STFU, you old bat!
Posted on 10/08/2004 12:00:24 PM PDT by Tom Pain
Activist: Fight nuclear power
Disarmament advocate talks at IWU, ISU
By Michele Steinbacher msteinbacher@pantagraph.com
BLOOMINGTON -- Nuclear arsenals still point at the world's cities more than a decade after the Cold War, and atomic power plants like the one in Clinton dot the nation's landscape. That should terrify Americans into action, one of the world's leading advocates for nuclear disarmament told Central Illinois residents Thursday.
"Why do you have all these missiles if Russia is now your best friend?" Dr. Helen Caldicott asked a crowd gathered at an Illinois Wesleyan University lecture hall Thursday. Later that night she spoke at Illinois State University.
Caldicott, founder and president of the Washington, D.C.-based Nuclear Policy Research Institute, also urged her audience to consider the medical hazards associated with so-called clean nuclear energy -- and to fight plans to build a second nuclear reactor in Clinton.
"It would be the 14th reactor in this state, a state that already has the most in the nation," she said.
"You live in a very, very dangerous area," she added.
The pediatrician told the afternoon crowd that as a physician she knows the effects of nuclear energy and radiation.
Born and raised in Australia, she also knows it firsthand as a melanoma survivor.
The Earth's ozone layer, which filters out harmful solar radiation, has developed a hole over the Southern Hemisphere. That has led to a melanoma epidemic there, she said.
Chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons eat away the ozone layer. Aerosol propellants and refrigerants played a role, but so do the gases produced when uranium is enriched for nuclear fuel, she said.
"This planet is in the intensive care unit. It's an acute clinical emergency on our hands -- and its not physics or biology that's caused this, but men's minds."
Citing nuclear disasters from Pennsylvania's Three-Mile Island in the 1970s to Ukraine's Chernobyl in the 1980s, Caldicott told the audience Americans need to work to close the nation's 103 nuclear power plants.
"If one of them blows, the consequences would be devastating," she said. She lamented U.S. reluctance to study the long-term effects of Three-Mile Island. She said she believes nearby dairy cows provided milk to the Hershey chocolate factory just 13 miles away, resulting in carcinogenic chocolates. And the physician called Chernobyl a "catastrophe of unknown proportions."
The U.S. military has built 77,000 nuclear weapons, she added. Russia and the United States house about 97 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world, she said, but those nations take a microscope to countries, such as North Korea, with only a handful of them.
She described a what-if situation involving Russian missiles hitting Bloomington.
The IWU lecture hall and people in a five-mile radius would be disintegrated. The blast would create a crater three-quarters of a mile wide, she said.
A nuclear war would throw so much dust in the atmosphere, sunlight would be blocked out for nearly a year.
Referring to Chechen rebels' massacre of Russian schoolchildren last month, Caldicott said people should consider the horror that would come from such terrorists reaching the Russian nuclear missiles.
She also worries about the safety of radioactive waste at U.S. reactors.
"A terrorist could fly a plane into a cooling pool," she said, referring to the water reservoirs where spent fuel is stored.
Caldicott co-founded Physicians for Social Responsibility. The 23,000-member organization works to educate colleagues about the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling nominated Caldicott for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.
The author of five books, Caldicott is best-known for her 1979-published "Nuclear Madness." Her most recent work is "The New Nuclear Danger: George Bush's Military Industrial Complex."
Caldecott's institute is co-sponsoring a public symposium on "Nuclear Power and Children's Health" Oct. 15 and 16 in Chicago. For more information, see the institute's Web site, www.nuclearpolicy.org
From article in Bloomington(ILLINOIS) Pantagraph: "She(Helen Caldicott) lamented U.S. reluctance to study the long-term effects of Three-Mile Island. She said she believes nearby dairy cows provided milk to the Hershey chocolate factory just 13 miles away, resulting in carcinogenic chocolates. "
Caldicott was a nutter even 20 years ago. She predicted in 1984 that if Reagan was re-elected, nuclear war was inevitable. She's been even more wrong since then.
Agreed. I had to watch a video of her in a college class. She's a first class lunatic.
CHINA
I'm amazed this old fraud is still alive, much less still talking the same trash.
STFU, you old bat!
I'm a goner then! I'm a chocoholic -- love Hershey's semi-sweet chocolate!
Note to self...
Find good message that resonates with leftist crowd. No matter what the news of the day, recycle it for the times --this is a surefire way to remain important and to have good benefactors.
I had the "privilege" of attending a speech of hers. It was actually pretty entertaining once I stopped taking her seriously. A bunch of lily white upper-class lefties listening to someone endorsing all their worst fantasies.
Yes, and it is wrong for her to mention Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in the same sentence. They are so very different.
Maybe she has a quack's model showing a nuclear war's dust blocking the Sun out for a year but other models show no such thing. Nobody says even a limitied Nuclear exchange would be without far reaching fallout consequences but this Lady is just agenda driven and not science driven.
I predict ...death and taxes
Another answer: Russia is NOT our best friend.
I'm a goner...I think I'll have another Hershey's Nugget, get a cup of coffee..It's too late now.
My eating chocolate saves lives (just ask my family)
Just bring it on Hershey!! And Nestle, Cadbury, and anyone else....
Yep, your a girl. Most men prefer Milk Chocolate.
General "Buck" Turgidson : Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.
If so, I am already dead....so I guess I will have another.
I howled with laughter at the anti-nuke freeks in France, protesting the DESTRUCTION of nuclear weapons. Apparently, the lunatics failed to understand that when you remove the radioactive materials from a nuclear warhead, you still have radioactive materials to process!
Nuckin' Futs, I tell ya.
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