welcome viewers to our ongoing program nuclear free future conversation coming to you from channel seventeen center for media and democracy here in burlington vermont i'm your host margaret harrington and here in the studio with me is d rouer from physicians for social responsibility who has a long history in the n t nuclear movement welcome john welcome you're on our program to be here yes and as we've been going on for about nine years here with the nuclear free future conversation and i had the opportunity to meet you at your wonderful presentation at the friends meeting house in early november about the what's going on right now in a clear risk what and that is the title of our program what we can do about the risk of nuclear war and john with your long history in the n t nuclear movement i'm sure that you can give us some perspective on what is going on right now yes these are exciting times in both the positive and negative way you know those of us who are over fifty five or so have some memory of living with the almost constant threat of nuclear war as younger people i was taught that the soviet union was so evil and communism so monolithic that nothing but a nuclear war could ever stop the spread of it and that the soviet union would never fall without the power of nuclear weapons course history proved otherwise but we grew up with the constant worry of what was going to happen to us the idea of duck and cover that if air raid signal sounded everybody just got under their desks at school and went down into the fallout shelters and that maybe would let us survive somehow but we didn't know much about the details of what that meant right and you go you go back to your school days where you were in grade school when when these drills would happen what would be the what would happen at that time well the every monday as i recall there was just a long air raid signal and when i was very young they actually had a scope move into the hallways and get under the desks and that was dropped after a number of years that we just listened to it and didn't talk about it too much a stronger memory is seeing the fallout shelter signs on so many buildings in leading above the steps toward the basement and i can remember my neighbors in suburban baltimore digging a hole in the shelter of some sort and asking my dad why are we doing that and i don't remember why he said we didn't need to do that but he didn't do you do you recall at the moment did he kind of assuage your anxiety about this or or did he say it's going to be ok or or but it was just never really talked about it was just part of life and wasn't discussed as much as i wish it had been that curiosity about what it was about and my natural scientific curiosity led me to do some research on my own and as a i grew to be a teenager in a high school i remember measuring the walls we had a particularly solid stone house and measuring the walls and looking in books for the radiation protection factor to see how long i could live with the fallout if it did happen but it was a matter of fact it wasn't a terribly fearful thing as it probably should have been it sounds like john from the very beginning you were somebody who would do something about it right i mean because a lot of us were just fearful you know what is going on we hear there's a right signs we see the bomb shelter sign down in the basement of the school or in the street and it was just so very very frightening and as you say it was a clear and present danger when you when you were growing up right but like most people i didn't think i could do anything about it and this was the world i was given deal with it and that's that's kind of a sad attitude that we're raised to believe because it allows all the people in power to do whatever they want and we just obey it wasn't really until i started my medical training finished my medical school when ronald reagan won the presidency on a platform that including filling his cabinet with people who thought we could no longer had to deter the soviet union from taking over the world we could actually launch a nuclear war beat them and then we'd somehow come out winning so by that time my curiosity was really piqued so i spent a lot of time with the book saying what would nuclear war look like and i had the medical sophistication and education by that time to know what the blast effect would be what the radiation would be what the fires would be and it was pretty frightening so that's when i discovered physicians responsible for social responsibility you had been working on this for a decade and a half and they had the physical medical facts well documented in peer reviewed journals so i could see factually what it would look like and i became a speaker for them and what impressed me was when you tell people the facts when you let them look at them say here's the potential for nuclear war that your president is calling for we can have this but here's what it's going to do if people spend a few hours with it almost always they say no let's not do that and it can't happen to right isn't that the way the mind set is it can't happen here it's going to happen over there like the bombs will go to the at the time the soviet union well i don't know how many people believe that it's more like a psychic numbing that it c happen but i can't think about it because i can't do anything about it but when you learn the facts you learn and know you can do something about it and we did people like dr helen caldicott and others who founded the physicians for social responsibility and the international physicians for the prevention of nuclear war actually reached ronald reagan and gorbachev explained it to them and then they agreed you're right we can't do this and so they created the the  strategic arms reduction talks and got rid of a lot of nuclear weapons right so let you with the street strategic arms reduction talks they began in the early eighty's right so before that it was something called the nuclear  nonproliferation treaty whereby the nuclear armed powers and our five at the time said to the rest of the world well we really don't want these things so if you guys agree not to obtain them then w agree to work hard on getting rid of ours and what has happened was that work that kept nations who thought they might get them from from getting them but decades passed and clearly the nuclear powers were not interested in giving them up for geopolitical reasons and so that's what's so exciting going on now is the nations that agreed then not to have them are finally challenging the nuclear powers to say we're going to make these things illegal you promise to get rid of a long time ago and you're not doing it so in june after ten years of hard work by the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons one hundred