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• Dr. Caldicott's official site
• Nuclear Policy Research Institute
• About Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer
• Physicians for Social Responsibility

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Tavis: Dr. Helen Caldicott is the president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, and a cofounder of Physicians for Social Responsibility. She's also a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. And, as I mentioned at the top of the show, she was named one of the most influential women of the twentieth century by the Smithsonian. She is also the author of several books, including her latest. 'Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer.' Dr. Caldicott, I'm honored to have you here.

Dr. Helen Caldicott: Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: I'm anxious to get to this book, in part because the title itself is so provocative, it seems to be antithetical to everything we're being told.

Caldicott: By the nuclear industry.

Tavis: Exactly. So we'll come back, you know (laugh) this, obviously. We'll talk about that in just a second. Let me start, though, with the North Korea test. What did you make of this when you heard the news?

Caldicott: Well A, 'The New York Times' in a recent article says it may not be a nuclear test. B, it's less than one kiloton. The Hiroshima bomb was 13,000 kilotons. They've measured no radiation yet. They've just got the seismic thing. It could be a big conventional explosion. We don't know. It's certainly destabilizing.

Tavis: What do you make of the fact, though, that North Korea, and not only North Korea, but other nations are determined, it seems, to embrace this capability, and to build a nuclear device? What's that all about?

Caldicott: Yeah, I'll tell you what.

Tavis: Okay.

Caldicott: Of the 30,000 hydrogen bombs in the world, Russia and America own 97 percent of them. Russia's still got America targeted with two and a half thousand, 40 on New York City alone. America's got Russia targeted with 5,000, on hair-trigger alert, ready to go with a three-minute decision time by George Bush or Vladimir Putin. America's still got a policy to fight and win a nuclear war against Russia.

If those bombs go off, we'll create a nuclear winter. The Earth enveloped in a cloud so thick of smoke it blocks out the sun for a year, and everything except the cockroaches die. The real rogue states in America, in the world, therefore, are Russia and America. And of course, all the little countries want to emulate them, because it's powerful to enter the portal of the nuclear club.

So what we should do is what Gorbachev and Reagan almost agreed to do, is to abolish nuclear weapons between Russia and America, and only then, with the little countries, will we be able to police them and say, don't you do that, because we're not hypocritical.

Tavis: You do realize, though, in a post-9/11 world, some folk, respectfully, find that argument a little lacking. That we need to protect ourselves.

Caldicott: How? With nuclear weapons, Tavis? One nuclear weapon could vaporize millions of people alone in L.A., and there are probably 50 or 60 targeted on L.A. How do you stop nuclear terrorists with planes by having nuclear weapons, number one? Number two, terrorists don't need nuclear weapons. You've got 103 nuclear power plants deployed around the country.

I could melt one down within hours. And that could destroy Manhattan, if Indian Point's melted down, 35 miles from Manhattan. In fact, the terrorists had targeted the two Indian Point reactors during their attacks on the World Trade towers. They didn't go into them, 'cause they thought there was a missile battery around them. They haven't increased security at nuclear reactors since 9/11.

Tavis: So your point is it's not just that nuclear weapons are horrible to begin with, but the nuclear plants provide beautiful, wonderful, open targets for terrorists.

Caldicott: Totally. They don't need to steal plutonium and make a bomb. They've got them in the form of nuclear reactors all around the country.

Tavis: Let me ask you what your sense is of the role that the U.S. has given itself as the decision maker for who has nuclear weapons to begin with.

Caldicott: I think it's terrible.

Tavis: Yeah.

Caldicott: You have to know you're only two point five percent of the world's population. I clearly come from Australia, with my strange accent, but we don't like that. We all have to work together as a family of the human race. Not one country saying it's better and more powerful than any other country. You've got the most nuclear weapons in the world, 15,000. You can't stand on a platform of morality and tell other countries what to do unless you rise to your full moral and spiritual height and do the right thing, or I'm afraid the world will not exist much longer. And I write that in my last book, 'The New Nuclear Danger.'

Tavis: Before I jump to this one, one last question on this matter, at least. Given what you've described the power of these weapons to be, what does anyone do, much less the U.S.? What does any country do or need with 15,000 of these things? How many does it take to blow the whole world up?

Caldicott: You need 1,000 bombs dropping in 100 cities to cause nuclear winter and the end of life on Earth. Russia's got two and a half thousand ready to go. Boris Yeltsin, in 1995, made a mistake and got to within 10 seconds of blowing up America, 'cause they thought a missile launched by Norway was in fact a missile launched from your Trident submarine, and you were launching a first-strike attack.

Ten seconds you were from annihilation. Ten seconds. And I've got a Russian who used to be a missileer who keeps calling me and saying Helen, we're desperate. We think we might blow you up by accident, 'cause our satellites aren't working anymore. We're scared, we're paranoid, we don't know when you're going to strike. It's a very scary balance, Tavis. It's the elephant in the sitting room that nobody is addressing.

