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Thanks very much. When I was coming down from Healesville I stopped at one of my favourite gum trees to pick the branches for the welcome to country. I thought, should I be doing this? Is it a good thing to do? I thought well, hell, we are talking about nuclear power, a lousy power, which is foreign.
This is truly what these branches of gum leaves are about, not foreign, a gift from the land. Why are we not listened to? Of course my people were not listened to for a long time, but the thing that really hurts me is that if we live in a society where we are supposed to be governed by somebody or something, then why aren’t they standing up?
I’m pretty disappointed in the political action that the state government is not taking. I have to say this because of my involvement and engagement formerly with state government as a public servant to do this and that, to stop this and that, see ways of prevention, and I guess many of you are in the same boat.
We are talking about ruining absolutely everything we have left, and god help us there is too little left. I am a grandmother and I hope to be around to be a great grandmother, but I worry more about whether my grandchildren will be around.
As I was travelling down here I thought about the stuff we used to do when we are little, and how little of that can happen these days. I guess where I’m going here is as little astray from the welcome, but I feel that in this case, coming here to do the welcome to country is fantastic, it’s the protocol and its acknowledgement, but it doesn’t sit squarely enough with those in power.
I now feel a bit ashamed to be involved in the Commonwealth Games with Ron Walker at the head of it; I wish I could turn the clock back. My involvement there when asked to do so was about making sure that not only our community but the wider community had the chance to be involved in such a global function. I’m really am up against myself at the moment.
I’d like to draw some energy from my ancestors and the spirit of the land to try to see a way forward about this, a way that could be a winner for all of us as people of this land, and a way that we can convince those in power that this is the wrong thing to do.
I don’t know the technological aspects of this, but I do know I have a great fear for the future, certainly my future with my grandchildren. When I call on energy for the spirit of my people I wish I could turn back the clock again and draw something very special from this earth, but all I can do is be here to support.
If there is any way that my voice and actions can help, then that’s what I can offer. So from the Wurundjeri country I did pick the branches of gumtrees, because I think we need an amount of warmth, love and courage for what we are doing.
Certainly from my people there was lots of resilience and resistance for many things, but the ultimate is the gift from this land. So this gift of the land is offered to you in a very sincere way, because we hope to preserve and maintain what we have today, not what we hope to get tomorrow.
Good luck to you all, you are most welcome to the traditional land of the Wurundjeri people.
Although I cannot be with you tonight, I want to congratulate you all for attending this important public meeting. I also want to congratulate Palm Sunday Alliance for a Peaceful and Nuclear Free Future organising this informative event, including an impressive line up of speakers scheduled for tonight.
I am pleased to announce that the Yarra City Council will formally discuss taking up membership of the organisation Mayors for Peace at our next meeting. I hope you all enjoy the meeting and learn a lot from tonight’s interesting programme, the Mayor Councillor Jenny Farrar.
I’d like to take a minute to talk about the significance of today - because March 1 is commemorated around the region as Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day.
Today is the anniversary of the Bravo nuclear test held in the Republic of the Marshall Islands in 1954, a massive atmospheric nuclear test. The mushroom cloud spread across the northern atolls of the Marshall Islands; indeed today we know that 20 out of 22 atolls in that island nation were affected by radioactive fallout after 67 American nuclear tests.
Around the Pacific, this day is marked as a day for memory - to remember what happened and say it should not happen again. Because for 50 years, from the first US test in 1946 until the end of testing in 1996 with the last French test, the peoples of the Pacific, the indigenous peoples of the Pacific, bore the brunt of nuclear testing by nuclear powers.
The same pattern happened in Semipalatinsk in the former Soviet Union, at Lop Nor in China, today it goes on in India and Pakistan, in Korea.
It’s important that we remember this as our politicians talk about “clean and green” nuclear power and how it’s going to save us from global warming. With the end of nuclear testing, people have forgotten the legacies of what happened on 1 March and what happened on many other days in the region.
Just last week I was fortunate to be in the middle of the Sahara desert, with colleagues, to address not the victims of nuclear testing but the survivors of French nuclear testing in Algeria - the actors, the people who today are campaigning to address the radioactive legacies of those tests.
Rebecca Bear-Wingfield, if she could have been here, would have talked about what it means to the people of the deserts of South Australia, the way in which Maralinga is to be used as a sacrifice zone to dump nuclear waste, as it was used as a testing ground in the past.
So in Algeria, the Touareg are organising and calling for clean up and compensation, where France conducted 17 tests in the desert.The Tahitians were there for their 193 tests, the Japanese were there dealing with the consequences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So today is a day for memory, and as we move on to talk about the new push for nuclear power and uranium mining, its important to remember that around the region, around the world, indigenous people are struggling. The costs and consequences of nuclear testing should not be forgotten.
It’s very good to be here. Thanks very much to Aunty Joy, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this country. As Nic said, Indigenous people in Australia and around the world have and continue to bear a disproportionate burden of the adverse impacts of this industry, from mining, dumping of radioactive waste and the imposition of weapons testing on their country.
My name is Dave Sweeney I work as a nuclear campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation, and ACF, like Friends of the Earth is part of the Palm Sunday Alliance, which is more than 50 faith, union, professional and community organisations - it’s a very important positive timely initiative.
We are very happy to be part of it, and thanks to the organisers of this meeting and this initiative for launching a month of action which will be a very big and very public display of community concern and opposition to nuclear and the building of a future that is better, cleaner, safer.
The nuclear industry proposes profound environmental, economic, public health, social, cultural and security threats. And the nuclear industry starts with uranium.
And Australia has the world largest reserves, so we are a serious player in the international nuclear trade, and there is currently a very powerful push to increase this role and these risks. As a society we face a choice, do we dig up uranium and dance with death, or do we lock up the uranium and enrich life?
ACF and every environment group in Australia, every member of the Australian environmental movement, and that’s a pretty broad church, opposes the continuation and expansion of the Australian uranium industry. We do not believe this sector is clean, safe, sustainable or necessary.
This industry is not driving answers to climate change, rather it is fuelling environment and security problems and is diverting dollars and brains from the real answers and the real solutions to providing secure and sustainable energy for Australia and the world.
Energy efficiency, and renewable energy production, making cleaner energy and using it more smartly is the way forward, not leaping from dirty coal to dangerous nuclear. I commend you to look at the material, and there is a lot at the Friends of the Earth stall, so we can tool ourselves up and engage in this debate.
Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world, we have a major drought, we are currently taking showers where we start, stop, towel and dress like we are practicing for a new event to be unleashed at the Beijing Olympics.
Yet in Germany, in contrast, they are just coming out of a long cold winter, you can turn on the shower and walk around the house listening to Wagner’s Ring Cycle. And yet Germany today generated 10 times the amount of electrical power from sun than we did - in Australia today. The answers are there.
The answers are there in technology that can turn our climate crisis into an opportunity and into a retooling of our economy. What is needed is political leadership, political courage, political will, political vision and political spine; they are the real finite resources, they are the limiting factors.
Where are our politicians in the current push and the current mix, where are our politicians? The federal coalition has the most aggressive pro nuclear agenda in Australia’s history. It is actively setting out to turn this country into the world’s uranium quarry, the largest supplier of uranium on earth.
It is using its control of the senate to act out of control in relation to management of radioactive waste in Australia by imposing, on Aboriginal land against Aboriginal wishes, a federal radioactive waste dump in the Northern Territory and they intend to name a site by the middle of this year. It is a disgrace.
The federal government is all the way with the US nuclear alliance, with the threats that brings to the region and the loss of independence and sovereignty that brings to Australian foreign policy. And
we have the PM who calls nuclear power the cleanest and greenest form of energy, and hand picks a panel, the Chair of which had to take a leave of absence from the Board of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), to do a report on whether nuclear could possibly work as a power solution.
I reckon if I picked the AFL commissioners to do a report into what is the best code of footy in Australia, I could predict the answer. And heavens above, Ziggy and his team of hand picked experts have come back with nuclear power.
So now we have a situation where it is being seriously talked up, the largest per capita new build nuclear power station programme in the world, 25 reactors by 2050.
The PM talks about the need for a debate, but if anyone asks where any of these reactors might be and who is going to pay for them, who is going to run them, where the waste that they create will be stored, then these people are scare mongers, they are ideologues, and they are nimbys.
Well, I have just got back from a few days in Canberra, and I’ve just seen a new breed of nimbys, Coalition backbenchers, they look like rabbits in the headlights, and have a new definition nimbe’s – Not in marginals before elections. In nuclear matters, the federal government has had a complete policy melt down.
So what about the other side of politics, the other major party, what about the ALP? Surely the light on the hill never came from a nuclear reactor? Labor, some in federal labour, want to have their yellow cake and they want to sell it too.
They are clear on domestic nuclear power. Labor have unequivocally ruled it out, they see it and call it for what it is, a radioactive white elephant, and that’s good. We welcome that. They have also ruled out downstream processing or enrichment, and that too is welcome.
However, it is odd to promote the export of a product, but then not value-add to that product. Should Labor change its uranium policy, John Howard is going to have a day in the park, talking about hypocrisy and inconsistency.
Labor remain committed to the US miliary alliance. Clearly, as we can see in the positioning over Iraq, this commitment is not absolutely uncritical, but it is uncritical about hosting US nuclear bases and in relation to hosting deployments that are vital to US nuclear war fighting capabilities.
Labor have committed to repeal the federal governments heavy handed and deeply flawed Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act, a piece of legislation that takes away peoples’ right to say no to the imposition of a dump in the NT.
They promise a different process, a better process. The details still need to come, but a commitment to consultation is certainly better than the current process of coercion.
There is a basic ecological principle that informs a lot of the positioning of environment groups, and that principle is reduction at source. Instead of having a filter at the end of the pipe you stop the stuff going down the pipe in the first place.
The source of the nuclear industry is uranium. Australia’s uranium exports are fuelling uncertainty and insecurity and every gram of our uranium inevitably becomes radioactive waste.
So Labor has it right on reactors but they have it wrong on mines. And if Labor wants to be taken seriously when they talk against nuclear power then they have to get serious about the fuel that makes it possible.
Last weekend the Deputy Labor leader, Julia Gillard, said that she too supported a change of uranium policy because she supports jobs, jobs, jobs. Uranium sales contribute less than 1% of the value of Australia’s mineral exports.