twenty two nations signed a treaty or adopted a treaty to say that these things are now illegal now that's a complicated process in international politics because each country adopts the treaty but then they have to actually sign the treaty and fifty three nations of done that and then it has to be ratified by their governments which is a multi year process right and it also depends doesn't it on who is in political power in the in those countries and our time and again now there are nine known countries that have nuclear weapons there are known that we know about it yeah that's right and we probably know there's only one of those nations doesn't admit to having and that's israel but nuclear technology as such and monitoring systems and information processing now is such that it would be very hard to have one without somebody knowing with the exception of a small terrorist weapon that would possibly be obtainable and usable and that's one of the three big threats as i see it you talk about psychic numbing and then during all of the obama years you have said that many of us were asleep on that on the nuclear issue during the obama administration the progress we were making slow to a snail's pace could you talk about that about that was like an outcome of the psychic numbing and i know that people young people that i talked to thought that the nuclear weapons were already outlawed they said that though and you know it can't happen again right right yeah there's very little factual information among the general public we were pretty aware of what was happening we knew it was awful and we numbed ourselves psychically so we could survive in and go on living and the risk did decrease when gorba start talks we decreased the total number of weapons in the world from seventy thousand or so to down about fifteen thousand from fifty times over kill down to about eight times over kill means we can destroy everything useful eight times over and we still stand with that and because of the end of the cold war and the soviet union breaking up we felt less threatened so we went on to other issues like climate change and power and so forth which are very important issues to deal with but those reductions stopped in the obama or slowed to a snail's pace they're still getting rid of saddam but now the we've just promised to spend another trillion dollars over the next thirty years to modernize them which essentially means to replace the make them more usable yeah i had thought that modern not modernized meant to get the the old nuclear weapons into shape but you're talking about is probably making nuclear weapons it's both power it's both the problem is when we do that then every other country wants to do that in this all the nuclear powers are doing it in one way or another which is another arms race lot of wasted money that's not dealing with the famines in the world in the refugees in the world and it the weapons are actually being made more usable the fuses are being made more accurate so they can land more precisely in a given area which means all we cannot do as much collateral damage we can just take out their weapons and not take out the whole city in the mind of some military planners that's makes them militarily useful which is not a very good thing and so the end is this a covert thing that's going on it's really most of us really don't know about it know the congressional office a budget management has it all laid out there's a wonderful report called the trillion dollar train wreck that outlines which systems are going to be replaced which warheads are going to be placed what they're going to be a place with and the maintenance of the old tr d of delivery systems you know we need we can deliver bombs by bombers we can deliver other warheads with missiles from either submarines land or land i c b m right and in the in the mainstream news we hear about the the nuclear submarines over in the in the east now and all about the different things that happen like that there are some crashes and that sort of thing that goes on and that's already here about going on and all my goodness what what is the story behind it because you have described this the the nuclear threat to humanity as the greatest threat to life on earth and now we have some idea of the viewers and i of you as somebody who does something about it you don't just sit and worry or have be fearful but as a child you measured the density of the stones in your basement and  so how how why do you describe it as the greatest threat to to to human life on earth because as you said the climate change issue is here the nuclear power issue is here the hunger famine issue is there and all of that but overall is the nuclear nuclear threat well there are lots of problems that human beings face but the most immediate one to our existence is nuclear war we've got to realize is that in the next thirty to sixty minutes some politician or someone makes a mistake that soviet or a chinese a few miles off the coast of north america can incinerate one hundred cities at a time in the next thirty minutes and my view is if anybody if that happened anybody looking back at the history building up to that wouldn't say anything other than how they missed that they knew it was coming and they didn't stop it  when i was talking about this a lot of thirty years ago in the reagan era i came to the conclusion after looking at all the accidents that the mistakes human beings had made that nothing but the grace of god had saved us we tried as hard as we could to destroy ourselves and if there's any proof of the existence of gods the fact that somebody has stayed our hand at the united nations this summer i was extremely impressed by meeting a man who was a british naval commander in the navy and his career his job was to practice it two different times flying a fighter bomber from britain over st petersburg and dropping a large nuclear weapon and another time following russian submarines in the north sea getting ready to drop nuclear depth charges it was all preparation for a nuclear war and he began to see how ridiculous this was he knew that his plane couldn't get back and when he talked to his the navigator about you know we're not going to make it back once we drop the bomb he says well for dropping that bomb there's nothing to come back to he began to realize the reality that the logic of that logic of that and when he realized that when they drop the nuclear depth charge on the submarine to destroy it that the helicopter unlike the fighter plane was not going to get away from the blast and when he confronted his commanding officers about that they said well you don't have to worry that this is all deterrence it'll never happen and he realized we could make a mistake on any of these of course it could happen well when i talked