdote on as he does, then I’d stop him and I moved to correct him in each point, point by point. Now there are two things: one is that he didn’t listen to me and wasn’t interested in what I had to say, and two, he had no background knowledge to talk to me about any of the points he’d brought up! None!
[21] And then he said, “Look, I took some notes before I came down,” reached in his inside pocket, and pulled out some paper, read to me that people who work for the nuclear freeze are either KGB Jews or Soviet agents. And I said to him, “But that’s in the Reader’s Digest!” He said, “No, it’s my intelligence files.” It was verbatim from John Barron’s article in the Reader’s Digest, just recently published. Patti told me he does religiously read the Reader’s Digest–he rarely reads books: from his daughter’s mouth. Then at one point, she said, “I know that what she’s saying is right because I have a Pentagon document to prove it.” He looked at her and he said, “That’s a forgery.” And I think the thing that impressed me most though is that we’re both deeply and profoundly disturbed at the end. And he totally lacked any empathy. Not for me, I was a stranger. But for his daughter, who he obviously loves. And I thought, “How can a man like this be such an actor, so that he hypnotizes this great body of people in this country?” And then he left.
[22] And I was in a state of deep shock, and so was Patti. We just collapsed into each other’s arms when he left. And I went back into my hotel and thought, “Well, I’ll get a bit of light reading tonight to make myself feel better.” And I bought Time magazine, and on the cover was his picture, and inside was an article verifying everything I just seen. He’s ignorant. He’s obstinate. He won’t read his briefing papers. He sees his presidency as acting, so he’ll read a little bit before his press conference, period. He makes decisions off the top of the head with no background knowledge at all, like Star Wars and everything else; that he has no friends, his only real friend is Nancy–he’s even ostracized from his kids. And it was like you know, you have a lump in your neck and you think, “Oh, it’s a bit scary, I won’t go and see the doctor.” And after six months you do and they take a biopsy and they ring you up and say, “Well, it’s Hogkin’s disease-which is cancer.” It was the same sort of feeling, of deep and profound shock to’ve [sic] actually seen it.
[23] And you know, what I’m saying, you know already, because it’s been written about in books and articles, time after time after time. Yet here’s this man who’s a hypnotist. He’s hypnotized everybody. And I say, “Yeah, even though people don’t agree with his policies, they all follow him.” And that is a most dangerous phenomenon and one that I can’t understand as a physician with some psychiatric background. Except the only thing I can compare it with is Germany, and what the Germans did. They felt insecure after the First World War, and here this man rose up and said, “You’re the greatest, they’re the evil ones, and we got to kill all of them, but you’re the greatest.” And they all said yes to him and off they went. The same thing’s happening now, but it’s much more dangerous.
[24] Now let’s go back to the beginning of the arms race and do a little history. Einstein thought that Hitler was building nuclear weapons and it all goes back to that blasted man Hitler. And Hitler was trying in a way to develop nuclear weapons, but he failed. However, this country did not fail. And they set up the Manhattan project, a huge scientific endeavor and built 3 bombs, using E=mc2. And Einstein was a great prophet, a great scientist, but unfortunately he did a terrible disservice to the human race, but maybe someone else would have discovered that sooner or later anyway. But he was a true genius. And the first bomb was called “Trinity.” Note the name–not an appropriate name for a nuclear weapon. Before they blew it up in New Mexico to test that they thought the whole world could be rendered critical and be enveloped in fire and they’re worried about that. So they went back and did the calculations but the probability remained the same. So they decided they go ahead anyway and blow up the bomb and see what happened.
[25] So they did. And when it blew up, they said they’d never seen anything like it. They said the desert in which it blew up suddenly became minute as it was filled with violet-blue light and the sound of thunder occurred and it seemed to go on forever. And Oppenheimer said to himself as he watched it–he was the scientist as you know who really built the bombs–he said “I have become death, the destroyer of a world.” And after the war he said that “for the first time, physicists have known sin.” And they still know sin. For those of you who doing physics, probably the only jobs you’ll be able to get now are building bombs.
[26] The second bomb was called “Little Boy.” “Little Boy.” And indeed, a little boy in Hiroshima was reaching out to catch a red dragonfly on his hand against the blue of the sky. And at age fifteen, on August the 6, 1945, there was a blinding flash, and he disappeared. And so did thousands of other people. They were vaporized. And they left behind them, the shadows on the pavement. And if you go to Hiroshima to the museum, there are shadows of people–that’s all they left, their memorials. A woman was running, holding her baby, and she and the baby had been charcoalized, like on a broiler, turned into a charcoal statue.
[27] And I could go on. The clinical distinctions you should understand people’s eyes were melted as they watched the bomb explode; they just ran down their cheeks. People are still dying now of cancer, years later. The incidence of cancer in Hiroshima is increasing. We haven’t found the maximum time through the maximum number of cancers to occur, following exposure to massive doses of radiation.
[28] Some people escaped and ran to the only Christian center in Japan, thinking “America, America would never bomb a Christian city, Nagasaki.” And they arrived 3 days later for the second bomb, called “Fat Man.” And the Japanese will say, “Well, we can understand the second bomb, but–the first one, but why did you blow up the second?” A legitimate question. Indeed, of a Judeo-Christian nation with the Constitution such as yours. Genocide.
[29] Now the victors in the war never have Nuremberg Trials. The fire bombings of Dresden and of Tokyo, the two nuclear weapons used. This is the only nation that ever to have used [sic] nuclear weapons. There has been a nuclear war–one. But the ones who were tried were of course the Germans and they deserved to be. But it wasn’t unilateral–the damage and the horror and the grief and the wickedness. And so we moved from war where soldiers fought each other to mass genocide of civilians–women and children–and it became legitimized.
[30] And after the war, they tried to disseminate the knowledge of nuclear energy so that no one would build bombs; it failed. And if you remember too, the Russians were our allies in the Second World War. Go back and read the newspapers during the Second World War. They were our best friends! And the Second World War was won on the Russian front, where Hitler deployed most of his battalions. Most of his battalions. And I remember when I was a little girl, my mother used to talk about Hitler killing Jews when I was two. And I used to have nightmares about it. She knew in 1940, when most of the American press was not talking about it! Hitler was an ally of this country, not an ally, but the press supported him until 1938, ’til Kristallnacht, when they burnt the synagogues and destroyed the shops of the Jews.
[31] I’ve lost my train of thoughts. I do that in the middle of my speech sometimes… What was I leading to? Jane? Come on! I was making a good point. Come on, someone prompt me!