All this talk about a resource boom is true, that resource boom coming from uranium is not true. Our cheese exports are worth more than our yellow cake exports. There are estimates that if Australia embraced and got fair dinkum about renewable energy, that would grow 250,000 jobs in the next 15 years and most of them would be in regional and rural Australia.
Don’t talk about jobs when you are turning your back on the sector that is going to grow them. We want jobs, but we want jobs that celebrate and promote life and community, and do not undermine these things, or threaten these things.
And there are no jobs on a dead planet. It would be a good thing if people could send a message to Julia. There are form letters with dot points at the FoE stall. And I’d ask if you could do that. It’s a small thing to do but it really does make a big difference.
We need to let all the ALP delegates to national conference know that we don’t want this country to go further down the nuclear path. We can and should be a world leader in renewables, not a world loser in nukes.
We here tonight have a very important role and particular role in relation to passing on that message. If you climb to the top of the flagpole at the top of the Fitzroy Town hall and you look north, you won’t see the Ranger, Olympic Dam or Beverley uranium mines.
But if you look south you will see the headquarters of BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, the first and third largest resource companies in the world, who dominate over 90% of Australian uranium production. Now, if they are being irresponsible out there, it’s up to us and others like us to hold them responsible here.
We need to get a clear message to the ALP. It’s a message that the majority of ALP members also share. A Newspoll in May last year showed that 78% of Labor voters oppose any or any further uranium mining in this country.
There is a small elite that for reasons of being captive to the perceptions of the press gallery, wanting to show tough leadership, putting their own stamp on the party, are making a decision or wanting to drive us to a dangerous point at their conference on April 27 – 29 in Sydney.
The day after the 21st anniversary of Chernobyl, ALP delegates gather to turn Australia into the worlds largest uranium quarry. No more disrespectful legacy could be imagined.
There is a small elite that put those other imperatives ahead of the imperative of protecting this country, protecting public health, removing radioactive threat, addressing the threat of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism, and building a clean, safe, secure, sustainable energy source for this country and for the world.
We cannot continue to put carbon up the chute; we have to change the way we do business. But we don’t change the way we do business by embracing nuclear power.
Nuclear power is the cane toad of energy. It’s an imported option that creates a range of problems that those in their rush to let it loose didn’t consider and now can’t control. It has no place.
Nuclear energy has no place in this country and the fuel that drives it around the world, that drives the worst industrial wastes and the worst ever weapons has no place coming from this country. Reactors start at Roxby. Contamination starts with Kakadu. We need reduction at source, not expansion.
We need to let the ALP know loud and clear that we don’t want to go further down this path. Can you do these things, can you write, visit or ring your local ALP member and say that you don’t want Australia do go further down the uranium path.
On Saturday, this Saturday March 3 is the Victorian State ALP conference, the Victorian State policy is a good policy, it says that Victoria will be nuclear free and it will not use or have recourse to nuclear power or uranium mining.
That’s good; that should be defended and celebrated and reflected at conference. Every Victorian delegate who is elected on Saturday, and who goes to the national conference in Sydney should reflect that and we are going to be there, for a peaceful presence to put some focus on this.
In the week when the three not so wise men, have come out and said that for private profit we will take a public risk, we will impose an activity which the PM says “good idea Ron”, an activity that is unlawful under Victorian and Federal law, unlawful to build and operate a nuclear reactor under Victorian and federal law, being canvassed and endorsed and beaten on the chest as good by the PM.
We are going to be at the Victorian state conference to highlight this issue, to call on them to stand up strong for Victoria and to take a message clearly to Sydney and to not go forward with an expansion of uranium mining. Saturday 8am at the Melbourne Convention Centre down on Flinders Street.
There needs to be an important sense of community opposition. One of the things I hope people take away tonight is the knowledge that a powerful tactic of our opponents is they try to atomise us, they try to take away our sense of community, our sense of power.
They say, oh 78% of ALP members are opposed, well what are they going to do? The community doesn’t like it, oh, well what are they going to do? Move? No.
What we are going to do is use our citizenship rights - we are citizens in this country we are not consumers, we are not clients or customers of corporate Australia, we are citizens.
And we will use those rights, we will talk in the town hall, in the front bars, in the lounge rooms, in the streets and in the board rooms across this country to determine the future of this country.
We are not going to roll over and let bad policy driven by elite ideological assumptions leave a legacy that turns this country into the world’s quarry and waste dump and exports threat from pillar to post to anyone who’s got money in their pockets and wants to buy it.
We start with that on Palm Sunday; we have a month of action kicked off tonight by the Palm Sunday Alliance to build this.
Finally I’d like to say in the late 1990’s I recall addressing a meeting in the Fitzroy Town Hall, and this meeting was about the Jabiluka uranium mine proposal. And at the time the commentators, the experts, the politicians, the miners all said this is not a question of if but when.
They said you crew are wasting your time, this is a done deal, there is nothing you can do to stop this. It was a campaign to erode our hope, our heart and our spirit. In 2007 Jabiluka is still stalled, the Mirarr people are strong and still saying no.
No ore has left that site and no ore is going to leave that site. And that was community action. That was black and white working respectfully together.
