Our friend Robert Merkel has taken the time to read Helen Caldicott's new book, Nuclear Power is Not The Answer To Global Warming or Anything Else, (for that alone he deserves a medal) and has come away less than impressed:
For a peak at other Caldicott-authored outrages, click here.
Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Electricity, Environment, Energy, Politics, Technology, Economics, Helen Caldicott
Caldicott is also almost certainly guilty of hyperbole in her reporting of the Three Mile Island accident. Caldicott, referring to one of her earlier works, claims that "hundreds of nearby residents" suffered symptoms of acute radiation sickness, the symptoms indicative of radiation doeses of "at least 100 rads" in the immediate aftermath of the accident. This is almost certainly rubbish. As the Wikipedia's article on radiation poisoning explains, if such symptoms occurred they would have been very easily identifiable by medical professionals, and such doses would have resulted in spontaneous abortions in pregnant, severe decreases in red blood cells counts, extended sickness, and probably a number of short-term casualties. However, Caldicott doesn't report any evidence for such occurrences. Caldicott is a doctor, and would know this perfectly well. If she had such evidence, she presumably would have presented it in the book. I do not understand how Caldicott, in good conscience, can make such claims when there are such apparent gaps in her evidence.Maybe because when it comes to claims like these, she doesn't have a conscience?
For a peak at other Caldicott-authored outrages, click here.
Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Electricity, Environment, Energy, Politics, Technology, Economics, Helen Caldicott
Comments
As for confronting her claims on a factual level, we've done that many times before.
"Maybe because when it comes to claims like these, she doesn't have a conscience?"
You'll serve your readers and constituencies better if you stick to the facts.
I certainly wouldn't want her treating me.
A Desperate Passion: An Autobiography, published in 1996 by W.W. Norton & Company.
The review appeared in 21st Century Science & Technology, under the title "The World According to Helen Caldicott."
Australian physician Helen Caldicott, one of the best-known and most emotional of the international anti-nuclear activists, has been scaring people to death for 25 years, backing up her ghastly images of nuclear-incinerated babies with her medical authority as a pediatrician. Her skill at moving audiences to tears has made a major contribution to the increasing incapacity of Americans to think through scientific ideas with reason, surrounding them instead with a passionate ignorance. In the world of Helen Caldicott, men and industry are both oppressors, and feeling good about being one's self is a primary goal in life.
I read this autobiography in part because Caldicott has moved to the fashionable town of East Hampton, New York, where she is involved in attacking Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, a longtime center for ground-breaking physics and medical research, along with three nuclear reactors in nearby Connecticut. Her tactics today are the same as those in the past: lies, half-truths, exaggerations--anything to scare the audience into attacking the ``enemy'' of nuclear technology.
I thought it might be useful to find out what drives such a ``desperate passion,'' and such a disregard for science. Her autobiography did not tell me anything unexpected. The intersection of Hollywood, political figures, big money, big media, and anti-nuclear ideology is not a surprise. And neither is Caldicott's personal philosophy or its dependence on the views of Bertrand Russell (who says that he welcomes wars, famine, and pestilence as natural ways of culling the population).
Caldicott tells you about herself in a warts-and-all, touchy-feely way. I am mistrustful of this tell-all frankness--is it really necessary to know about her mother's sex life?--but here's what I learned about Helen: She was a bright student, quite conventional, who sewed her own clothes and from an early time ``used her sexuality to advantage.'' She describes, for example, how she made a ``somewhat revealing'' dress that she wore to an oral exam. ``...I'm sure the dress was not a hindrance,'' she writes, telling how she came out top in that subject. She was scared into becoming anti-nuclear after she read Nevil Shute's novel {On the Beach,} about nuclear war survivors in a doomed world.
She goes to medical school, falls in love with a fellow student, gets engaged, gets pregnant, gets married, and stays home to care for their three children. While in Boston, where her husband is working at the Children's Hospital Medical Center at Harvard, she goes back to medical work part-time, working on cystic fibrosis.
Back in Australia, in 1970-1971, another book then changes her life: Germaine Greer's {The Female Eunuch.} Sexual liberation, she says, lifted her out of depression. ``I was awakened sexually by reading the feminist literature, which did wonders to improve our failing marriage,'' she writes. From Greer, she moved on to her ``next mentor,'' Lord Bertrand Russell and his three volume autobiography, with all the concomitant Russellite activism (as well as his Malthusianism). Caldicott says that with these books, she ``found'' herself, the real person that had been buried under layers of convention.
Her ``coming out,'' so to speak, occurred at a posh church in Adelaide, where she was invited to speak on women's liberation and told to say what she really thought. So, she writes, ``I said that women in Australian society were less confident than men because they rarely had orgasms, which I had discovered from surveying my patients in general practice....''