[32] Yeah, the Soviets were the allies. So, if you go back and read the papers during the Second World War, the Russians were our friends, definitely our friends and allies. And there was a lot talked about it. Then, immediately the Second World War ended, the Russians became enemies, and they replaced Hitler and the Germans in the American psyche. And to this day I don’t understand why. I’ve gone back and read the history, and I do not understand why, except that Truman had a Defense Secretary who wanted to hate and he hated the Russians and so they became the enemy.
[33] So American decided to develop nuclear weapons on the theory that Russian wouldn’t be so–was a bit stupid and would never get the secret. Within four years Russia build her first A-bomb. Then Edward Teller, the father of the Hydrogen bomb, built the hydrogen bomb, which uses an atomic bomb as a trigger mechanism and releases the energy of fusion released inside the sun. Huge bombs, cheap to build, easy to build, and huge. Like, twenty million times of TNT, when the Second World War only came to only four million tons. Like one bomb containing more energy than all the bombs used in the history of the human race. We got thirty thousand of them now, Russia’s got twenty thousand. Within one year Russia built her first. And so the spiraling arms race again, led every step of the way by the billions in technology of America, except one. Blindly and stupidly copied and followed by the Soviet Union, who are still into power games like little boys, which has always caused wars. They want to be, quote, “super powers,” for some reason.
[34] Okay, now, in the sixties, Robert McNamara who is the Secretary of Defense, the Kennedys said that if America had 200 bombs that was enough to kill one third of the Russians, and that became the policy of deterrence. If they did something that we didn’t like, we’re gonna kill one hundred million people. Now, I want you to ponder that, briefly. Hitler killed fifty. America was prepared if necessary to kill a hundred million people. Twenty years after Hitler died. A country with a Judeo-Christian Constitution: “Thou shalt not kill!” And so, America lost her soul. And she had a soul, I can remember when I was a little girl, my father used to take me down to the American ships in our harbors. These lovely sailors, they were. In white clothes. They were missing their children. They used to give us these sticks of chewing gum. I’ve never seen them before. And chocolate, we hadn’t seen chocolate because it was rationed. Nylon stockings for my mother. And they saved Australia! America saved Australia. We were so grateful. But something happened, and it was the nuclear age. And it was old modes of thinking, that’s what it was.
[35] Anyway, at that time, the Air Force had all the bombs and the Army and Navy were very jealous. If you know anything about the services, you know the hostility between the Army, Navy, and Air Force far surpasses the rivalry between Russia and America. The latter is used to justify the former, and you know that, don’t you? And that’s been one of the main causes of the arms race. The Russians are coming–we need another missile. The Russians are coming–give us an airplane. Always. Just read the history of the arms race, and the appropriation.
[36] So they diversified so everyone can have bombs. So now we’ve got thirty thousand bombs, when two hundred was enough to kill a hundred million sons and daughters of God. And Reagan says he is not strong enough! One wonders what his deficit is. And he’s building seventeen thousand more now, and Russia’s got–we’re building about ten new bombs today, in the biggest build-up the world’s ever seen. And he says he’s for the elimination of nuclear weapons. That’s called the “big lie.” And Hitler thought of that when he was in jail before he wrote Mein Kampf. The big lie–don’t tell little lies like Nixon, ’cause everyone sees through it. You tell big ones and no one see through it. Do you know what Hitler said? I read it the other day: “It’s a very fortunate thing for leaders that people don’t think.” Isn’t that so true?
[37] Okay, now, deterrence–I want to briefly talk about deterrence from a more mechanical perspective. Deterrence, which this country has always had as a policy, as has Russia, means that if the Russians bombs us, at the end when we’re all dead, we’ve got enough bombs to bomb them and kill all of them. That’s what deterrence means. But it was always a fallacy, because if you blow up one bomb, two hundred miles above America, it sends up with a huge surge of voltage called EMP, or electro-magnetic pulse, which melts all wires and microphones, television, radio, telephone, communication systems, missile launching systems, and the whole country’s paralyzed with one bomb. In other words, if one country launches first, the other one is paralyzed and they can’t respond, so deterrence has always been fallacious. Okay? So, that’s number one–stupid thing. Number two, I can’t think of another word for it, number two, Reagan has moved from deterrence to a first strike nuclear war. Did you know that your country has an official policy to develop the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war fought over six-month period–which itself is totally fallacious. For several reasons. Nuclear war is going to take about an hour to complete quite actually, because once a missile is launched, the other satellite sees the attack and they press their button, and it’s all over within about an hour. Number one, so it can’t last the six months. Number two, if there’s a nuclear war now, it will induce nuclear winter and the death of all life on earth. The Pentagon even admits that and I’ll explain that in a minute.
[38] First, though, I want to go back and describe nuclear war just briefly. Hands up those who have never heard the description of a bomb dropping on a city and the medical effects. Well, I won’t do it then.
[39] Do it? Oh, okay. Well, this is called the bombing run, and it is to shock you into reality, so everything else I say you’ll be able to hear, even though some of it is going to be quite controversial. Okay?
[40] Every town and city in America is targeted, with the population of twenty-five thousand people or more. All the nuclear reactors are targeted, inside each one of those is as much long-lived radiation as that released by the explosion of a thousand Hiroshima-sized bombs. Right? All the military facilities are targeted. Your SAC base is targeted. If you’ve got a facility here for the National Guard–that’s targeted. There are so many bombs that railroad crossings are targeted. All the oil refineries, everything–like blanket bombing. And let’s pretend for instance the attack …
[41] Well, I think I need to go back and say that Gary Hart and Barry Goldwater held a Senate investigation into computer errors in the Pentagon. And they found in eighteen month period, they were 151 serious computer errors, so that we thought we were under attack. And the most serious was in November ’79 when somebody plugged a War Games tape into the computer and it made a mistake and said, “We’re under attack.” The men in the missile silo got the keys ready to launch the missile. Like this, this is my key (holds up pen). And out it goes. Three squadrons of B-52 headed towards Russia armed with nuclear weapons. At the seventh minute they had to notify the President, but he was not to be found. When the mistake was realized, we were thirteen minutes from nuclear war and that was reported in a small section in the New York Times near the obituaries. You know, it should have been headlines in every newspaper across the globe, okay? Last year there were 244 serious computer errors.