That was people saying, okay, so you’ve got more money, and more access to opinion pieces in the Australian, you’ve got more clout and connection, but I don’t think what you’re doing is right, and I’m going to say that and I’m going to find like minds who say that, and we are going to keep saying it.
In closing I’d like to share one quote from Yvonne Margarula, the senior Traditional Owner of the Mirarr people. The thing is the Mirarr people have had the longest experience, the most direct experience of uranium mining in this country.
She reflects on this in an open letter to a federal government inquiry into uranium. “Everyone seems to only be concerned about what is happening today, or next year, yet no scientist can tell us properly what will happen in 100 years when they’re all gone and no one cares.
After that there will only be the Mirarr people looking after that place as we have done for thousands of years. None of the promises last, but the problems always do”.
None of the promises last, but the problems always do. Well so does our resistance.
And the reason we are having this talk now is because people stopped them building nuclear reactors at Jervis Bay, and another plan in the 1970s at French Island.
And the reason we are fighting about uranium mining is because the ALP hasn’t changed is uranium policy before because people have held them to it. It’s a continuing chain of resistance to stop a permanent residue of pollution.
It’s a very, very peak time, a time of test, a time of struggle, and a time of increased threat, and it is a time to come together to maintain our hope, our heart, our humanity, our action, our enthusiasm, our engagement to say really clearly what sort of country we want to live in.
I know clearly, and I’m sure its shared by everyone in this room, and the people in the lounge rooms that we go home to, that its not a country that is the worlds uranium quarry or the world’s radioactive dump.
Let’s be a world leader in renewables rather than a world loser in nukes.
It is a privilege to speak before you.
I thank you and congratulate you for being here, for your concern about our predicament, and for your wish to act with others to turn the ship around, decisively away from the drift, the slide, no the push towards unprecedented nuclear danger.
I do quite a bit of speaking, but about this talk this evening I have been rather nervous, because of the weight of responsibility I feel about the importance of the topic. There is nothing of greater weight or moment to talk about, indeed that anyone can talk about.
When I speak I usually use a lot – probably too many – powerpoint slides full of information. Tonight I am taking a different approach. I want to have a conversation with you about big and deep questions, which go to the very core of who we are and how we live. In this electronic information age, it is easier than ever before to access large amounts of information.
Does this make us wiser, better able to make good decisions and act? Not really. We desperately need authoritative, current information. But we also need the capacity to sift, weigh and measure, to understand context, the forces and interests at work in determining information we receive, how we receive it and for which purpose. And in the end it is what we do with it that matters most.
Tonight I want to convey some information, but I also want to speak from the heart. I want to talk as a physician, with a professional responsibility to care for the sick, alleviate suffering and as much as possible prevent illness and death and promote health, without fear or favour. But I also want to talk as son, grandson, brother, husband, father, and human being.
I would desperately love to lead an ordinary life, to grapple as all generations have with the fundamental realities of ordinary life – love, pain and death.
Knowing that we are part of a great circle in which the flame is passed from one generation to the next, that some of our influence, our works, our genetic heritage, our nurturing of the next generation, will pass on; that the changing atoms and molecules which have temporarily come together to make us - some of which were previously part of ancestors, Jesus, Mohamed, Buddha, sacred places - will continue in the biosphere and take shape in other lifeforms. All of that is under the nuclear sword of Damocles.
Our current predicament is unprecedented in evolutionary terms: no humans before have had to confront the potential for the ultimate crime, mass murder, genocide and ecocide - the death of the future.
The end of birth and rebirth, the end of possibility, at least for our species and many others. The possibility that our children may never, none of them, have the chance to have children.
That all the children who might have been born at any future time will never be able to have children. Before the industrial era, humans did not have the capacity to erode so rapidly and profoundly the capacity of the biosphere to sustain humans and absorb their impacts.
Since the late 1940s and early 50s, pretty much within my lifetime, large numbers of nuclear weapons have risked death and destruction on a scale which would bring an abrupt end to human civilisation and the habitability of the biosphere for many lifeforms.
As Arundhati Roy has so eloquently said:
The nuclear bomb is the most antidemocratic, antinational, antihuman outright evil thing that man has ever made.
If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man’s challenge to God.
It’s worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created.
If you are not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is 4,600 million years old.
It could end in an afternoon.
Here we are, not by choice or design, having to deal with threats to global health, sustainability and survival - of humans’ making and subject to human control - which no previous generation has ever had to face. As Gandalf said to Frodo in the Mines of Moria – “We cannot choose our time; only what we do with the time that we are given.”
And we face these challenges with the brain essentially of a social primate adapted for hunting and gathering – hard wired for immediate, proximate threats rather than distant, invisible ones; dominated by meeting basic needs for food, shelter, acceptance, meaning and love; by smell, taste, visual cues, emotion, gratification, recognition, reward, status, sex, breeding, and other aspects of reptilian and other ancient lineage.
A brain with an extraordinary capacity for forgetting, denial, rationalisation and manipulation by leaders, dumb tribal allegiances, and fear of the other. But also, of course, for remarkable adaptation and creativity.
Albert Einstein said:
“The splitting of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.”
So here we are in 2007, 62 years into the nuclear age, almost 20 years after the end of the Cold War, having got this far more by luck than design, having several times – most notably during the Cuban missile crisis – been little more than a hair’s breadth from global nuclear war, having survived more than one nuclear crisis in which all that stood between large numbers of unrecallable nuclear-tipped missiles being launched was a wise act of one person.
