Dear Alex and Alex,
In 1984, New Zealand banned nuclear-powered or armed ships from entering New Zealand waters.
New Zealanders owe our 1987 anti-nuclear legislation to Dr Helen Caldicott. Forty five years ago she resigned her job as an instructor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School to work full time on the prevention of nuclear war. Her writing and speaches shocked and moved me – more than anyone else’s.
Here is what she says just one nuclear weapon would do to a city like Auckland.
Caldicott says that an all out nuclear exchange between Russia and the USA would take approximately one hour to complete and would end most life on earth. Just one twenty megatonne bomb detonated over the city of Auckland would blow a crater twenty five meters deep and vaporise everyone within an eighteen kilometer wide circle. [I note that the largest tested, Russia’s Tsar bomb, was/is five times larger – one hundred megatonnes]. For those who were not killed immediately, there would be no doctors left to treat them for radiation sickness, severe burns, and unimaginably severe physical and psychological traumas, because most doctors live in cities, she reminds us.
In the 1970s and 80s such grisly facts about nuclear weapons were household knowledge, but we forget. Even though I remember so well the sense of national pride that I and millions of New Zealanders felt for our world-first anti-nuclear legislation, I still forget. I remember the mayhem, the excitement, the sense of purpose in protesting en-mass the 1983 visit to Auckland harbour by an American nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Pheonix, but I still forget.
Because we forget, we think we know what nuclear war would be like; but we don’t. We cannot even imagine accurately what one modern-sized nuclear blast would do life, let alone know the horrors that await us – horrors so hideous we would not wish them on even our worst enemy – if we don’t wake up now.
My teenage son has no idea of how viscerally we and billions of people around the world feared nuclear war. From this I extrapolate, how can anyone these days – in their teens, twenties, thirties or forties – appreciate how important the aims of working towards personal, interpersonal and international peace are.
Given that many insane, Godless and criminal politicians are today grooming our minds for war tomorrow, with frequent and flippant talk of the use of nuclear weapons, we need, I believe, with the upmost urgency, shocks that awaken us; a collective slap across the face, perhaps felt by listening to a compassionate, psychologically mature expert like Helen Caldicott.
Please interview her as soon as possible.
https://www.helencaldicott.com/
Here is the link to an interview she gave on Radio New Zealand in 2016.
Helen Caldicott – Anti-nuclear warrior
Australian Dr Helen Caldicott has been campaigning for nuclear disarmament for decades and her visit to New Zealand in the early ’80s is often cited as a catalyst for Kiwis adopting the anti-nuclear cause as their own. The Smithsonian Institute has described her as one of the 21st century’s most influential women.