Nonetheless, I am an optimist. Solar and wind energy are now more cost-effective, and many states require that they be implemented. While it is necessary to talk about radioactive trash and that every nuclear power plant raises electricity rates, the antinuclear movement must also spend some of its energy advocating solar energy. Then maybe we can win.
20
The Nuclear Age and Future Generations
Helen Caldicott
In 2007, Arjun Makhijani published a remarkable study called Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy. Originating from a symposium I had organized and a presentation given there by David Freeman, it showed that America could indeed be both carbon- and nuclear-free by 2050 by converting to alternative sources of energy. Solar panels could be installed on all houses as they have been in much of Germany, and, with enough wind west of the Mississippi to supply three times the energy America needs, windmills could be installed across the country. Yet, with a pathetic Congress in Washington and a president captive to corporations in the White House, nothing less than a revolution can realize this vision in the next fifty years.
When I first came to the United States in 1978, almost every American I spoke to said it was better to be dead than red. In other words, they would rather have had a nuclear war than be Communist. Against this backdrop of mass psychosis, Physicians for Social Responsibility and I recruited 23,000 doctors in 153 chapters and trained them to engage with the media, which was soon deluged with information. The media’s reaction was to question why doctors should be involved in what was essentially a political issue, not a medical issue. Our response was that it was a medical issue because nuclear war would destroy the human race.
We continued to organize symposia across the nation, which garnered further attention. People began to listen. The archbishop of Boston became concerned, having woken up one morning, seen a map in the Boston Globe showing what might happen in the event of nuclear attack (everyone vaporized in a five-mile radius; third-degree burns out to twenty miles; three thousand square miles in flames), and said, “I don’t think Jesus would like this.” Celebrities such as Lily Tomlin and Sally Field joined us, too—a boon as far as the media was concerned, because who wants to watch an Australian doctor in a tweed suit talking about the medical effects of nuclear war?
After five years, 80 percent of Americans were opposed to nuclear war, including Ronald Reagan. I remember coming out from a long meeting with the president, in which I felt I had not persuaded him, only to later hear him say that nuclear war must never be fought and can never be won. He then started working with Mikhail Gorbachev, who himself had seen doctors on television talking about the medical consequences of nuclear war. I remember, too, asking House Speaker Tip O’Neill to play our film The Last Epidemic on every monitor in Congress, and he did. He later said that supporting the nuclear weapons freeze was one of the most important moments of his career.
We organized a demonstration in Central Park, which turned out to be one of the largest demonstrations in American history. More than a million attended, including black lesbians from Harlem, Southern Christian Baptists, and Mormons from Salt Lake City. Reagan may have returned to talking about Star Wars and missile defense in America’s interests but by then almost the entire population of America supported an end to nuclear weapons. We had created a revolution—a peaceful revolution that contributed to the end of the Cold War.
It was education that did the trick. As Thomas Jefferson said, “An informed democracy will behave in a responsible fashion.” But the younger generations who now spend all their time tweeting and texting on their cell phones are not informed; they do not understand what they will inherit from the nuclear age, and that troubles me. Not only is there the possibility of future nuclear accidents, they will inherit massive quantities of radioactive waste, which no one knows where to store. This waste will leak, contaminating food and water, and ultimately induce epidemics of cancer and irreparable damage to our genes. Imagine our descendants waking up to radioactive food, to radioactive breast milk, to babies deformed because they were exposed to radiation in utero, to children diagnosed with cancer at the age of six. Meanwhile, the nuclear industry is only concerned with building further power plants; they are arrogant enough not to show any interest in cleaning up after themselves or in the harm that radioactive waste will cause in the future.
This harm encompasses genetic mutations, almost all of which cause disease and are found in recessive genes (most mutations in dominant genes are lethal). The problem is, as Hermann Joseph Muller’s Nobel Prize–winning experiments on drosophila fruit flies have shown, it can take twenty generations for mutations to manifest themselves as diabetes or cystic fibrosis or any of the six thousand diseases now known to be genetically inherited. From a medical perspective, therefore, it is absurd to conclude that because there have been no signs of genetic abnormalities directly caused by the nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the survivors have not suffered any damage to their genes.
The Japanese government has proposed allowing doses as high as two rems per year to schoolchildren, claiming the risk is low. An exposure at this level over five years—a total of ten rems—for a girl starting at age five would create a cancer incidence of around 3 percent, according to risk estimates in the BEIR VII report. Around three out of every one hundred girls—for boys the risk is lower—would develop cancer, and in one of those three, the cancer could be attributed to radiation exposure. The terrible impact, however, is greater than this. Imagine the fear and the guilt parents would feel knowing that their child might develop cancer as a result of such exposure, especially given the long latency period of most cancers. The Pentagon understood this when it evaluated the extent of contamination produced by the July 1946 underground nuclear bomb test at Bikini Atoll. Their report read:
Of the survivors in contaminated areas, some would be doomed of radiation sickness in hours, some in days, some in years. But, these areas, irregular in size and shape, as wind and topography might form them, would have no visible boundaries. No survivor could be certain he was not among the doomed and so added to every terror of the moment thousands would be stricken with the fear of death and the uncertainty of its time of arrival.
This is what is happening around Fukushima. This is what happened around Chornobyl.
We are in a serious predicament. We are facing the end of life on this planet. I once asked Carl Sagan if he thought there was any other intelligent life in the universe. He paused and said, “No. Because if any species had reached our stage of evolution, they would have destroyed themselves.”
We certainly seem to be bent on self-destruction. America and Russia own 97 percent of the hydrogen bombs in the world. Each country has about one thousand on hair-trigger alert, and about one thousand hackers attempt to infiltrate the Pentagon computers in a single day. The United States spends trillions of dollars on what is in effect socialized killing while the nation does not have a free health care system available like most civilized societies.
Global warming is also upon us. In Australia, we have had the hottest days we have ever had. I live in the middle of a forest of eucalyptus trees that explode with the heat. Ash falls from the sky as bushfires burn, while other parts of the country suffer severe floods. Meanwhile, we continue to export our coal to China, where it is burned, causing so much pollution that people find it difficult to breathe and are buying bottles of oxygen. We continue to manufacture more and more plastic, even when there is an island in the Pacific twice the size of Texas made entirely of plastic trash, which causes both intestinal obstruction and carcinogenic BPA and phthalate poisoning in the fish that feed on it and the birds that feed on the fish. We continue to allow fracking, which irreparably harms the environment. And all the while, the true god is money. All anyone believes in anymore is making more money, which is killing Earth.