We can never know when this luck might run out, though we certainly know our luck will be tested. Those of you who are younger than about 30 will have no personal experience of the profound and explicit fear of unleashing of the massive US and Soviet arsenals at targets all over the world that deeply affected people everywhere during the Cold War.
In one of the most credible scenarios for global nuclear war, developed by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1982, they had difficulty finding enough targets for all the nuclear weapons. In that scenario,
Melbourne was targeted with 3 nuclear bombs, each equivalent to 1 million tons of TNT in explosive power, almost 70 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima which killed 120,000 people immediately, injured another 78,000, and continues to this day and at an increasing rate to kill survivors exposed to its radioactive fallout.
But that was the bad old days, wasn’t it? Nuclear weapon numbers peaked at 68,000 in 1986 and have now declined to ‘only’ 27,000. The Cold War is over.
The major security threats now are proliferation, rogue states and terrorism. But 95% of those 27,000 nuclear bombs, that cataclysmic destructive capacity, are still in the hands of the Russia and the US. They can be retargeted probably in a matter of minutes.
The monumental tragedy of the end of the 20th century is the failure of leadership, as Mikhail Gorbachev recently wrote “which proved incapable of seizing the opportunities opened by the end of the Cold War” and burdened the start of the new millennium with the worst baggage of the old one.
The so-called war on terror is manipulated and exploited for short term and divisive base political purposes and the problem of terrorism worsened by the illegal, immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq on false and constantly changing pretexts, its human cost callously denied by our ‘man of steel’.
Meanwhile the major root causes of conflict and insecurity and likely determinants of future conflict, articulated by the Oxford Research Group, are:
Modest recognition and progress on some; but tragically, all victims of an ongoing comprehensive failure of leadership, governance and long-term vision; allowed to spread and fester in malignant fashion. Such a world is the worst place for the worst weapons of terror: nuclear weapons.
The dangers of use of nuclear weapons are growing:
“To declare war requires an act of congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust requires 20 minutes deliberation by the president and his advisors… this system remains largely intact”
An extensive international black market involving the father of Pakistan’s bomb, AQ Khan, has operated for years, with transit points and dealers in about 30 countries, for uranium enrichment centrifuge designs and components, and Chinese nuclear weapons designs.
Australia’s bilateral ‘safeguards’ on exported uranium are essentially a toothless, retrospective bookkeeping exercise and provide no more than ‘an illusion of protection’. The Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office is a shameful misnomer which regrettably is more part of the problem than part of the solution.
Its Director-General has recently undermined the IAEA, continues to deny well-documented proliferation risks associated with light water reactors, and continues to deny the proven and widely acknowledged capacity of plutonium from power reactors to be used to make weapons.
About 40 countries with nuclear fuel chain capacity have all the materials and expertise to produce nuclear weapons within a matter of months if they so choose.
Sensitive nuclear technologies are increasingly widely available. For example, R&D in laser enrichment technology, such as occurring in the publicly-funded facility at Lucas Heights in Sydney, could make it smaller, cheaper, easier and more concealable to enrich uranium, whether for reactors or bombs – the technology is the same
More than 1400 tons of HEU and about 500 tons of plutonium are distributed at some 140 sites, including unguarded power plants, radioisotope production reactors, and research reactors. 5-10 kg of HEU or 1-3 kg of plutonium is all that is needed for a nuclear bomb.
This double standard is utterly indefensible, unsustainable, and a major driver of proliferation.
The desperate nature of our current predicament and bankrupt state of current inaction was highlighted in 2005, in the words of the WMD Commission, by: “two loud wake-up calls in the failure of the NPT Review Conference and in the inability of the M+5 Summit of World Leaders to agree on a single line about any WMD issue.”
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Board of Directors and Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel laureates, recently moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock from 7 to 5 minutes to midnight.
They said:
“Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed US emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.”
They go on to say: “We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons.” Yet even though they recognise the extreme seriousness of global warming, they emphasize the proliferation and other dangers of nuclear power, and that global action to address climate change does depend on use of nuclear power.
There are numerous myths peddled explicitly and implicitly about nuclear weapons:
The facts however are that:
One must agree with President George W Bush when he said at Kansas State University on 23 Jan 2006: “The world cannot be put in a position where we can be blackmailed by a nuclear weapon.”
It is utopian to believe that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used. So nuclear weapons must be abolished – the question is whether this will occur before or after they are used. Our job – all of us – is to make sure we get rid of them first.
Just as recognition of the reality and importance of climate change and the urgency of addressing it have recently become essentially impossible to rationally deny, we may hopefully be at a key tipping point in relation to nuclear weapons, with increasingly widespread recognition of how dangerously fast we are headed for a catastrophic abyss without much more than a paddle.
In January this year a senior bipartisan US foursome who can reasonably be described as former Cold War warriors - even nuclear henchmen – former Secretaries of State George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary William Perry and Senator Sam Nunn, made an impassioned plea for abolition of nuclear weapons.