Continuing her liberation, Caldicott began to expand her political activities, especially against the French government's nuclear tests in the Pacific. However, her arguments, and their scientific content, never rise above the anecdotal orgasm level.
Caldicott lobbies, gives interviews, addresses meetings, and works hard to establish a cystic fibrosis clinic at the Adelaide Children's Hospital. When the Australian government decides to mine and export uranium, she reads the quackiest book on nuclear energy ({Poisoned Power} by Arthur Tampin and John Gofman) and then hits the road, lecturing trade unions on why they should oppose this government policy.
- Hit 'em in the Testicles -
Caldicott's address to the Adelaide Trades and Labour Council sums up her concept of organizing: As she writes: ``I'd worn a pair of black velvet slacks and an ivory-colored satin blouse--so that they might at least look at me.'' When this didn't work, and the audience continued their own conversations without paying her any attention, she says: ``I had a brilliant idea. I began talking about the medical effects of radiation upon testicles. Suddenly you could have heard a pin drop. Australian workers are not adamant about many things, but if there is one subject dear to their hearts, I had found it.''
She then summarizes: ``I learned something very important that night. Don't overwhelm your audience with data they can't assimilate, because you will lose them. Grab them where they are emotionally vulnerable; once they are with you, the whole occasion is extremely rewarding.''
Her political organizing escalates, and Caldicott frankly discusses her method of using ``a little flirtation'' to obtain signatures, and so on. (How this fits in with the liberated feminist ideology is not discussed.) She carries this method to America, where she and her husband return in 1975-1976, although she acknowledges some difficulties with this form of organizing--such as the time George Meany (allegedly) invited her to his hotel bedroom.
It is in the United States that her activist career moves into high gear. Caldicott meets all the big players in the anti-nuclear movement and forms the Physicians for Social Responsibility, which is launched with flattering coverage in {The New York Times} and other press. Its membership got a big boost in March 1979, after ``Three Mile Island melted down,'' as she puts it. Caldicott was now in her element, hitting people in the testicles, so to speak, with hysterical accounts of what the potential dangers of Three Mile Island were.
Riding a wave of television and press coverage, Caldicott then goes international, speaking and attending conferences in Hiroshima, the Soviet Union, and around the world--becoming a ``nuclear bag lady,'' as she put it. She leaves her medical work at Harvard to devote herself to jet-set organizing and raising money, lots of it, for the anti-nuclear cause. There are no limits to the publicity her Hollywood and journalism connections can arrange.
One also learns the eye-color and build of all the well-known activists who are her friends, from the German Green Party's Petra Kelly, to Meryl Streep, Sally Field, and Lily Tomlin. Then there are the ins and outs of high-level anti-nuclear diplomacy, including Caldicott's meeting with President Reagan, arranged by his daughter, Patti David.
In 1984, Caldicott is forced to resign from the Physicians for Social Responsibility, by a leadership faction that dislikes her hysterical scare-mongering (theirs is more low key). She works feverishly in the Mondale campaign, and is crushed by his loss in the Presidential race. As she put it, ``I'd reached the end of my tether.'' She and her husband vacation around the world and return to Australia. Then, another personal disaster occurs: her husband divorces her.
- Caldicott Reborn -
Here, the book ends, but Caldicott's crusade continues. After a long period of re-finding herself, Caldicott has settled in Long Island, N.Y., where she continues on her desperate and passionate way, dressing well and arousing her audience with emotional ploys and distortions of the truth.
Meanwhile, as a result of Caldicott's activities and with the complicity of masses of comfortable people who are all too willing to be hit in the testicles in order to become passionately ignorant, research at the frontiers of science, such as that conducted at Brookhaven, is stymied and people around the world are dying of starvation and disease, because we lack the benefits of nuclear energy.
Caldicott's rethoric and manipulating methods appear however ridiculously harmless compared to the amount of crap we are used to hear from politicians and other activists.
Let us for a moment consider the point of view of an anti-nuclear activist. What do you think she/he thinks of the fact that the nuclear arsenal that was supposedly built to protect the world at the same time has given us the potential to destruct all human life on Earth. Or the fact that the nuclear industry claims it doesn't emit CO2.
If we play this game of saying who's got the most dirty tricks, nobody wins. As I see it we have an opaque nuclear community who basically says that everything's just fine and a group of concerned people who have to use dishonest methods to get public attention, hopefully improve the level of education in this particular matter and eventually reach a more nuanced public opinion.
I'm not saying I justify dishonest methods but before criticising them, one should make sure one doesn't use similar methods.