[42] Now, I just want to explain that new weapons that are going into Germany now don’t take thirty minutes to get there, so you have time to say, “Oh my God!” if the computer’s made a mistake, let’s call the President, let’s have a conference, yes we’ll press the button. They hit Moscow in six minutes. They’re called Pershing II, they’re American weapons. Now, in six minutes, by the time the satellite detects the attack, how do they detect the attack? There’s a lead sulfide system on the satellite that detect the fire coming out of the rocket, and then they radio back to the computers in the Kremlin. And that takes 6 minutes! So there is no time for human decision, meaning the Russians have decided they’re going to launch on warning–read by the computer receives a message and presses the button by itself–that’s called launch on warning. Hence, if you have a computer error lasting six minutes–that’s the end of the earth. Right? There have been computer studies that show as the number of computer errors increases, and as the transit time decreases, it’s only a matter of time for the accident of nuclear war occurs. That’s why senior people in the Pentagon are wandering the halls now, saying they predict it could happen within the next ten years. And a poll we just did of interested American people shows that 31 percent of them agree with the people in the Pentagon. So what I’m talking is you know, here it is–military experts, with people’s intuition, coinciding.
[43] Now, the Russians got annoyed about the Pershing IIs, so what did they do? They put submarines off the coast of Washington with missiles that hit Washington and the command centers within six minutes. Now that means when both sides go to launch on warning, particularly at a time of heightened international tension, like now! And almost certainly, I spoke to guy who I’ve seen, and he’s probably here, a doctor who I had dinner with, a urologist, who used to be in the Air Force, and it’s not infrequent for the forces to go into high stakes of alert from DEFCON five to four to three to two to one, before the button gets pressed. Now times of heightened international tension, and highest sense of alert, it’s assumed now that both countries go to launch on warning mode where the button gets pressed by computer. And it’s been estimated that if an international crisis lasts thirteen days, like the Cuban missile crisis did, and that we’re in now to a degree, there would be a 50 percent chance of accidental nuclear war occurring.
[44] That’s why I can’t sleep. The kids know this intuitively, although they don’t know the mechanical and mathematical calculations. And 75 percent of them don’t think they are going to grow up. Many of you are having nightmares at the moment. You’re scared out of your skins, and the reason why is that. That’s where we are. So life is very tenuous, the planet is terminally ill, we have an acute clinical emergency, and nothing short of giving up our lives and our careers and our jobs to save the earth will suffice. If you’ve got kids. And if you haven’t maybe you want have some in the future–do you? Yeah. What was I getting on to?
[45] Mhm? Medical consequences. Now, I want you to pretend we’re at a time of heightened international tension and the button has been pressed in Moscow by accident fifteen minutes ago. It could easily happen tonight–not easy, but it could. And we haven’t got our radios on. You know, you’re listening to the music, and it interrupts, and you hear “Wooooooooooh! This is just the emergency broadcasting system,” they say. Okay, well now what would happen is that all programs would cease, they would say, “We are under a nuclear attack, seek shelter.” Where would you go, okay? Now, this Air Force base is definitely targeted, and if you got a National Guard here this town is targeted. What’s the population of Marquette? Twenty-five thousand? Well there you are, you’re targeted, probably. Okay, so I’m going to drop a very big bomb on this city, it’s far too big for this particular place but you’ve got an Air Force base here so you’ll get a MERVed foot print–what’s that? MERVing means “multiple independent re-entry vehicles,” that means putting ten bombs on one missile, like the MX, the Russians have missiles with numerous bombs on them. And instead of dropping a big bomb, it’s more effective to kill more people by dropping a lot of small bombs and having the interacting blast effects, because that kills more people, it’s more lethal. But in order to save the physics and not describe all that complex stuff, I’ll drop a big bomb, right here. And it’s going to come now in ten minutes. I want you all to just shut your eyes for a minute and imagine that you’ve got ten minutes left before I go on.
[46] Okay? Now it’s going to come in twenty times the speed of the sound, and land here and explode in the fraction of the millionth of a second, with the heat of the sun. And it’s gonna dig a hole three-quarters-of-a-mile wide and eight hundred feet deep right here, turning all of us, and the buildings, and millions of tons of earth below to pulverized radioactive fallout shot up in a mushroom cloud. Six miles from here in all directions–think of where you live–every building destroyed, concrete and steel melt, every person killed, most vaporized. Twenty miles from here in all directions people killed or lethally injured, so they’ll soon die shortly. Winds of five hundred miles an hour from the shock effect turn people into missiles traveling at a hundred miles an hour. And then of course you’re traveling at a hundred miles an hour and you hit a solid object and you’re dead from compound fractures, internal organ injuries, you can imagine, pulverized. The shock wave enters the nose and mouth producing acute pneumothoractic, an instant death, ruptures the lungs, it ruptures the tympanic membranes, the windows popcorn [sic] and shards of glass flying at a hundred miles an hour decapitate people and enter the human flesh. I’m quoting now from a book called The Effects of Nuclear War–a thick book–put by the Pentagon, with complex equations like how far will a piece of glass traveling at a hundred miles an hour penetrate human flesh. It’s like a recipe for Auschwitz, it made me feel like vomiting really, as a doctor.
[47] Everyone will be burnt, some vaporized, some charcoalized, some just third degree burns. And everyone will die. Some immediately, but some in a few days, in the most extraordinary agony. And you know, often people say, “Well, I don’t want to get depressed, I’m not coming to hear her talk.” And I often can visualize what they would be like walking around amongst the radioactive smoking wreckage looking for their children who have been vaporized. And the agony of knowing the world was ending. And the agony of knowing they didn’t have the guts to come and feel the pain beforehand and stop it.
[48] So that’s where we are. And the White House has been stockpiling up huge quantities of morphine, just in case there’s going to be a nuclear war. For pain relief! But we don’t know where its stockpiled, hasn’t been given to us. Anyway, we’ll all be dead and injured, our hospitals will be destroyed, and our syringes will be melted. Forty miles out if you look at the flash, just from curiosity, you’ll be instantly and permanently blinded from retina trauma. And then the whole area engulfed in the firestorm of three thousand square miles. A holocaust! So that everybody will die and if you’ve gotten to a fallout shelter, the fire is so intense that it uses up all the oxygen in the shelter and you die of asphyxiation and the blast and the fallout shelter becomes a crematorium.
[49] Now that’s the whole country. Every city and town. And the Federation of American Scientists say that if they attack the coast in summer, America will just burn, coast to coast, north into south, and just go up in flames. And it could happen tomorrow. And President Reagan didn’t want to talk about it. Or hear about it.