There is no question that nuclear weapons can be abolished:
There is a vast body of authoritative and highly consistent reports and recommendations, from the 1996 Canberra Commission, to the 2006 WMD Commission report, describing how, step by step, through a series of timebound, irreversible, binding steps, NW can be abolished. There are no insurmountable technical or legal obstacles.
Our experience with political leaders and diplomats teaches us that what is lacking, in the absence of visionary leadership, most particularly in the US but also in other NWS, is the groundswell of irresistible pressure from a mobilized public to compel leaders to make it happen.
Next month we will be formally launching the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. This is an initiative spearheaded by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
Our aim is to help spark and mobilize an irresistible groundswell of public outrage that will compel leaders to finally finish the job of abolishing nuclear weapons.
MAPW has received generous support from the Tom Kantor Fund of the Poola Foundation to help kickstart this in Australia, for which we are enormously grateful.
We want to work with as many groups and individuals as possible to join in, pick up and run with this in their own ways. Expect to hear more about this, come to the Palm Sunday festival, and keep your eye on www.icanw.org
Whatever your expertise and interests, nuclear weapons are core concerns. They are:
But to be clear: the emperor is utterly naked. Even in narrow military terms, the one superpower has the most to lose and the least to gain from nuclear weapons.
They undermine the security of all, including those who have them. Consider the US: its conventional military superiority is unassailable by any other conventional military force or combination of forces in the world. Yet it is a highly probable target for the nuclear weapons of other countries and terrorist organizations.
No comprehensive reliable defence is possible against the many ways nuclear weapons could be delivered. Even a small country or non-state group with a few nuclear weapons or capacity to attack multiple nuclear facilities, causing extensive radioactive contamination, could pose a major threat to the US.
Despite some past achievements, on making nuclear weapons abolition a high priority and investing serious effort and resources to advance this the Australian government is sadly bereft. John Howard has been Prime Minister for over a decade.
Lapses of memory are possible, even for non-politicians, but I can’t recall our man of steel ever having something substantial to say about getting rid of nuclear weapons.
Australia’s current nuclear weapons scorecard is disappointing:
I have no doubt that the catastrophic destructive potential of nuclear weapons is widely known and understood.
I am convinced it contributes powerfully to the malaise; the nihilism; the despair, disengagement, dysfunction and destructive elements in many societies; the contemporary crisis of meaning and values; the stresses for young people of growing up in a world of deep, irreconcilable contradictions and watching adults going about their daily lives in denial and apparently powerless in the face of the ever-present risk of nuclear destruction; enathema to any values worth having.
Sigmund Freud said in 1930: ”Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.” What would he say now?
It is healthy to live consistent with ones values and belief rather than with gnawing contradictions and inconsistencies.
It is healthy to be engaged and active and involved in matters affecting one’s own and others’ wellbeing and future: nothing about me without me.
It is profoundly healthy to work to remove the greatest risk of acute catastrophic and preventable illness and death.
It is good for your and other’s heath, now and in the future, to affirm by your actions how precious and fragile is the gift of ordinary life.
It is healthy to perform acts of love.
Only rogue states have nuclear weapons.
We have no choice but to get rid of nuclear weapons.
This need is urgent.
It is 5 minutes to midnight.
It will not happen without a historic effort.
I can imagine a world free of nuclear weapons.
I can,
you can,
we all can
make it happen.
Thank you.
Thank you for inviting me here. It's a great privilege to be on a platform with Dave Sweeney and Tilman Ruff. I don't really know what else to say; it's been said. When Tilman gave his talk I just felt absolutely desperate.
I turned to Dave and said, "I don't know why we're still here". And Dave said, "its luck", and its absolute luck we are siting here in this room and those three hydrogen bombs did not explode over Melbourne.
As Tilman just said, the bombs are still there, and who is in charge of them? A man with a deep psychological problem, a personality disorder, and that's George Bush.
He gets 3 minutes to decide whether or not to press the button, but it's not whether or not to press, it's which option he chooses: counter force to target the military installations in Russia and China, or country value, to target all the cities in Russia and China, or both, to counter both the military facilities and the human population.
America has 5,500 nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert if you include the Trident submarines. They still have a policy to fight and win a nuclear war against Russia.
Russia has got 2,500, such a redundancy. There are 4o bombs targeted as we speak on New York alone, 60 on Washington DC, every city and town in the US with a population of 50,000 or more is targeted, and we are too because we are actually part of the United States, and have 34 US military installations in this country, they do their war practices here at Shoalwater Bay up in Queensland and in the Northern Territory.
We are sycophantic; we are the 51st state of United States. We participate and organise and orchestrate the killing in Iraq through Pine Gap. It's all targeted through Pine Gap. What we are doing is evil. I can think of no other word.
The Lancet estimated about 6 or 8 months ago that 650,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq, it's more now, and how many injured? Over 2 million refugees, and yet we have our lattes and we're just like the Americans.
We are like the good Germans, remember, they had their parties, they danced, and flirted and imbibed the art and the food and the wine as they raped and pillaged Europe, until the world came slamming down on their heads. We're the same.
When I was a little girl I lived in Surrey Hills, and my mother used to tell me about the Germans, and about Hitler. I was two in 1940, and I used to look out the window in Surrey Hills and there was a bare patch of land in the distance and I thought it was Germany. I don't know where it was, Burwood or somewhere.
