December 15
GUEST: Dr. Helen Caldicott,
long time peace and environmental activist, former faculty
member at Harvard Medial School, and past president of
Physicians for Social Responsibility, talks about the
environmental and medical dangers of the nuclear age.
Russia’s
war could spell worldwide nuclear disaster
I wonder what it is like being right about nuclear power all these years. The concept never seems to die either. There must be a lot of money to be made poisoning the earth. But where do these energy entrepreneurs figure they will go after the last plant is wilted? Perhaps one turns to space fantasies once our planet is done for. We should start a GoFundMe campaign to shoot these aspiring energy speculators far into outer space, where they can't hurt us anymore.
But the idea of nuclear energy seems to be as eternal as its half life. A recent issue of the Jacobin Magazine started out with the familiar truths about poisoning our planet, only to change halfway through the article to an attack on liberals for closing the Indian Point power plant. Maybe the editors of that self branded "socialist" magazine thought that any attack on liberals was worth a try. But take a look at the tortured logic the writer uses. The article is a time capsule of discredited science from the 1960s. Is this the brave new world of socialist thought?
"How Liberals Created, Then Destroyed, Publicly Owned Nuclear Power" By Fred Stafford
I include this article to show how many lives the nuclear energy industry has. Not only are some supposedly progressive writers (The Intercept describes Fred Stafford as a "STEM professional and independent researcher on the left") pushing nuclear again, but the whole concept of a nuclear exchange with Russia has long since disappeared from our mainstream media. Even the use of the word "exchange" is misleading. A nuclear war would be the catastrophic end of human life on earth. Nothing left to exchange really.
Still we hope that Helen Caldicott is not the Cassandra of our modern age. We must work to end nuclear's threat to humankind. As Pete Seeger sang it:
Then because I promise
I'll give it one more try
To show my rainbow race
It's too soon, too soon to die