[50] And then last year the World Health Organization did a study and took only half of the number of strategic weapons available, because they couldn’t find anymore targets to hit. But don’t forget, it won’t be limited. It’s all set ready to go, the Russians don’t believe in limited nuclear war and we don’t either. So it’ll all be over within about an hour, for sure. But I want to describe to you what happened with the W.H.O. study. They targeted every significant town and city in the United States, Canada, Soviet Union, China, Europe. Imagine Europe, and the heritage! England, India, Vietnam, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Hawai’i, Guam, Cuba, and then some more. And they first found in the first hour alone, in this limited attack, one billion people were killed. One billion. And in the next two weeks, one billion more died of the effects I just described–that’s half of the world population.
[51] Now we’ve got something else to describe that’s recently been discovered. We didn’t realize, so they didn’t realize when they blew up the bombs in Bikini and in Nevada, that cities would actually burn, because they blew them up in the desert. And forests burn, and oil wells burn, and as they burn, a huge cloud of toxic black radioactive smoke will rise up into the troposphere and within weeks envelope the earth. And it will shut out the sun for up to a year, so it will be dark in the middle of the day. What will happen? Well, all the plants will die ’cause they have to have the sun for photosynthesis and glucose production and oxygen. The temperatures will fall to minus forty degrees centigrade, maybe in the middle of the summer. With snow storms, blinding snow storms, and hurricanes across the face of the earth, in the dark. And if you haven’t already been killed by what I just described–and there will be more than two billion from that–well, you’ll freeze to death in the dark pretty rapidly from that effect and it’s called nuclear winter. And we think it will end all life on earth. The amoeba, the paramecium, the algae, the like, most primitive forms of life, everything. We find the threshold for such an impact may only be a thousand bombs burning one hundred cities. The Pentagon has verified such studies, so they’re now trying to find ways to fight the nuclear war below the threshold for nuclear winter. America’s got thirty thousand bombs, thirty times nuclear winter, and she’s building seventeen thousand more.
[52] Now I want to go back to Nixon, who I consider, in retrospect, to be a great statesperson. He did a naughty thing; he did Watergate, and betrayed everybody. But he did some good things. He went to China and overnight made friends with the communist Chinese; who were more bitterly hated during the McCarthy era than were the Russians–One. Two, he went to Russia and established detente, thought it was better to negotiate arms control and reductions, exchange Bolshoi ballets, doctors, scientists working in space. Obviously a civilized way to proceed. However, there were group of right-wing intellectuals in the ’70s who got together, who didn’t like detente, who hated the Russians with a paranoia that was clinical. And, ah, they called themselves the Committee on Present Danger, they were founded in 1976 by Max Kampelman, who now heads the arms control group at Geneva, the arms control team in Geneva. And they had a philosophy which went like this: “You can’t trust the Russians ’cause they cheat on treaties.” Lie number one: there have been seventeen treaties negotiated with Russia on nuclear weapons, and neither side has substantially violated those treaties. The CIA is even saying it now. But I know the people who negotiate them, and who have monitored violations. There have been no substantial violations–apart from the fact that the White House lies to you all the time about that.
[53] Now if you can’t trust the Russians, you can’t have arms control, and if you can’t have arms control nuclear war obviously becomes inevitable, as we all realize. If nuclear war is inevitable, you have to prepare to fight and win it. And so this country now is preparing to fight and win a nuclear war, but that was the philosophy of the Committee on the Present Danger, which is what that committee was called. And it stems from ruling by Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of your great Supreme Court judges, who said that the First Amendment holds except in a crowded theatre where you are not allowed to cry “fire” because of the clear and present danger. The clear and present danger, in this instance, is communism, and you are not allowed to cry for nuclear war. Now when Reagan was elected, forty members of the Committee on Present Danger were appointed to his administration and they are the administration. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Schultz, Weinberger, Rostow, Kampelman, Nitze, Browne, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[54] Now, they had that philosophy, but what have they done about it? Well, in 1982, a document was leaked from the Pentagon to the New York Times. And it was a defense five year guidance plan for the next five years, and the heading says, “Pentagon draws our first strategy for fighting a long nuclear war: Committee on the Present Danger philosophy.” So what are they doing? They are building to use now so when a nuclear war, let me take you through the Pentagon’s logic, ’cause I’ve just taken you through the medical and scientific data that we have now about nuclear war. To win a nuclear war, you have to build very accurate missiles, if you take out New York City, you could explode a bomb about half a mile from the Empire State building and vaporize New York. You don’t need accuracy. We are called “soft targets.” “Hard targets” are the missile silos, and to take out a missile silos, you need deadly accuracy over a range of five thousand miles. So they’re building very accurate missiles, and if you knock out the Russian missiles before they press their button–then you win the nuclear war! That’s not thinking about nuclear winter or anything else, but you win. That’s the way their logic goes. When Caspar Weinberger was assailed by physicians who said, “But you can’t win a nuclear war,” he said, “Oh, I didn’t really mean win, I meant prevail.” And you look up Pentagon’s definition of what prevailing is, “After the nuclear war is over and we’re all dead, America has more nuclear weapons left than Russia does.” That’s the Pentagon’s definition of winning a nuclear war.
[55] I invite you not to believe a thing I’m saying, ’cause it sounds crazy. I want you to check up–don’t believe anything I’m saying. But it’s all referenced.
[56] Anyway, so the way you do that is you build accurate missiles. Now one CMS is armed with ten bombs, and each bomb is very accurate with a computer in its nose that goes and finds its target.
[57] Now the next one is a Trident, and that’s relevant to you, because you got the ELF system here, which is to communicate with the Trident, to tell them to launch their missiles in the first strike, preemptive first strike, a surprise strike.
[58] I wanna show you a Trident. This panel here represents one missile of a Trident, it’s got ten bombs on it–these pencil things are bombs. Each bomb is eight times larger than the Hiroshima bomb, and that’s the Hiroshima bomb up here, which killed a whole city, two hundred thousand people in a flash. Now I want to show you a Trident sub and I need two helpers–what about you two? [the president of the Student Nurses Association and another person step up to hold the unfolded paper across stage]
[59] Now I can talk about thirty thousand bombs, but you can look at this: there are twenty-four missiles, actually each missile can carry seventeen bombs, but these have got ten bombs on, so that makes 240 hydrogen bombs. That’s enough to destroy every major city in the northern hemisphere.