I thought of the trains going to the concentration camps, with the Jews in them and the Germans said they didn't know what was in them. They saw the smoke coming out of the chimneys and that sweet sickly smell. They didn't know what it was. Yes they did.
I get angry about where we are now. People say oh you mustn't be angry; she's an angry woman. Well why weren't the Germans angry? If the Germans were angry they could have stopped the killing, the hundred million people in the Second World War.
Anger is appropriate, what's wrong with anger when the whole of the creation as Tilman said, is threatened? We're too god damned comfortable. I didn't mean to give a speech like this; Tilman triggered it. We can't be comfortable, there is no reason to be comfortable with a madman in charge in Australia, John Winston Howard.
I'm sorry to say but I can't have a lot of respect for Rudd who is for uranium mining, so we're selling cancer to the world. We are exporting uranium, which we fission in reactors which becomes one billion times more radioactive in the reactor, and that's nuclear waste.
What uranium does is transitorily produce electricity for about 30 years by boiling water, but what it really produces is radioactive waste, and what that WILL produce is epidemics of cancer, and over 16,000 genetic diseases for the rest of time. And that's just humans. Animals get cancer and genetic diseases and so do plants.
Tilman and I are both physicians. How many children have I helped with cystic fibrosis to die? My patient who was handed to me when he was seven, navy blue in a pusher, is now about to get married at the age of 45, he is the longest heart lung transplant that has lived in the world.
As Tilman said, life is precious, it's an incredible privilege. I've seen a few babies in tummies around here. To think that I was conceived out of the millions of sperm my father ejaculated that night, each different, each genetically different, my sperm reached my egg.
Just think of it; what a miracle! What a privilege it was that we were, each of us, even conceived. And what are we here for, hedonism, to make ourselves feel better, to make money?
We're not, we are here to leave the earth in a better place, as the person who welcomed us to the country said. And what have we done to this country since we stole it from the Aborigines who worshipped it and treasured it, and it was their religion?
We have destroyed it. I drove along from the airport today, little houses on little blocks and we all own a little block, (holds up branches from the gum tree) this is what Australia's about. It makes me feel like weeping.
And who are the people that run this country? Mostly they're men, and I'm not giving a rave against men, because there are wonderful sensitive men here.
But where are the women? We are 53% of the population, why don't we have the courage to stand up and take over maybe? The hormones we produce, oxytocin, estrogen and progesterone are very nurturing hormones, not that many men are not incredibly nurturing as well, but where are we going?
I know Robert McNamara, he's a friend of mine. He said to me, Helen, you don't know how close we came during the Cuban Missile Crisis as Tilman said.
We nearly had a nuclear war in 1995, when Yeltsin, a hardened alcoholic in control, the Russian early warning system which is dilapidated and degraded, and the Russians being very paranoid that America is going to strike anytime, especially with George Bush in power at the moment.
In January 1995 their early warning system detected a missile going up, AND they didn't know what it was. They naturally thought that America had launched a first strike. For the first time ever in the history of Russia, they opened the football, which is the case with the button in it.
If you watch George Bush closely, you will see there is a man always a few steps behind him with a suitcase, and it's the football with the nuclear codes in it.
When Reagan was shot, they lost the football for two days. They opened the football for the first time ever in Moscow, and there is Yeltsin, inebriated, a bottle of vodka before breakfast type of stuff, Korsakoff's syndrome, with his General's standing over his shoulder.
He had three minutes to decide whether or not to launch his arsenal. Ten seconds before the end of that three minutes elapsed, the missile veered off course, and the computer was closed. That's why we are still here. It's luck as Dave said to me just now. And we in Australia are participating in this whole goddamn thing.
Look why don't we just take over BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto just down the street, take it over, I don't care if we go to jail. It's time we went to jail for our children. It's time we were courageous enough to go to jail.
I've been to jail, its awful, they take everything away from you, your identification cards, your purse, your shoelaces so you can't hang yourself on the bars, it's horrible, but surely we've got the courage to do that?
We are participating in producing the formula and prescription for the end of life on earth. I once asked Carl Sagan, I said, Carl do you think there's life elsewhere in the universe? He paused for a while and said no.
I asked why, and he said if people had got to the level of development that we have, they would have already destroyed themselves. I mean what a very sad and negative comment, but maybe he's right. It's very hard, as Tilman said, to take in this psychologically and live with it.
The only way I can stay sane, is to do the work, because I have this crazy egocentric notion that I can do some good. Well, we did in the 80's didn't we? We did end the Cold War. We did; all of us.
Then Clinton got in, gutless Clinton, who didn't fly over to Yelstin and say "Sign here Boris, we're going to eliminate nuclear weapons." Because he was scared of the Pentagon, he had smoked some dope, he didn't inhale, but that's rhubarb, he did.
He'd never been to Vietnam, so he didn't have the courage like FDR would have. There are very few statespeople in the world. And people say when you get into power you have to compromise. No you don't.
When you're the President you have absolute authority, when you're the Prime Minister you have absolute authority, and guess what, John Howard is showing that. He's showing that in parliament. He is the most arrogant, dangerous Prime Minister that Australia has ever had, ever.