Tavis: Let's address it, then. What people are addressing, what we hear all the time, particularly given the problems we have with oil, or the lack thereof, gas prices as high as they are. What we keep hearing from the powers that be is that the way to solve this oil problem, etcetera, etcetera, is nuclear energy. And you say that nuclear power is not the answer.

Caldicott: Well first of all, you don't use oil to generate electricity. Oil is used for transportation, not electricity. So to say nuclear power will solve the problem of oil is like comparing an apple with an orange. It's just stupid. And it's a lie. You generate electricity by coal, by natural gas, or nuclear. Or by solar, wind, geothermal cogeneration, tidal wave, and conservation.

And I'm putting together a roadmap which will be ready in April for a totally nuclear-free, totally carbon-free future. The technology's here, and it's cheaper by orders of magnitude than nuclear. We can do it right now, if the politicians behave themselves and stop being dominated by the coal companies, the oil companies, and the nuclear companies.

Tavis: You maybe just answered the question I wanted to ask, and I was about to preface by saying I'm not asking this out of any particular naiveté. But why do the powers that be keep telling us, and trying to sell us on the fact that nuclear energy is the answer?

Caldicott: 'Cause they're bought and sold by the nuclear industry. Cheney is a leading spokesperson, so is Bush. The nuclear industry is spending over $200 million at the moment on a campaign to say oh, well, we're the answer to global warming. They're a moribund industry. They were dying after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. But they make massive quantities of radioactive waste which over time, and I speak now as a pediatrician, will create epidemics of cancer and leukemia in our children for the rest of time, and genetic disease.

So, nuclear power is a cancer industry whose transient by-product is the production of electricity, where mostly what it produces is nuclear waste, which concentrates in our food. Do you know, Tavis, 40 percent of the European landmass is now radioactive from Chernobyl. I don't eat European food, 'cause you don't know what's radioactive, and what isn't.

Tavis: Let me ask how we get traction on this issue with everyday people. And I ask that because I'm sitting with you on PBS. I am not a Nobel laureate, and in my lifetime...

Caldicott: Neither am I. (Laugh)

Tavis: Well, I was about to say, I'm not a Nobel laureate, much less a Nobel nominee, and most of the folk watching, (Laugh) are not Nobel laureates or nominees. And yet, this is an issue that impacts all of us, but it's not sexy, and it's not always easy to understand. You've done a good job of breaking it down, but how do you get traction on that type of conversation?

Caldicott: Tavis, if there's a meltdown in America soon, and say it's at Indian Point and the financial capital of the world is destroyed, do you think that every single program might be interviewing me and my colleagues? It's sexy if it happens. It's how to open up people's psychic numbing. Most of us have seen someone die of cancer. I've helped hundreds of children die of cystic fibrosis.

It's devastating, and it becomes - I hate that word, sexy - but it becomes pertinent when you or your family get sick. And what we do in medicine is if we have a disease we can't cure, we must prevent it. And we can't have a cancer industry generating electricity which will increase cancer for the rest of time. It's like having a reactor full of polio virus. And as they replicate, they make heat, boil water, and turn it into steam and electricity. But it creates poliomyelitis. So it's the same thing. It's a medical issue.

Tavis: To your point now...

Caldicott: Is that sexy, or not?

Tavis: Well, it's not sexy, but I understand why you don't like the word sexy, but you get my point, and I understand yours.

Caldicott: I do.

Tavis: I get your point, and I take it for what it is. Let me ask, to your latter point, though, I ask about this issue getting traction with everyday people. Is this issue getting traction in your industry, in your field?

Caldicott: I'm not in an industry, I'm in medicine. That's not an industry, it's a vocation. We took the, I'm like a nun. I took the Hippocratic Oath. I just spoke at Harvard at my alma mater at Children's Hospital, the best pediatricians in the world, a hundred of them. They were absolutely devastated by my description of the nuclear fuel cycle and the medical consequences.

And they said but what can we do? I created Physicians for Social Responsibility, 23,000 doctors. We went on television, radio, to talk about A, the medical effects of nuclear war, and we led the nuclear freeze movement, and we helped to end the Cold War. Now we've gotta close down every nuclear power plant in this country, and we need to know that if the second world war was fought today, Europe would be uninhabitable forever more, 'cause it's literally laced with reactors. Most of which would have been targeted.

Tavis: The new book by Dr. Helen Caldicott is 'Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer.' 'Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer.'

Caldicott: To global warming, or it creates global warming in its own right, yeah.

Tavis: We're glad to have you on.

Caldicott: Thanks.

Tavis: Thanks for your insight.

Caldicott: Thank you.

Tavis: Up next on this program, from 'Grey's Anatomy,' actress Chandra Wilson, one of the most watched shows on television. I love the role that she plays, the Nazi on the program. Stay with us, we'll talk to Chandra Wilson in just a moment.