[60] Reagan is building thirty Trident submarines. The use of four Tridents could probably induce nuclear winter and the end of all life on earth. The Archbishop of Seattle calls this monstrosity the Auschwitz of Puget Sound, which killed–Auschwitz killed maybe two million people in the gas ovens–this would vaporize, within seconds, hundreds of millions of human beings. They’re building thirty. They’re about to launch the seventh, which would violate the SALT II treaty, which the Senate did not ratify, but the administration is openly considering violating by launching seventh Trident.
[61] Already in the ocean there are thirty-two submarines like these, only their missiles are not quite as accurate, called Polaris and Poseidon; they only carry about 160 bombs. Thank you.
[62] So we’re watching this for first strike. Then there is the Pershing II that I described to you, that takes six minutes to hit Moscow, that’s for decapitation of the Soviet leadership. What does it mean? You kill them before they press their button–that’s what decapitation means, chop their heads off. Now, and the other one is a cruise missile which is being deployed at your Air Force base out here. Cruise missiles are small weapons, small–now, they got about a bomb fifteen times larger than the Hiroshima bomb, but they fly beneath the radar, and they’re quite small, hugging the ground, with a computerized map in their nose. When they get to Russia they go and look for their target, and they are exceedingly accurate. Nine thousand of them are being built, or so, deployed on B-52s, B-1s when they’re built, on faster tech submarines, the old refurbished battleships like the Iowa and New Jersey, and on the ground in Europe. So they’re the first strike nuclear weapons.
[63] Now how do you launch a first strike? You have to knocks out the Russian satellites so they can’t see the weapon coming cause if they do, they’ll press their button, and your bombs will hit empty silos. So America is fast proceeding on developing anti-satellite warfare, although the Russians have unilaterally stopped testing anti-satellite weapons, and they’re twenty years behind in the technology anyway. So you knock out the eyes and ears of the Russians, you decapitate their leadership so they can’t press their button. Then you launch your first strike.
[64] Now, what if some of the missiles don’t get hit, and they actually get launched? Well then you have Star Wars. Star Wars is not to protect the American people–the only person in this country who really believes Star Wars will is the President. He’s deluded! He’s a deluded man, ’cause all the scientists who work on Star Wars, and the corporations who are working on it, making lots of money, know that it won’t work. It’s only being built to mop up a few of the missiles that get through the launch of the first strike. So it’s a sword–a shield behind which the sword of the first strike is launched. Are you with me?
[65] Now Star Wars is actually about hydrogen bombs in space, and each hydrogen bomb can only produce one X-ray laser beam, which can’t go through the air, can only go through space ’cause it gets destroyed through the atmosphere. When the Russians launch their missiles, if you hit them through the atmosphere there’s only one target, but when they get into space they release all their vehicles, which are the hydrogen bombs. So let’s say one missile has ten bombs so in space you have ten targets to hit as well, as they can put a million, aluminum decoys, so the computer won’t be able to tell which are bombs and which are decoys! And you’ve got hydrogen bombs up there, ready to hit the incoming bomb. And each hydrogen bomb can only hit one bomb, or one decoy, because it can make only one X-ray laser beam.
[66] The reason we won’t sign the Test Ban Treaty is because they’re testing bombs for Star Wars in the desert! Read a book called Star Warriors, by William Broad, who writes for the New York Times science section. There are young kids out in Lawrence Livermore who work under Edward Teller, who’s a little bit mad. And they are built–they are aged 20 to 30, they’re brilliant, they’re left brain animals, and so most walk with a slight lint to their head [laughter], they mostly come from very disturbed homes, they were mostly sociopaths, they want to escape the earth in space builders or blow up the evil empire. They sit on the Gulag Archipelago all the time, and they have their own hydrogen bomb tested in the desert! That’s what these tests are about in Nevada! Read Star Warriors. And so when we look up at space, we’re going to look up and see not just stars, but hydrogen bombs up there, that’s what it’s about.
[67] And you know how this is going to be conducted? By a battle management computer, which it will be in high orbit up there. It will be so complex a computer will have to program it, it will be de-bugged by a computer, it can never be tested, and it will be initiated by a computer.
[68] And anyway, what about nuclear winter? Because not only will first strike have to take out the missile silos, but the submarine pens which are in cities, and the airplane airports which are in cities, and other relevant military facilities. So it’ll cause nuclear winter. So this country has an active plan to develop nuclear winter and blow up the earth. The Russians do too with their deterrence, but they’re still into deterrence, not first strike nuclear war.
[69] Now what’s behind this administration? I want to describe to you how you’re losing your country. And it’s in grave danger–not from nuclear war, just nuclear war, but from a Constitutional perspective. The Committee on the Present Danger is one of the right wing committees, but over time, these right-wing people have developed very important think-tank called the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the American Security Council, the Hoover Institute, Georgetown University. And they fund, to the tune of millions of dollars, very brilliant young fellows write op-ed pieces to the New York Times, Boston Globe. Boston Globe editorial people have told me they get deluged with hundreds of op-ed articles per week from these think-tanks. And they’re so good: they are intelligent, they are well-written, they are logical–their basic premise is just evil. And they get printed, because, you know, the journalists don’t have time to write all the articles, they’re sometimes lazy. The White House is on the phone from 8 a.m. in the morning to the networks, pressuring and bullying the networks all day. These right-wing people are absolutely brutal in their treatment of the media. That’s why the media are so unilateral at the moment.
[70] Now who funds these right-wing think-tanks? Let me read you a list: Richard Scaife from Mellon Foundation, I was just in Pittsburgh where he hails from; David Packard, from Hewett Packard; one of the biggest arms corporations, Bechtel; Amway, Reader’s Digest, Hunt Oil, Holiday Inn, Hertz Rent-a-car–Hertz is funding the fellows that work at Lawrence Livermore on Star Wars–Coors beer, Sears Roebuck, Marshall Field, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Johns Manville, General Electric, Proctor and Gamble, Rockwell International–all are friendly multi-nationals. The business roundtables has become more and more conservative: GE, IBM, GM, DuPont, ATT–thank you for calling ATT! ATT isn’t about telephones, it’s about nuclear war! It’s into C-cubed-I: command, control, communications, and intelligence. It’s wired the world up like a ticking time-bomb, with the highest technology ready to explode any minute by accident or design. I feel like blasting out the phone, “Do you know that your company has wired the world up to explode?” But I know that the poor little operator wouldn’t be able to handle it! It’s not her fault any way, ’cause she thinks that she’s just a telephone operator and that’s all what ATT does.