This year is the most important year in our history. What Dave has to produce now is a list of the delegates to the ALP National Conference. He says its hard to get them, they're very secretive. Those ALP people are very secretive, and the right wing is really scary, in Sussex St., which is where I come from in Sydney.
But we have got to get to every single one of them. There is a lovely person here called Sarah, where are you Sarah? Stand up. She heard me talk last year, and she has got the bit between the teeth, she want to see Jenny Macklin the other day. She said to me, "What am I going to do?" And I said, "go and see all the politicians." She's doing it. How old are you Sarah? 28.
Right, that's what we've all got to do, I don't care what age we are. We need to go and see every single Labor party politician and threaten them, because they only respond to threats.
And you need to go and see the Liberals too, because guess what? They've got children too, they've got testicals too that could be irradiated and damaged, their sperm.
Why isn't the Catholic Church in on this? Right to life? Do they want to give birth to damage fetuses, as the radioactive waste gets around the world and into the food supply and enters the uterus, like plutonium?
We used to have a bumper sticker, that said Plutonium is Thalidomide Forever, because it's a teratogenic and kills cells in a normal embryo that are going to form part of the brain or the heart or the arms. Remember the thalidomide babies, born with no arms?
Plutonium lives on to do that to fetus after fetus after fetus, for half a million years. When I debated Ziggy Switkowski last night on SBS, he produced a fabric of lies and he was so smooth.
He said, "Well we will worry about radioactive waste for the next 100 years and then other people can look after it and technology will have taken over. You have to be polite, you have to be ladylike and play by the rules, but we are in a terribly invidious position.
This book I wrote, Nuclear Power is Not the Answer. The first chapter deals with global warming. Nuclear power creates global warming in its own right. You have to dig up the uranium, using what? Oil.
Then you have to crush it, using more fossil fuel. Then you have to enrich it, and in America where our uranium is enriched, they use two huge coal fired plants to enrich the uranium.
Then you have to build the reactor, just making cement creates massive quantities of CO2, and then about 60 or 70 years later you have to decommission it, which costs more than building the reactor itself, by remote control using robots because it's so radioactively hot you can't get near it.
That's more fossil fuel, then you have to transport and store the radioactive waste for half a million years somewhere. No one knows really where. They have chosen a mountain in America called Yukka Mountain, appropriately named I think that is transected by 32 earthquake faults.
That's where they are going to put their radioactive waste they say. But what if we reach peak oil and what if we run out of oil and we leave huge vats of bubbling radioactive waste for our descendants and there is no way to transport it.
Or what about global warming when the oceans rise, what about all the reactors on the coast? Are they are going to drown and melt down? What about in France where the river levels dropped so low because of
the drought two years ago, they couldn't cool the reactors, and they were squirting the outside of the reactors with garden hoses to cool them. What about here when each nuclear reactor will require a million gallons of cooling water a minute and we've hardly got any water? These people by definition are sociopaths who want this stuff, including John Howard.
The cost, 5-6.5 billion US dollars to build a reactor, it's a socialized industry, the American government pays for it, no private investment firm will go near it; Wall St won't touch it with a ten foot pole.
Then you've got the reactor, which continuously emits radioactive materials, so if you live near it you are at risk of getting cancer, and also your food is going to be radioactive.
In France, they love their food, but 80% of their electricity comes from nuclear power, every corner you turn there is a reactor. So we don't know what their cancer levels are, but they clearly will be high. Don't forget the time frame for the induction of cancer is 50-60 years.
That's why the nuclear industry gets away with their evil, it's a cancer producing industry, like asbestos, just like asbestos, only with asbestos, it only affects the people and the wives of those who mined the asbestos.
My father died of an asbestos induced cancer, and I used to hold the asbestos sheeting as he sawed it, enveloped in dust. However, asbestos only affects the present generation but nuclear waste bio-concentrates in the food chain and will affect and pollute all future generations.
As for renewables, Dave is right, Australia could become the energy superpower of the world, bathed as we are in sun, every building should be retro fitted to be solar powered with solar hot water, funded, and subsidised by the federal government.
Wind farms could be established all over the country, and geothermal energy from hot rocks in South Australia could be tapped. We could employ 250,000 people or more and export this technology. How dare Julia go back on what she has committed to before? Sarah, go and see Julia, and be really strong okay, woman to woman.
So I am putting together a road map, a prescription for the future, with some brilliant scientists in the us, to utilize an array of wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, hydro electricity generation plus energy conservation.
Americans could save 28% of the electricity they currently use, just by turning off their VCRs and computers and the like. The road map will be out in April. The technology is here, currently available, extremely cheap and we are doing an economic and technological analysis and we will place a précis into the hands of every politician in America.
We will go and see Barbara Boxer who heads the Energy Committee in the Senate and if she takes it on, we might be able to get the US government to fund it. But we in Australia need to take the lead like New Zealand did. Why don't we have the guts like New Zealanders had? And that means every single one of us.
We can't be psychologically comfortable anymore. We can't get up in the morning without looking ourselves in the mirror, or our grandchildren in the eye and say I am going to save this planet, this beautiful planet of ours.
If anyone ever understood that, it was the Aborigines, our ancestors in terms of the land. We should be kneeling at your feet, learning how to care for this beautiful. And for what we have done, as a white person, I deeply apologise to you.
Thank you.