to him about that he said he came to the same conclusion i did it was a miracle that this hasn't happened b said the guy you really need to talk to is generally butler who was a friend of his but heard about this general commanded all the u nuclear forces for a number of years in one thousand ninety's and he's written a book where he clearly states that we're only here by by luck good planning and divine intervention and he says the more i think about it the largest proportion is divine intervention so to see these people who know everything about nuclear weapons to watch the mistakes being made come to same clues that i did just looking from the outside with had a profound effect on summer it is a miracle we're here and it's very we'll we're being educated the viewers and i about this but it's it's very it's consoling in the midst of all this to know that professionals like general butler has has written about it so he's doing something about it yeah he's and hasn't just absorbed this into his own psyche in his own life but he's reaching out to all of us and viewers that's what dr dr murray is doing right now to us and  so there's two really two messages i have for people one is that nuclear weapons are worse than with most people think they are certainly if they're used and even if they're not used they're worse than doing much more damage than people think they are and secondly every one of us is much more powerful in reversing the risk of that than we think we got that's what i want people to hear these things are worse and need attention and we're more powerful in getting rid of them i mean i think we are the second point being made really largely by the international abolish nuclear weapons which just received the nobel peace prize for two thousand and seventeen this is a group of incredibly creative and energetic people folks who've been around as long as i have who didn't put the nuclear thing down but it's studying it for the last forty years and have norma's amounts of information and then young energetic people say that's not the world i want to live in we've got to get rid of this threat and after ten years of hard work they actually did something that's never been done in history they got the little guys without nuclear weapons to speak up to the big guys and said lightning i mean the so there are threats behind all of this well i haven't personally seen those threats made i've heard that from people who know well john what is what is making the what is driving this this holding on to the nuclear weapons and into is this this is what defines the united states as a superpower the holding these nuclear we're having more nuclear weapons than any other country you know if you talk to certainly all the past nuclear planners like generally butler like general colin powell they'll tell you these weapons are worthless even for deterrence they're pretty worthless but most people in power now still believe in this concept of deterrence that somehow if you have these you won't nobody's going to bother you or take you over but history shows that that's just it's just not true it's not  necessary the odd thing from the view of the united states in particular clinging to these things is that we have the most powerful military in the in the world nobody can touch us in a conventional war and if we only had that we could feel pretty safe about anybody invading  wouldn't help with terrorism or cyber threats lot of other things but it would keep us from a military invasion nuclear weapons as i said before can be here in the next thirty minutes with no surprise to anybody were all gone i would think that would make the united states lead the charge let's get rid of these things we did it before it was the united states that led the charge to against chemical weapons they said you know we can beat everybody every other way we don't need chemical weapons and other people could do some nasty things and we did so we've done this before with other weapons of mass destruction united the world has outlawed chemical weapons biological weapons cluster munitions you know those terrible things that break into lots of bombs just to kill civilians in large numbers and landmines and this is the last weapon of mass does weapon of mass destruction that we just have it made illegal so it's time to do that and with the international campaign to ban any havior matters and the arguments against the the nuclear weapons ban is that what difference to make non nuclear nations signing it is like non smokers giving up to back right now does it help smokers or or vegetarians outlawing meat when you know point the point is enormous because it takes what we all known since the first weapons were used that these are immoral things they cannot be used in any just war by anybody's criteria because of the mass slaughter of civilians it now makes them illegal and that has enormous weight in public opinion so the united states interesting adopted and signed the comprehensive test ban that we will test actually blow up weapons that right then to test them but it's never been ratified in the senate yet we still stick to it like landmines you say we've never even signed that but we still don't put landmines up to our knowledge in iraq and so this creates moral pressure where the rest of the world who feels under pressure to have these can say oh these are illegal now you shouldn't have these and that changes the conversation in a really positive way when you talk about moral pressure is that one of the things that we can do the people who the ordinary people can we put how can we act in all of this in this great tumult well just changing the consciousness of saying chemical weapons for example my dad spent his entire life at the door edgewood arsenal the army's chemical warfare manufacturing and research plant in his mind those were still reasonable ways to help his country stay safe now everyone is horrified by those when syria may have used them when i was sure but there were some chemicals used what over there was intentional or not is up in the air but even the thought of them using it the whole world instantly russians at no way the russians came in our enemies in that conflict came and said we'll make sure they're not used to and to a large extent they did so having them illegal changes the conversation everybody puts moral pressure on the government the people say i want money for nuclear weapons but they're illegal you can say that cultural changes everything because all the mainly what people believe is what they'll support or not support and vote for and not vote for and right now nuclear weapons we still have the schizophrenia we know they're terrible but most people think that somehow they're keeping us safe they spend enough time looking at them almost everybody agrees no