[71] You can’t buy stocks now. For those of you who have stocks, you can hardly buy stocks now that aren’t related in some way or another to nuclear weapons and other weaknesses. This is a military economy, and of course it’s being financed by the corporations who make the weapons. And Heritage, and American Enterprise Institute, et cetera, are the propaganda wings for the military industrial complex. They make films, like the The Salt Syndrome, which ran out on every T.V. station before Reagan’s 1980 election, saying one, the Russians cheat on treaties, which is a lie; two, they’re ahead, which is a lie. Dr. Richard DeLauer, the scientist advisor to the Pentagon, has said that the twenty basic technologies that will influence the arms race in the next twenty years. America’s ahead in nineteen of them. Light years ahead. So that’s a lie. They showed the big dark and missiles coming through dark like the Russian bear–the subliminal psyche propaganda stuff. They were shown on every T.V. station in the country! So in the early ’70s America trusted the Russians with detente and Nixon; nothing changed in Russia except the Brezhnev got older and more Parkinsonian and more richer. Nothing changed except the American perception changed, from one of trust working together to one of mistrust. “Oh, but you can’t trust the Russians,” I’ve been told by a little girl on television, and that’s what everyone thinks now.
[72] So it’s been a brilliant propaganda exercise, paid for by the military industrial complex to keep you all frightened. And there’s a thing called the “fear funding cycle:” we elect the politicians, who appropriate billions for weapons, some of which is siphoned off to the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, American Security Council; they make propaganda films and op-ed pieces to keep the people frightened to elect more politicians who appropriate more money. As Goebbels said, who was Hitler’s propaganda minister, “You have to keep the people frightened all the time, ’cause if you don’t, they settle back, get comfortable, and then you can’t-don’t have permission to build weapons anymore.” So this whole thing is about money, that’s what it’s about, not Russians. Money. Period. [applause]
[73] And now, the universities, the scientists, are prostituting themselves before this. And you virtually can’t do science now without being funded by the Pentagon. Seventy-six percent of government RandD is now for military. It’s been cut for medicine, and for pure science, and for everything else. Meanwhile two-thirds of the world’s children are malnourished and starving. The average person… let me see here… for 1986, the average U.S. household will pay $5776–67 [sic] in federal taxes, out of that $3103 for military spending. The average person. And it’s not for defense, it’s for annihilation.
[74] How dare they do that?! And how can this intelligent, well-informed, well-educated country buy this–garbage. I nearly used a ruder word. Bullshit! Crap! I mean it is. Let’s–I mean, I wish we would speak the truth openly.
[75] Do you know why Gandhi was powerful? Because he said the truth is God, and he didn’t muck around with euphemisms or try to please people. He spoke the truth with a power that people followed: “Truth is God.” What would Jesus do if he came back now? Jesus didn’t say believe in me, he said, “Do what I do, we’re all the sons and daughters of God.” And we haven’t got guts to do the right thing, to save the creation.
[76] Now I want to talk about religion. In the Middle Ages, there was religion and there was no science. The man had a faith in God. Had to. And time was cyclical: birth led to death, day led to night, and then we discovered the clock and time became a pathway. And then we discovered the laws of God which we called “science.” And as we became cleverer and cleverer, we decided we were probably omnipotent ourselves, and we are. I mean, we’re going to find the cure for cancer. We may never. How arrogant! Well, we’ll find the cure to old age, I read in the New York Times. And so science became God and science would solve everything. And suddenly the scientists say–the scientists have said to us, “Oh my God, we made a dreadful mistake. We’re going to blow you all up.”
[77] And so what people have done? They’re desperate, they are having nightmares with good reason, so they turn back to religion. In one of two ways. In a conventional way, to the Catholic Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on Nuclear War. And all the other churches and religions have done the same thing. And in an aberrant way to the fundamentalists–who are preaching that nuclear war is going to be a good thing ’cause when it happens those who believe in this will go up and be Raptured up to meet Jesus in the sky!
[78] Now, I want you all on Sunday morning to turn on Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggert and Pat Robertson and watch them. I want you to watch how they are not really religious; it’s a religion of hatred, not love. How they are really preaching right-wing politics disguised behind the cross and the flag. And I want you all to watch it. [applause]
[79] They’re talking about Nicaragua, and the Contras. They’re talking about capital punishment. They’re talking about abortion. About homosexuality. About blacks. And about nuclear war and the evil empire. And how they get away with having tax-exempt status to do this, I just can’t imagine in this country, but they’re doing it. And up to a hundred million Americans watch them or listen to them every single week, which is about half of the population. And what they’re preaching specifically on this issue is that Revelations is true, the earth will be consumed in fire, which is Armageddon, and that that is nuclear war, and it’s going to start in the Middle East. And most Jews will be killed but the few Jews who survive and are going to be instantly converted to Christianity and go up and meet Jesus, and that the evil empire will be destroyed, which they designate as the Soviet Union. And that it’s a good thing and they call it the Rapture. And I saw Jerry Falwell on television talking about nuclear war–he’s written a book about it. He said, “Look, I don’t know what will happen to you people,” he said, “but when nuclear war comes I’ve got my bags packed, and I’m going straight up to meet Jesus.” I thought it was a little un-Christian of the man not to care about us–Jesus wouldn’t have talked like that. [applause]
[80] Two: I was listening to NPR the other night, this man said, “Look, you’re flying along on an airplane,” and he said, “Poof, suddenly the pilot disappears ’cause he’s been raptured up to heaven, the plane crashes and then nuclear war happens.” Now this is what they believe, they write about that, you can read a book called The Late Great Planet Earth, by Hal Lindsey, who sold millions of copies of his books. This is the culture of this country now, I kid you not. You’re intelligent, you see through that, but a hundred million Americans don’t. Now, if that wasn’t bad enough, President Reagan has had a fundamentalist minister for the last twenty years as his private minister. And he said, quote, that, “There were times in the past when we thought that the end of the world was coming, but never anything like this.” He said, “When it happens,” quote, “We will be a part of paradise.” He has said similar things about nuclear war, eleven times since 1968. Caspar Weinberger, he says, he thinks the end of the world is coming too. He has said, “I’ve read the book of Revelation, yes, I believe the world is going to end, every day I think the time is running out.” And he’s certainly helping the process somewhat.
[81] There are two people in Washington called the National Command Authority, who have the authority to press the button. They are the President and the Secretary of Defense. It’s a little bit like Jim Jones in Guyana who convinced four hundred people to commit suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. A self-fulfilling prophesy.
