Women's History Month - Helen Caldicott

A personal mission to literally “save the world”

from nuclear destruction.

Earlier this month I mentioned that during Women’s History Month I would be writing about some women that I admire. I would like to introduce you to Dr. Helen Caldicott, a woman who has dedicated her life to working for peace. Her list of achievements is incredible. She is the most articulate and passionate advocate of citizen action to remedy the nuclear and environmental crisis. The Smithsonian Institute has named her as one of the most influential women of the 20th Century.

"During the early portion of the twenty-first century, space power will also evolve into a separate and equal medium of warfare ... The emerging synergy of space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority will lead to Full Spectrum Dominance." - from U.S. Space Command Vision for 2020

When most of us think about the potential of outer space for future generations, we think of world communications, satellite navigation, and scientific exploration. U.S. Space Command, however, thinks about weapons. Believing that conflict in space and wars fought from space are inevitable, former President Bush called on the agency to weaponize outer space and thus provoke an arms race that could cost the United States trillions of dollars and could lead to the demise of the human race.

Helen Caldicott is recognized in every corner of the globe as the most visible advocate for peace in the world. In association with physicians and scientists, Dr. Caldicott and Bill Caldicott played a major role to educate the people of New Zealand and Australia about the vast dangers to health of nuclear production and development. Physician, humanist, impassioned advocate for nuclear disarmament and a true woman of peace is Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Dr. Helen Caldicott.

AWARDS/HONORS:
Nobel Peace Prize nominee
Peace Medal Award – U. N. Association of Australia- shared with her husband Bill Caldicott
Integrity Award (John-Roger Foundation), which she shared with Bishop Desmond Tutu
Peace Award (American Association of University Women)
SANE Peace Award
Gandhi Peace Prize

She is the author of the following books:

- Nuclear Madness

- Missile Envy,

- A Desperate Passion- An Autobiography

- If You Love This Planet

- Nuclear Madness

- The New Nuclear Danger: George Bush’s Military Industrial Complex (2001)

- Nuclear Power is Not the Answer (2006)

- War In Heaven (March 2007).

(In War in Heaven, Caldicott and Eisendrath show that the United States itself is today the principal obstruction to passage of an international treaty banning weapons from outer space.)

She has developed dozens of video tapes and films, written scores of articles which have appeared in nearly every major newspaper and magazine; spoken at major universities throughout the world and has met with heads of state everywhere.

Dr Caldicott, has devoted the last 36 years to an international campaign to educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age and the necessary changes in human behavior to stop environmental destruction.

Born in Melbourne, Australia, August 7, 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 and devoted herself to the treatment of children afflicted with cystic fibrosis until 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 co-founded the 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. The international umbrella group (International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War) won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. She also founded the Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND) in the US in 1980.
Both PSR and WAND have been at the forefront of the nuclear-freeze movement ever since. International PSR received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. For more than two decades she has tirelessly and eloquently spoken to groups around the world on behalf of nuclear disarmament.
She moved back to the United States in 1995, lecturing at the New School for Social Research on the Media, Global Politics and the Environment, hosting a weekly radio talk show on WBAI (Pacifica), and becoming the Founding President of the STAR (Standing for Truth About Radiation) Foundation.

Dr Caldicott has received many prizes and awards for her work, most recently the Lannan Foundation's 2003 Prize for Cultural Freedom, 19 honorary doctoral degrees.
She also has been the subject of several films, including Eight Minutes to Midnight, nominated for an Academy Award in 1981, 'If You Love This Planet', which won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1982, and 'Helen’s War: portrait of a dissident', recipient of the Australian Film Institute Awards for Best Direction (Documentary) 2004, and the Sydney Film Festival Dendy Award for Best Documentary in 2004.

Dr Caldicott currently divides her time between Australia and the US where she lectures widely. She is also the Founder and President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute (NPRI), headquartered in Washington DC. NPRI’s mission is to facilitate a far-reaching, effective, ongoing public education campaign in the mainstream media about the often-underestimated dangers of nuclear weapons and power programs and policies.

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I really admire Dr. Caldicott who has dedicated her life's work to global peace and

I feel safer knowing that she currently makes it a full time mission to prevent nuclear war.

Walk for Nuclear Free Future to U.N., NYC

Walking for a Nuclear Free World

Last month four different organized walks converged and crossed over the George Washington Bridge in New York City. People came from many regions of this country and as far away as Japan and Australia to convey the message to the United Nations “Now is the time to eliminate all nuclear weapons forever.”

Several of the walkers have close links with an organization started by Hiroshima’s mayor, Mayors for Peace<www.mayorsforpeace.org>, building opposition to nuclear weapons at the crucial local level of government.

The Northern Route, wound through upstate New York and then down the Hudson River Valley, where it touched deep history that precedes (and explains) our nuclear dilemma. Walkers in New York State passed through the Onondaga and Oneida Nations, learning of nuclear dumping in this region and of the powerful peace testimony of the Iroquois confederacy.

