Helen Caldicott Meets Ronald Reagan and Learns About & Croix Convinced and we’re sure you will be too. Try just one sip of La Croix Sparkling Mineral Water and you’ll know that it’s the best. Sparkling and light, uniquely free of impurities, additives, after-tastes, mineral odors and calories, this Minnesota spring’s water has been locally revered for over 100 years and is now available to you . Try La Croix and we think you’ll agree: thefinest sparkling mineral water at any price is La Croix. Missile Envy Excerpts from a speech by Helen Caldicott before the Portland City Club g H f e have a problem that overrides all others; that is so serious that unless we W are going to look at it, is going to destroy the whole planet. And in truth we have six months to save the earth, because if we don’t elect the right people to Congress this year and a President who understands what he is doing on this issue, the weapons currently being built will make nuclear war in the future a mathematical certainty. I don’t know when it will happen, but it will be too late. Pure Mineral IW ' A ! I M A ,W > ■ MAN BREWING CO INC O’ ’ Lo Sodium—No Calories PACIFIC RIM 206/624-1681 or 622-7101 FRUIT SPREADS Organically grown in the Pacific Northwest 7902 ^Greenlake C>rIN. ypizzELKiA: N iy 5dyle pie, slices, calzone espresso, juices baked qoods based missiles were concentrated on the land. I tried to tell him that fact a year before; that America has 5,000 invulnerable nuclear weapons in its submarines under Now who is this man, who has devised these policies? And who is running this country right now. Does he understand what he is doing? He doesn’t. I spent an hour and a quarter with him in the White □NORTHWEST JAZZ SINGERS FESTIVAL □ Friday and Saturday nights SEATTLE’S OLDEST RESTAURANT LUNCH •DINNER •COCKTAILS •ENTERTAINMENT 109 Yesler Way, Pioneer Square 624*1515 House a year ago. I met his daughter, Patti; she heard me talk. I was speaking at the Playboy mansion and she said, “I want you to speak to my dad. If there is one person on earth who can change his mind, it’s you.” So we went. I said to him, “You probably don’t know who I am.” He said, “Yes, I do. You’re an Australian who read On the Beach and you’re frightened of nuclear war.” And I said, “Yes, that’s right." And he said, “I too believe in preventing nuclear war but I believe in building more bombs.” Then he told me the Russians were all totally evil godless communists—exactly the same way, incidentally, that he used to speak about the Chinese—and I asked him, had he ever met one? And he said no, he hadn’t. When I read my psychiatry books 20 years ago that was the definition of paranoia. Then we went flat out for an hour and a quarter. He started out telling me about weapons systems. He didn’t want to talk about the medical or scientific effects of nuclear war. Just the numbers of bombs — missile envy it is. And so it was just as if he had learned his data on it by rote for the teleprompter. He had absolutely no background knowledge to debate any point with me at all. I’ve rarely met such an uninformed person who was in a position of high office. And as I moved in to correct him (and I was pretty tough with him; there was no animosity though), his eyes just glazed over. To give you an indication of his lack of knowledge, there was an article in The New York Times several months ago stating that he was meeting with a group of congressmen, and he told them that, until recently, he hadn’t realized that the Soviet Union system of heavy landthe sea that no one can find because they’re noiseless. And that Russia has got 5,000 bombs on land which are totally vulnerable to a first-strike attack. His strategic arms proposal says that Russia has got to get rid of half of their land- based missiles, ignoring the American submarine-based missiles, while America can build some more land-based missiles. And I said that’s not fair. He didn’t seem io understand that at all. Then he pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and said, “Look, I took some notes before I came down,” and he read to me that people who worked for the nuclear weapons freeze are either KGB or Soviet agents. So I said to him, “But that’s from the Reader's Digest." And it was. It was verbatim from the John Barron article in the Reader’s Digest. And he said, “No, it’s not. It’s my Intelligence File.” But what shocked me more than anything else, apart from his lack of knowledge and his paranoia, was his lack of empathy. Both Patti and I were deeply distressed at the end. It’s very frightening because Einstein said that the splitting of the atom changed everything, save man’s mode of thinking. Thus we drift to unparalleled catastrophe. Now a President like this wouldn’t have mattered 40 years ago. He would have been a nice guy, everyone would have liked him, everything would have been fine. But now he can actually blow up the world and kill 4.5 billion people. I think he is the most dangerous President this country has ever had, because he practices pre-nuclear thinking with absolutely no understanding of what he is doing. • » Peace activist Helen Caldicott recently published Nuclear Madness and Missile Envy. Clinton St. Quarterly 15
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz