So let's start at the beginning of the nuclear age. That was founded by Einstein, of course, when he discovered E equals mc squared. Energy equals the mass of the atom by the speed of light squared. An incredibly profound revelation. There was a hell of an explosion and...
Well, I guess that's all, sir. Well, that's enough. Holy smoke. What's the matter with you, Weldon?
Well, it just occurred to me, sir. There, but by the grace of God, went I. And Einstein said, the splitting of the atom has changed everything save man's mode of thinking. Thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe. Music Music Music During a series of meetings in Potsdam, Germany, the final doom of Japan is settled by the Big Three and their advisors.
Delivering an ultimatum of unconditional surrender to the Nipponese warlords, the Japanese suffers the consequences. Swarms of B-29s and carrier task forces carry destruction to the Japanese homeland. These and the following scenes of the opening of the final assault on Japan were photographed by newsreel, Navy, and signal corps cameramen.
The natural power of the universe is harnessed in the new atomic bomb. Its tremendous possibilities are explained in this chart. The mightiest, most destructive bombs yet produced, such as England's terrifying Grand Slam, weighing 11 tons, are puny midgets compared with the new attack.
atomic wonder. One of the first to smash the atom was Dr. Ernest Lawrence of California, inventor of the cyclotron, the atom smashing machine. With global war, the government stepped into the picture.
General Groves, head of the United States. The head of the project teamed up with Vannevar Bush, government director of science and research, and with Dr. Richard Tolman, technological expert. Seeking for the best base material to carry the explosive atoms, hundreds of prospectors ranged the province of Alberta. Scientists made uncounted tests before deciding on uranium, which contained atoms easiest of all to crack. The results justified the tremendous efforts.
The president reports on the startling developments that sealed Japan's fate. We are now prepared to destroy more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake.
We shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war. It was to... spare the Japanese people from utter destruction, that the ultimatum of July the 26th was issued at Potsdam.
Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers, and power.
as they have not yet seen, and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware. The army had been told to spare two cities in Japan so they could scientifically test the results of these bombs on human beings and cities. How's that for thinking?
And what happened was at 8.15 a.m. a plane, a single plane, appeared overhead in Hiroshima and a single parachute appeared from the plane and the Japanese were pleased they thought the plane had ...been shot down, the pilot was escaping. Another parachute opened adjacent to the first, and a little boy was reaching up to catch a red dragonfly on his hand against the blue sky.
And there was a blinding flash, and he disappeared. And so did tens of thousands of other human beings. About a hundred thousand people were killed with that bomb. The second bomb was exploded three days later and some people who escaped Hiroshima migrated to the only Christian center in Japan thinking that would never be bombed.
And they arrived just three days later. later to Nagasaki to receive the second bomb. And a lot of the Japanese when you go there will say to you, well we sort of understand the first bomb, but they say, why the second?
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was equivalent to about 13,000 tons of TNT. That's a small bomb, but let me describe how big that was. The maximum payloads the big planes carried during the Second World War was four tons of bombs.
That's the most they could carry, 4 tons. So they exploded a bomb that was 13,000 tons in one, in a millionths of a second. The hydrogen bomb, some of them are 20 megatons. That's equivalent to 20 million tons of TNT in one bomb.
That's four times the size of all the bombs dropped during the Second World War. One bomb. Now, they once made a 50 megaton bomb, which America blew up in the Pacific, in the South Pacific, and they got such a terrible shock, they never did that again.
They could easily make a 100 megaton bomb. They're awfully easy to make. If you exploded that in space, increasing the diameter of destruction, the higher up you go, you can.
You could wipe out six western states of the United States of America with one bomb. You are all children of the atomic age. You have grown up with this. You probably have nightmares sometimes about nuclear war.
Some of you, when you were young, practiced drill in your schools, hiding under your desks in case a bomb dropped, putting bits of paper on your head to hide from the nuclear explosions, right? You remember those days? So today America has 30 to 35,000 nuclear weapons. That's enough, they say, the Pentagon says, to overkill, which is a Pentagon word and not a medical term, overkill every Russian human being 40 times. Russia has 20,000 bombs.
That's enough to overkill every American human being 20 times. So who's ahead or who's behind? If you think about this in medical terminology, how many times can you kill a human being? And they say, oh, Russia's ahead. You see?
The mentality is about at a level of a nine-year-old boy. I guess there are a couple of things I don't know about this airplane, sir. I'm glad to hear you admit it.
That's the beginning of wisdom. Well, sir, how soon do I get a chance to knock one of them down? Soon enough. The superpowers are like little boys playing in a sandbox, arguing about who has the biggest biceps, or bow and arrow, or truck, or whatever.
So, okay, America has all these bombs and so does Russia. Now, what would a nuclear war mean medically and what's the probability of such a situation occurring? Of course, it's not going to be a war, you realise that. A war means that you fight a war and you win and you rebuild yourself up from the rubble. This is not a war, this is extermination.
It's what you do to cockroaches, you exterminate them. So the probability of such a war occurring is quite high. The Joint Chiefs of Staff predicted in 1975 before a Senate committee that there was a 50-50 chance of a nuclear war occurring by 1985. That estimate was verified by a Harvard-MIT study, 1985. You've been reading the papers recently. I'm sure that President Reagan's advisers are telling us that we have to prepare ourselves psychologically for a nuclear war. I'm not very sure how you do that.
The other thing they're saying to us that it is possible to fight and win a nuclear war. Have you not read that lately or seen that on the news? ...television to fight and win a nuclear war, also a lunatic type statement. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was founded during Einstein's time, has a clock, a doomsday clock on the cover, which has moved only 10 times since 1945. During the years of detente, Kissinger and Nixon era, it was at 9 minutes to midnight. After Afghanistan it was moved to 7. In January 1981 it was moved to 4 minutes to midnight.
And the editors think they probably didn't move it far enough. George Kistiakowsky, who was Eisenhower's science advisor, who made the implosion mechanism for the first A-bomb, is an old man. He's 80. And he seriously doubts that we'll make it to the year 1990. And he's not alone.
There are many famous, brilliant scientists and strategists who feel the same way. The Pentagon computers in this country failed 151 times in the last year and a half. They keep seeing bombs coming from Russia. The most serious one was in November 1979 when someone plugged a war games tape into the fail-safe computer, the Pentagon. The computer made a mistake and it detected weapons coming from Russia so it put the whole world on nuclear alert for six minutes.
Three squadrons of planes took off. towards Russia armed with nuclear weapons. At the 7th the president was to be officially notified, but they couldn't find him. And if it hadn't been stopped at that point 14 minutes later, we would have been annihilated.
Now let me describe how a nuclear war could occur and what would be the medical consequences of such a situation. Now once the button's pressed, the weapons and their missiles go out into space. The space race has been mainly about weapons.
They re-enter the Earth's atmosphere at 20 times the speed of sound and then land accurately on target. Meanwhile, the satellite and the radar from the other side detects the attack. And the button's pressed. So the weapon's passed virtually in space and the whole thing's over within about half an hour. Half an hour.
So you can't really talk about an aggressor in half an hour, can you? Or it's your fault. I mean, you don't even have time to think.
I mean, all you can have time to do is press the button. A 20 megaton bomb would do this. I'm now quoting from the New England Journal of Medicine in 1962. It would gouge out a crater.
half a mile wide and 300 feet deep, so that everything in that volume would be converted to radioactive fallout, be pulverized, millions of tons of rock injected into the stratosphere and troposphere where it would descend as radioactive fallout. Every person out to a radius of six miles from the epicenter would be vaporized, just turned into gas, and most buildings. Out to a radius of 20 miles from the center, most persons would be dead, or lethally injured. And when I say lethally injured, I mean tens of thousands of cases of the most severe burns.
A single burn takes about three to six months to treat, requiring hundreds of units of fresh frozen plasma and blood, 24-hour intensive care nursing, operations every couple of days for months, and then often the patients die. There are only 2,000 acute burn beds in the whole of the United States. There would be shocking injuries you see as people are sucked out of buildings and thrown against other buildings. Buildings disintegrate and concrete and steel are thrown around like matchsticks. Millions of shards of flying glasses as windows disintegrate.
People decapitated, organ injuries, ruptured lungs, compound fractures, that compound fracture means the bone sticking out of the skin and so on. What was left of the buildings would be lying in what was left of the streets. If you looked at the blast or the flash from 40 miles away, just glanced at it, you'd be instantly blinded as the flash burnt the retina or the back of the eye.
It would ignite everything that was inflammable within an area of 3,000 square miles so everything would burn and the fires would coalesce, sucking the air in with hurricane-force winds to the centre of the explosion. And if you made it to a fallout shelter in that 20 minutes to half an hour's time, you would not survive because you would be pressure cooked and or asphyxiated as the fires used up all the oxygen. In the Dresden firestorms, the people who made it to the shelters all died.
They asphyxiated. Now you should know that your civil defence department says that every town and city in this country with a population of 25,000 people... ...or more is so targeted. Not necessarily with a 20 megaton bomb, it may be smaller, but all these bombs do an enormous amount of damage, which means, in effect, that most population centres in this country will be gone. Also, apparently, the nuclear reactors are targeted.
Inside each 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactor is as much radiation as that released by the explosion of 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs. If you should drop a one megaton bomb on such a reactor, according to the Scientific American last month, you would contaminate permanently an area the size of West Germany and that would obviously aggravate the fallout problem. The oil refineries are targeted, the large industries and all airports. Now say you weren't in a targeted area and you were in a rural area that was untargeted and you're not asleep.
Alright, you're not asleep and you are actually listening to the radio or watching the television. Now you often hear the radio, you hear this, we're just testing the emergency signal, don't you? Hear that? Well this time I suppose they'd say we're not testing this is for real, the bombs are on their way, you have 15 minutes, 20 minutes or whatever to reach the nearest fallout shelter.
So you run very fast, I mean very fast, and you won't have time to collect your family with you or anyone you love, almost certainly. unless you're very lucky. Now this is also described in the New England Journal of Medicine.
When you get down there, you medically will not be able to re-emerge from that shelter for at least two weeks to six to eight weeks because the short-lived radioactive isotopes in the fallout are so intensely radioactive, you would die. And when you do come out, the world would be a different place because civilizations pass that we've inherited from our ancestors. will be totally obliterated.
All the architecture, the music, imagine the world without Handel and Beethoven and Brahms. The art, the literature, everything will be gone. And you see in Hiroshima there was an outside world to come and help. There'll be nobody. And further, there will be millions of corpses.
A 20 megaton bomb on Boston in 1962 was estimated to have created 2.2 million corpses. And as the bodies rot and decay, the bacteria, which is a perfect breeding place for bacteria, multiply rapidly and they mutate in the radioactive environment to become more lethal and virulent. And our white blood cells, which fight infection and protect us from infection, are depleted by the effects of radiation.
So we will be susceptible. To all the diseases we now medically control, like polio, typhoid, plague, dysentery, hundreds of them. So there'll be epidemics of diseases.
It is thought that so much ozone will be destroyed by the release of nitrous oxides created by the explosions that the ultraviolet radiation coming in from the sun will produce third degree sunburn within 15 to 30 minutes, which is lethal, and it would blind people. In other words, you would have to live underground for the next five to ten years or however long it takes for the ozone to reaccumulate. Of course, it will burn and patch all the crops.
There'll be very few hospitals left, if any. Very few doctors left. And we estimate we hold symposia on this subject, on the medical consequences of nuclear war. They are addressed by Howard Hyatt, the Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, and others.
And we estimate that within about 30 days after such an exchange, 90% of Americans would be dead. Canadians as well, the Russians as well, the Europeans, the British are all targeted like that, most of the Chinese. It is really unknown what will happen to the whole world. But consider this data. The National Academy of Sciences in 1975 estimated...
If both superpowers used only 10% of the arsenals of their hydrogen bombs, 10%, it could destroy 50 to 80% of the ozone layer in the northern hemisphere and 30 to 40% in the southern hemisphere. And some scientists think if only 20% of it is destroyed worldwide, it could blind every organism on the Earth. And people would die, the survivors would die, of a synergistic combination of starvation, radiation sickness, Epidemics of infection, sunburn, blindness and grief. It would be the grief that would kill me. I would prefer to be dead and it was Nikita Khrushchev who said in fact In the event of a nuclear war, the living will envy the dead.
Now you can say, well what can I do? There are two things I'm doing just to give you some ideas. You've got to work it out yourself.
The Physicians for Social Responsibility was dormant two years ago. We're now educating our colleagues. We have four and a half thousand doctors and the American Medical Association recently wrote to President Reagan because of our activities, asking him to meet with senior members of the American medical profession to discuss nuclear war.
And remember that all the politicians are our patients, even the president. Now I don't know if the people that treated him are members of Physicians for Social Responsibility, but they will be soon. The other thing... I did was start the Women's Party for Survival because as I talk a lot about this, very often it's the women who cry. Now I'm not excluding all mothering men but you know women are very passionate.
In fact they often drive men crazy because they're so passionate and emotional. That's appropriate to be emotional. Often when I lay out the medical effects of nuclear war, the person interviewing me on television will say aren't you being a bit emotional? You can understand that that's a crazy remark to make.
It's like if I have two parents in my office and I tell them their child has leukemia and explain the prognosis and they show no emotional response. I get them a psychiatrist. It's a appropriate to be passionate about our survival and I thought when I had my first baby I knew I'd die to save that life and I'd never felt like that about any other human life before. It was a profound revelation for me. If we can mobilize that instinct that that women have to save their babies across the world, we may survive.
So I started the Women's Party for Survival. And we're having a march on Mother's Day in Washington, wearing our Sunday best, Republican ladies, everybody, because this is a very conservative issue, the ultimate conservative issue. And bring lots of babies. And if you haven't got a baby, borrow one.
And the next day on Monday we're going to lobby our representatives on the hill and put the baby on the table and say Senator Jackson or Senator Helms why aren't you representing the life of this baby and the baby is our symbol. Now to give you another crazy idea there are lots of things you can do you see we thought of an action called babies against the Pentagon and that abbreviates to BAP. What we do is when the Senate is debating the arms race, we will release hundreds of naked toddlers into the Senate chamber. Lots of things you can do. You're next to the SAC Air Base here.
Close it down. Take no for an answer. Don't take no for an answer. It must be done.
It must be done. These weapons must be eradicated from the face of the planet bilaterally, multilaterally. Then people will say, what about the...
You can't trust the Russians. Remember that right through Vietnam and Cambodia, Russia and America negotiated SALT I, quite a good treaty. The superpowers have signed 17 treaties on nuclear weapons. Neither side have ever violated them. Russia has signed SALT II.
America hasn't. Why not? Why not?
Because, say the senators, America wants to maintain its superiority. What does that mean? Hi. We're on a terminally ill planet, you know that. And we are about to destroy ourselves.
And when a patient comes into the emergency room who's terminally ill, we don't say, well, that patient's terminally ill, take them straight to the mortuary. We put the patient in the intensive care unit and we delicately balance the electrolytes and we stabilise the cardiac function and we eradicate the infecting organism and occasionally the patient survives. And what I'm really saying to you is that if you love this planet, and I'm deeply in love with it, and you watch the spring come, and you watch the magnolias flower, and the wisteria come out, and you smell a rose, you will realise that you're going to have to change the priorities of your life if you love this planet.