Helen Caldicott: The Nuclear Threat Is Greater Than Ever
In our latest podcast, legendary anti-nuclear campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Helen Caldicott, now in her 80s, issued a stark warning: the risk of thermonuclear war is as high as ever—perhaps more so than during the Cold War peaks of the 1980s.
Her Historic Role in Averting Disaster
Dr Caldicott’s activism began in the late 1970s, mobilizing millions of Americans (she was then living outside Boston) through Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) symposia on the effects of nuclear war on human health. She and her physician colleagues framed nuclear war as a health issue, and medical papers authored by her and her collaborators in prestigious medical journals outlined the grim death tolls that would result if bombs detonated over Europe’s and America’s cities.
One paper cited a physicians’ study that modelled a low-megaton nuclear attack on metropolitan Boston. It projected 1 million immediate deaths, 1 million fatal injuries, and 500,000 survivable injuries.
Only 10% of the area’s 6,500 physicians would survive uninjured, leaving one doctor per ~1,700 acute patients. Even with 20-hour workdays and 10-minute consultations, initial care for all would take 8–14 days—without diagnostics, supplies, drugs, or external aid. Survivors would face unprecedented combined injuries (trauma, burns, radiation), synergistic lethality—in other words, radiation making everything much worse—psychological trauma, and epidemics killing over one-third of survivors due to malnutrition and sanitation collapse. Basically, no meaningful medical response was possible. It has been said that the suffering of many survivors would be so bad they would prefer to have suffered the fate of those who had been incinerated immediately in the atomic blast: the Living would envy the Dead.
One Sarmat missile (Western reporting name: Satan) from today’s Russian arsenal, with 16 independently targetable one-megaton warheads, is sufficient to destroy all the major cities on the eastern seaboard—or all of the UK’s major cities.
Perhaps because of the very high professional and academic regard in which doctors were held, and the sense that they were objective and outside the political game, PSR’s opinion-forming work was hugely influential.
Caldicott’s media skills ensured the spread of the story beyond medical journals to a wider public via TV shows, magazines, and editorials. This public education, she said, aimed at Jefferson’s ideal: “An informed democracy will behave in a responsible fashion.”
Her efforts influenced the 1983 TV movie The Day After, depicting a nuclear strike on a Midwestern U.S. city. It received the highest viewing figures ever—100 million Americans—in TV network history. President Reagan, deeply shaken after viewing it, shifted toward dialogue with Gorbachev. Caldicott even met Reagan personally for 90 minutes—the event arranged by his daughter, Patti Davis—holding the president’s hand as she educated the elderly leader.
In the early 1980s Caldicott’s PSR made up the American, and largest, chapter of the international doctors’ organisation, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. The IPPNW was a key organisation in reaching across the Iron curtain to influence Soviet opinion against nuclear war. Co-president of the IPPNW was Yevgeny Chazov, cardiologist and personal doctor to the Kremlin. In 1987 Gorbachev presented IPPNW copresident Bernard Lown with a copy of the INF nuclear treaty with the inscription, “I want to thank you for your enormous contribution in preventing nuclear war.”
A Generational Amnesia
Today’s youth, Caldicott lamented, often view nuclear weapons as distant history—perhaps even a kind of myth. Christopher Nolan, the well-known Hollywood director, who grew up in England during weekly CND marches in the early 1980s, noted that his teenage son was unaware of nuclear weapons before making Oppenheimer. The public remains dangerously uninformed, sleepwalking toward Armageddon, as she titled one of her books.
Caldicott remains ready to lead if called. We urged her to return as a symbolic figurehead, exploiting social media and influencers to re-educate the world.
Access to mainstream media remains important, but generational shifts and vested interests block warnings. Thankfully, the world of podcasts—like ours—remains unregulated, helping this warning from one generation to another to be heard.
The reporting about the ice in the arctic and antarctic never include results of ocean water content testing in the area or if testing is even performrmed.
Maybe academics don’t want to lose their funding by pointing out the most obvious of possible causes, since the Japanese government and TEPCO have been and continue to dump trillions of irradiated water into the Pacific.
Surely they learned that the ocean water circulates all around the globe, or maybe that “news” is left out of the curriculum, also.
I am glad to see you doing well, Dr. Caldicott. I followed your work closely after March 2011, like many others who appreciated your knowledge and honesty.
Donna
*return email sent to me cannot be read.