The New England Route traveled through Vermont and coastal Maine, Boston, Rhode Island and Connecticut. My friends, the monks and nuns of the Peace Pagoda in Leverett MA initiated this walk. I was able to spend some time with them in Springfield, MA where they stopped for a while to hear Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak at a local college, before they continued their journey to NY.

The Southern Route walkers started Oakridge TN, where uranium for the WWII bombs was enriched. They traveled through winter storms across mountains that are now being dismantled for coal. They walked to Pennsylvania and approached Three Mile Island where they looked closely at the devastation wreaked by both coal and nuclear power sources.

The D.C. Region Walk started on April 8 and was organized by Proposition 1 and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. They traveled 100 miles from the nation’s capital.

On May 1 all four groups arrived at the George Washington Bridge and walked to the UN building together.

As the United Nations began its review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty the walkers united their voices in unison. “Now is the time - to eliminate all nuclear weapons forever. Let the nations agree on a verifiable timetable for global nuclear abolition.

Now is the time - to begin making our communities, our country and the world a safer, healthier, sustainable place for all.”

After the march to the U.N., monks, nuns and supporters fasted for four days and chanted across the street from the UN as the NPT meetings progressed and activists also entered the UN to give the testimonies gathered during the walks.

There was very little written in the media about this spiritual walk made by thousands of people.

More than 23,000 nuclear weapons still exist in our violent world and more nuclear power plants are in the works for the first time since Three Mile Island. We have an opportunity to make a difference.

Go to http://www.2020visioncampaign.org for an update on what happened at the United Nations.

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This is a very serious situation - have you contacted President Obama or your government leaders to speak up against nuclear weapons and destruction to the earth that the storage of nuclear materials has contributed? If not, please consider doing so today!

peacesojourner

First British Nonviolent Protest 1/11/1952

January 11^th, 1952, marks the anniversary of the first British Nonviolent protest against nuclear weapons: 10 persons sat down on the steps of the War Office in London, England. The well recognized peace symbol emerged from these actions.

The U.S. government had tested the world's first thermonuclear device in 1952 and the Soviet Union had made its own thermonuclear breakthrough the following year. The first U.S. H-Bomb test was conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) on March 1, 1954. It occurred at Bikini atoll, located in the Marshall Islands, a United Nations trust territory in the Pacific. The AEC had staked out a danger zone of fifty thousand square miles (an area roughly the size of New England) around the test site. But the blast proved to be more than twice as powerful as planned and generated vast quantities of highly radioactive debris. Within a short time, heavy doses of this nuclear fallout descended on four inhabited islands of the Marshall grouping--all outside the danger zone--prompting U.S. officials to evacuate 28 Americans working at a U.S. weather station and 236 Marshallese. Thanks to their rapid escape, the Americans went relatively unscathed. But the Marshall Islanders, who were not removed from their radioactive surroundings for days, soon developed low blood counts, skin lesions, hemorrhages under the skin, and loss of hair. Over time, the islanders also suffered a heavy incidence of radiation-linked illnesses, notably thyroid cancer and leukemia.

Beginning in 1954, an uneasiness about nuclear weapons emerged around the world. An earlier surge of antinuclear activity, launched by the shock of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, had been promoted with some effectiveness by atomic scientists, pacifists, world government advocates, and hibakusha (Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb). Starting in 1954, however, the rapid development of the hydrogen bomb--a weapon with a thousand times the power of the bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima--began to revive the idea that humanity was teetering on the brink of disaster. Atmospheric nuclear weapons tests, particularly, stimulated public concern. They scattered clouds of radioactive debris around the globe and, furthermore, symbolized the looming horror of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear war. Deeply disturbed by this turn of events, many of the early critics of the Bomb renewed their calls for nuclear arms control and disarmament.

Statements from the Catholic Church during these years touched on similar themes. Pope Pius XII devoted much of his 1954 Easter message to a critique of "new, destructive armaments, unheard of in their capacity of violence," which "could cause the total extermination of all life." He asked: "When will the rulers of nations understand that peace does not exist in an exasperating and costly relationship of mutual terror?"

Throughout history, numerous visual images have symbolized peace. These include images of doves, olive branches, broken rifles and the sign language V used by Sir Winston Churchill during World War II. Later signaled by hippies to represent both peace and love.

One peace sign that is recognizable to many is the peace sign designed by Gerald Holtom. It is the familiar round circle with a line down the middle and two slanted lines, about half the length of the vertical line. The slanted lines attach to the vertical line, slightly below its direct middle, and continue to the perimeter of the circle.

While the sign initially stood for nuclear disarmament, it quickly became a symbol for peace, adopted in the 1960s by the strong anti-war and counterculture movements occurring in both England and the United States. Buttons with the peace sign first made their way to the US in 1960.

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In 2010 there are still millions of people world wide who demonstrate against nuclear weapons, war and violence, and still these things all exist.

Why are we not being heard?