[82] James Robinson, who gave the prayers to open the Republican Convention last time, quote: “Any teaching of peace is heresy. It’s against the word of God.” That’s what they believe. Okay? Now, Reagan got Falwell to brief the National Security Council two years ago in the White House. And after Reagan was elected, he appointed quite moderate people to his administration to the distress of Falwell, Schlafly, and Helms. And I want you to refer now to two books called, Ominous Politics, by John Salmona, and Holy Terror, by Conway and Siegleman, to verify what I’m telling you, who’ve done research on it, ’cause it’s not openly available in the press.
[83] Where was I headed?
[84] And anyway, Falwell and Helms and Schlafly were very upset about Reagan’s appointees. So they met with him in the Oval Office six months into his first administration and they complained, whereupon he appointed to top-level and middle-level positions in all his administrations–Pentagon, State, HEW, et cetera–Fundamentalist Christians. And to give you an example. Well, James Watts was one, he used to pray on his floor every morning in his office, and he didn’t worry about the forests, because we aren’t going to be here much longer, to worry about forests? Okay, remember that? Well he was one. Now one of our doctors went to the State Department recently to talk about nuclear war. And as he was leaving one of the high level State department officials turned to him and said, “You’re worried about this, aren’t you, Doctor?” He said, “Yes I am.” And he said, “Well many of us here think it’s going to be a good thing.”
[85] Now it’s said in these books that the new religious activists are probably the infantry for the political right. Boy, have they got an infantry! And the New Right, and the Religious Right have extensive staff connections with the Reagan White House. They are the Reagan White House. They are the Reagan White House. And what are they preaching? Well, they are very political. They are overtly anti-communist, well anti-Russian, they are preaching Armageddon, they defend free enterprise and rampant capitalism, they are for the family–so was Hitler! Kirch, Kuchen and Kinder. Church-Kirch. Church, kitchen and children. Keep the women in the home, anti-ERA, anti-equal rights, because when women get out, they ask too many embarrassing questions, ’cause we are too smart! So keep the women locked up in the home. [applause]
[86] They’re pro-family, pro-family–whatever that means, I don’t know, but I think it’s Kirch, Kuchen and Kinder–how the last election was won, with brides kissing each other and butterflies and new houses going up. None of the issues are discussed at all. The Bible is absolutely true, although it contradicts itself all the time. They’re anti-Semitic, they’re anti-black, they’re anti-homosexual, they believe that the earth was created in 7 days, they are removing evolution from textbooks from schools–that’s like book burning–they’re removing books from schools like Catcher in the Rye, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It’s the same thing as Germany. They’re anti-abortion, life begins at conception and ends at birth. I respect people who believe that, umm, I think it’s an individual decision. They’re anti pornography: well, you know that’s fascism. Now one of the leaders of them, Paul Weyrich, he said, now listen to this: “We are different than previous generations of conservatives. We are no longer working to preserve the status quo, like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We are radicals, working to overrun the present power structure of this country.” So you’re about to lose your country. You are about to lose your country.
[87] Now what role is the press playing in this? A major role. There is no investigative journalism that I can see at the moment. There are no Woodward and Bernsteins. The press is being unethical in that they are not investigating things, they are totally push-downs, to Regean who gets down and lies everyday. And so does Weinberger. The American population are totally ignorant about this almost. Why are they being ignorant? ‘Cause the press aren’t teaching the people. Why are they a pushover for the president? How come he’s so captivating? He’s a hypnotist. He mesmerizes people. He cries, gets a lump in his throat. He’s the Pied Piper of Armageddon: “Come on children, come on.” Everyone says “Yeah!” And they all follow. Everyone’s feels uneasy in their souls, but they’re all following.
[88] And the rest of the world trembles in its shoes, as it absolutely can’t understand this country. And 90 percent of the people in the world don’t live in Russia or America. And they’re scared out of their skins. Eighty percent of Dutch people didn’t want those cruise missiles, they got them! Why? ‘Cause America threatened them. Most Canadians don’t want cruise missiles tested up there. Why are they tested? ‘Cause America threatened their industry–high tech and timber. What happened in Australia? My Prime Minister in 1975 was gonna nationalize our industries and kick out the multinationals. So what happened? The CIA got rid of the prime minister I helped to elect, in Australia, in my country. How do you think that makes me feel? Mad! And it’s not just happening in Australia. Marcos was a puppet. All those shoes belong to the American government. [applause]
[89] Baby Doc was an American puppet. Thatcher’s American puppet, I know Trudeau. Trudeau said that when they have those meetings with the world leaders, they don’t really know anything. And Reagan knows less, he says hello and greets everyone and then uses Maggie Thatcher as his front man. And she’s so intimidating to the men, they hardly say anything. Craxi and all the rest, they just sit there almost… with their legs crossed. [laughter]
[90] So, it’s very serious. It’s very serious, but what can the rest of the world do with this country? Nothing. And what are you going to do? Well, 75 percent of our kids know they’re not going to grow up. And that’s shown in poll after poll and not just here but in New Zealand and Australia. Can you imagine–when you were little children, did you know you are not going to grow up? Some of you did.
[91] Well it’s tragic, isn’t it? I can’t imagine a more tragic situation. The kids are having nightmares, they feel betrayed. And you might say, “Well, they’re just kids, I mean, kids don’t know, not half.” Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings comes the faith. Like the little 4 year old who said to me: “I am going to die, tonight. I didn’t know.” They’re right, every time. I gave a lecture once, and a fourteen year old prepubescent boy came up, sort of dishelved, and he shoved a dirty note in my hand and said: “Remember, people should be more afraid of nuclear war than they are to speak out against it.” And I looked at him, his face was trembling, and he burst into tears. And he said, “I’m so frightened!” And I took him in my arms as he sobbed, and I said, “We’ll fix it for you.” Will we?
[92] We’re deciding right now the fate of the earth. It could happen tomorrow, or next week, or next year. And we form committees, and we have meetings, and we talk to each other, and we’re very polite. We have bureaucracies, and it doesn’t do a damn thing.
[93] And what we’ve got to do is what Gandhi did: this needs revolution. Nonviolent, peaceful revolution. This needs us to be very provocative. What Gandhi and Martin Luther King did–they were very provocative. Gandhi practiced asymmetry. He went back to India, not with guns and soldiers, to take on the British, but with a loincloth. And he had a salt march. And he brought out the dark side of the British and exposed them and did them in.