they're not too big a risk and dr you're talking about changing a culture and i know that in your own life you do that you have to tell us something about what do your work is at  michael's we are teacher and also in your practice as a physician my career is mostly in the emergency room where i spent thirty years fixing people up for what they do to each other and themselves and i'm just at a point in life now where i'd like to help people not think that they have to hurt each other to create the kind of world and safety everybody longs for and how do you don't how do i study conflict and study what is it that creates conflict how can we take conflict from being destructive to make a construct of conflicts a good thing we probably need more of it rather than less but we need to make it in a way that conflict becomes ok you disagree with me that means you have some idea some piece of the truth that i can learn from and work it out in such a way that we both benefit rather than we destroy each other so you have that you teach conflict resolution courses on nonviolent action in nonviolent communication so nonviolent communication is which is a way you can talk a language you can use that makes it less threatening to each other and makes connection more easy and nonviolent action is what you do with people who won't communicate with you when somebody threatens you and my students right now are writing the research papers on different conflicts around the world mostly on north korea what can we do to reduce the risk from a conflict with north korea and the premise is they they see how violence has been used to terrible effect back in the fifty's with a war that hasn't ended in korea and now the threat of yet a new war this time maybe with nuclear weapons and the they have to count the costs of that the expense of those weapons the potential loss of life and the actual loss of life in the fifty's which is maybe four or five million people much larger than i knew before my students taught me and then the environmental costs and of course the cost to us to actually morally when we say we're going to incinerate when the president says we're going to totally destroy north korea that's twenty six million human beings what is it does to us as a people to say ok well they have to die keep us safe we'll kill twenty six million i think that does something to our souls dr r that you bring up that the north korean thing and i just saw on the news that a young man who had walked across into north korea was just found and was rescued from prison in north korea he was a young man who was motivated by a faith that he could he could speak to the north koreans and convert them to peace and he is african american man he was he was then through former president jimmy carter he was brought back to the united states but he just died here in the united states only this this past weekend and he was by suicide in the somewhere in california and i looked up his story and he his favorite song it would she was he was teaching to the south koreans who he was teaching english to was you were born to be loved you were born to be loved and he he went over there with that message but it was like without the power of the there were rational message that you have for us as for your students and if you were is let's open up to  dr and and understand that there is something that we can do of course you know we have a lot of confusion in our society about what love means everybody likes mercy and justice and love but we're taught to believe that bad guys are just so evil and bad that they don't understand anything but the language of violence and history shows that's just not true or dictators have been overthrown by a nonviolent methods than by violent methods and then the sense of the state for sure just give us your tax dollars and your sons and we'll save you from whatever the bogeyman of that decade is in the church is sadly i think give a message that sometimes similar that you just avail our rules on will get you to heaven and that unfortunately is both a state and the church in a position of power they can abuse people and get them to do things that ordinary human beings otherwise would not do and i think claiming our own power as we're all born with to live full of wonderful lives is something we're all capable of we have a lot of good mentors for that gandhi's the world that martin luther king's mother theresa's also and you don't have to be saintly to do this ordinary people are very capable all those great people said this is not for just saints this is for play the game that the powers that be want you to play to serve them so it can be costly but once you give up the need to depend on them the system for everything and find  in yourself then you become my sheep much more powerful to create the world you want rather than reluctantly helping somebody else create the world they want to your detriment dr hour you're going to give good going to give on screen some  it people can connect to yes and to continue this yes if people are interested in doing something about nuclear the threat of nuclear war the use of nuclear weapons by terrorists accidents or intentional politicians i would recommend that you connect with one of the good number of groups out there but the ones i recommend are the international campaign against nuclear weapons which is just i can i see a n w physicians for social responsibility p s r gado r g or the nuclear age peace foundation which is waging peace to work they all sound out newsletters serves that will be reminders to you oh yeah this week i probably ought to do something about nuclear weapons and others tell you call your senator's office about this or that so politics of course is part of it lobbying is important and probably the most important thing now is education as my experience back then and now shows that once people he this stuff they're willing to change so many people are hearing it so get it into the media invite speakers p s r all these groups i mentioned have speakers bureaus that be happy to send one somebody to talk to your group insist that movies get shown about it was really messing it up in their community here in burlington is a lack of public debate i'm amazed that universe or mater st michael's or somebody hasn't had a major debate on what we should do about north korea or what is it do we want north korea to be threatened with nuclear weapons or don't we as a good strategy or not nobody is even talking about it that would be a tremendous step in the right direction well let it be that we will continue this conversation you will come back to this i hope would maybe with a student and and we can talk we can have we can begin the debate here but i do admire thank you so much dr or for joining us today and and continuing your you