“We’ll be lucky if we survive a nuclear war induced by accidents. Human beings are fallible. And we’ve got weapons with which we have to be infallible. And America’s spending $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years replacing every single nuclear weapon, missile, ship, plane with new ones. Why? Because who runs your government? Your government is full of corporate prostitutes who take money from [inaudible]* Boeing, Northrop Grumman, BAE, all of these revolting weapons industries. They spend over a trillion dollars a year on weapons, on death. It’s not the department of defense, it’s the department of death. Because these weapons are made to kill people. Half your taxes go to death every year. How come you let these evil, evil corporations subsume you, take your money when you don’t even have a free medical care system like we do in Australia, when you don’t have free education, where people are starving in the streets, where huge numbers of your people are homeless? How can you allow that to happen? Because people have shares in the military industrial complex, the rich people that Bernie talks about. These military industrial complexes, they run the government. They give the money to the congress people to run for their elections. In Australia voting is compulsory. If we don’t vote we get fined. Your government is run by– the whole government is run by the military industrial complex.” – Dr. Helen Caldicott in For the Wild podcast episode 203. on Nuclear Narcissism
*If you’ve listened to the podcast and know the name of the company Dr. Helen Caldicott says in this spot please let me know!
As Dr. Helen Caldicott states numerous times in her interview with Ayana Young on the For the Wild Podcast, nuclear power and weapons is a topic that has been pushed into the background; it is not being talked about as it should be considering that we are closer now than ever before to nuclear war. “The threat of nuclear war and global annihilation is not being discussed period. And the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a clock and it’s had it for many, maybe 40, 50 years, and it’s moved 100 seconds to midnight. It’s the closest its ever been to the threat of nuclear war. We’re closer than we’ve ever been.” And it’s not just the threat of a nuclear war and the nuclear winter it would cause, it is also the health tragedies that occur due to the manufacturing of nuclear weapons. Dr. Calidicott calls this process, “random compulsory genetic engineering.”
I know it can be hard to focus when there are so many problems we see in our world. Especially when it seems those problems have so few options for being fixed. Nuclear waste must sit for a million years before it loses its radioactivity. The waste that has already been created isn’t going anywhere and countries are having problems deciding where to put it. Japan is in the planning stages of how to dump Fukushima nuclear waste into the ocean, read about this here and here. There is even a whole field of science known as nuclear semiotics that tries to find solutions to the question, ‘How do we warn beings 10,000+ years in the future about nuclear waste storage sites?’ So how can governments even decide to continue producing nuclear energy when there is no good space for it and no good way to safeguard humans and non-humans alike against its radioactivity? And yet they do. The consequences for the ecosystems of our planet (of which we are inextricably a part of) are massive, and yet production continues. The scale of greed, fear, and anger within the weapons industry especially is simply horrific.
Although some readers might roll their eyes at the mention of politics within this post (everything seems to be about politics these days, and if we can’t escape it we mine as well educate ourselves about it), we must realize that President Trump is funding nuclear weapons manufacturing, and that he is the final decision maker on whether or not we launch ourselves into nuclear war. Dr. Calidcott says, “Donald Trump has a three minute decision time whether or not to press the button; he’s the only one who can and will. The suitcase containing the codes for nuclear war is with him at all times.” And if it’s not talked about in political settings, such as debates, leading up to the election, how can we be sure Joe Biden has a plan to lessen production of nuclear weapons? Voters and citizens of the US must fight for greater transparency on these issues and work towards lessening and eventually abolishing our human use of nuclear power. [btw – not just a US problem, readers from outside the US can look up their country’s nuclear history!]
Interested in going deeper? Check out Dr. Helen Caldicott’s many books on nuclear energy. Check out and/or donate to International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 