[94] So that’s what we have to do. What’s our asymmetry? Well I think that there five millions of us, in September, after the summer recess, should take over the Congress. Just take it over. Move in, it’s ours. We pay for it. It’s our House of Congress. We take it over, there aren’t enough lavatories for five million people, it’ll be a big mess. Gandhi didn’t provide lavatories, there aren’t enough beds, there aren’t- isn’t enough food. Let’s be prepared to be uncomfortable to save our kids: and take it over. And what are our demands? Fifty percent reduction by 1990 and elimination by 2000. Easy. ‘Cause that’s what the Russians have proposed.
[95] So we do it! And we don’t leave until we do it. And we give up our jobs. Hold it–what about the money? Well, what’s money about? Saving money for what? The money’s going to be vaporized! The only way you can make your kids feel secure, is to work full-time to save their lives. And then even if it happens, you can look at them in the eye, as it’s happening, and you can say, “I tried.”
[96] And you can look up at your God and say, “I tried, God. I tried.”
[97] Money, that’s what it is. Money is God. That’s what it is in this country. It’s more difficult for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than a camel to pass though an eye of a needle. It’s called the bomb culture. E. L. Doctorow just wrote an essay in Nation magazine. For forty years this country has had a bomb culture, living under the shadow of the mushroom cloud everyday knowing that life could be extinct. So what can we do with it? Well, we practiced displacement activity. If you put rats in a cage and you threaten them with a lethal situation, they run away and do something totally irrelevant to that which threatens them. That’s what we do every day. Money! The stock market, and everyone talks about how much this costs, what they saved on that, what sort of mortgage this is, flying airplanes, those guys working on the computers all the time, everything is money. Every conversation I hear in the airport, restaurants, airplanes is money. It’s displacement activity with a mania. Money? That’s what not, that’s not what life is about.
[98] Life’s about relationships. It’s manic denial. Jogging? Oh, jogging! Getting our bodies fit, what for? To get vaporized! Well, we should be using that energy to prevent our bodies from getting vaporized. To preserve our eggs and sperm, so we make more babies, so that they can have babies, for the rest of time. Gourmet foods? Buy this plastic thing and you’ll be happy ever after! Doesn’t work, so you buy another one, and another one, and you watch television all the time. Psychic numbing! Don’t want to think about it, it’s too scary. Like we don’t think about dying, we’re all going to die, that’s the only sure thing we know–that you and I are going to die. And we don’t face death ’til we have to, ’til the doctor says you’ve got cancer. And it’s such a shock. Well, we’ve known it all the time, so we start grieving. Shock and disbelief. I’ll get another doctor, another opinion. Depression so profound you lose your sexual drive and your appetite. Terrible feelings. Anger! Railing against God that I’m going to die. And finally acceptance of death and the nurses know that–don’t you? And the doctors know that. That’s when we try and take the patients through, with a loving, caring attitude.
[99] But to face nuclear war is facing the end of our immortality. Facing the end of our children that we leave behind, or the books we write, or Beethoven, Brahms, and Handel, Renoir, Rembrandt. Europe! Everything. So we don’t do it ’cause it’s too painful but it’s much more difficult to repress the fear and use the energy to repress it than frontally face it and have the guts to do something about it. And then you feel better. If you get active, you feel better.
[100] There are forms out there that you can take for Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament. What’s that for? It’s to encourage women to run for Congress. Now women are whimps. They really are, they’re pathetic. Women get all exercised about this, and I say, “Run for Congress” and they say, “Me?!” Or their husbands say, “Don’t be silly, darling, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” and they retreat. It’s time that 52 percent of the Congress were women–not Thatchers, women. Okay? [applause]
[101] We’re also encouraging good men with a strong feminine principle, like all you guys here tonight, to run for Congress too. [applause]
[102] And men are very sensitive, as we women know, they’re much more sensitive than we are and fragile, that’s why they cover up all their sensitivity with all the other stuff. They’re very–they’re very sweet inside, these guys.
[103] We’re also encouraging people to use the democracy: who’s your local member? How do they vote? What committees are they on? And to use the democracy–’cause most of you don’t think you live in one, do you? How many of you here believe you live in a true democracy? Put up your hands. One. Two. Three! (raising her own hand) Why don’t you? Four. You know why you don’t? ‘Cause you haven’t ever used it.
[104] Look at that woman who stopped drunk-drivers. One woman lost a child and she stopped drunk-drivers. Look what I’ve done: I’m no one special! I just want my kids to live. I’ve never spoken in public, I make mistakes all the time. Get shot down and such. I don’t care. ‘Cause I’m doing God’s work, for my kids, to save the world. And you can all do that. And that’s what you have to do.
[105] So you can join WAND. When you join, write a check double the amount it says on the thing ’cause we need the money. [laughter].
[106] But more important than that. You’ve really got to be provocative, you’ve really got to be strong, and you’ve got to consider this in your souls. I’m going to retire ’cause I’m absolutely exhausted after 16 years. I’ve got nothing more to give. You might- I’m tripping over my words, you heard me tonight, I can’t enunciate words properly. But the hope for the world lies with you. Is there a Gandhi in this room? Is there a Martin Luther King? There is, and it could be you. You’ve all got brilliance, you’re all clever in your own special ways. I can’t tell you what to do, but you know what to do. Pray about it, the answers are there. But learn, read, gather the information ’cause that’s ammunition to use. You must be well-informed. Read Missile Envy–you’ll know a lot if you read that book.
[107] I want you to go home tonight, and before you go to bed, I want you to write a letter to your children or grandchildren, or to the children yet unborn. And tell them what you’re going to do tomorrow and every day ’til you die to save their lives. And do it. And don’t be nice. And stop being polite, and speak the truth with a clarity like a bell. And save the Earth. We–you and I–we’re only born for one reason. We were only born for one reason. We were born to save God’s creation. And if we fail, we’ll know it in our lifetime. Like soon. And if succeed, we will have done the most wondrous thing, that’s ever happened, I think, since man’s been here for 3 million years.
[108] We’re the curators of life on earth, we hold it on the palm of our hand, and it’s up to us, you and I, to decide whether it continues. And I believe in the goodness of people. I believe in the God within. And I know that if you make the right decision, each one of you can be as powerful as the most powerful person who ever lived. And that’s your mandate. And that’s why you were born. So good luck, and God bless you.
[109] Thank you. [applause]
This text used with permission from Helen Caldicott. All Rights Reserved.