Anti-Nuclear Campaigner Passes Torch to Husband

Dr. Helen Caldicott, 47, the mother of the nuclear freeze movement, is dropping out. After 16 years--a personal campaign that began in 1971 with a successful protest against France’s atomic tests in the South Pacific--she is, she says, “a little bit bonkers.”

She is on a sort of farewell tour, with her husband and heir-apparent, Dr. William H. J. Caldicott, sharing the podiums. And only days after the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, addressing the California Assn. of Marriage and Family Therapists in Orange County, Helen Caldicott made it clear she does not intend to step down quietly.

The crowded hall in the Irvine Marriott Hotel was hushed as Caldicott painted her graphic picture of nuclear annihilation:

“I want you to imagine that the button was pressed in Moscow 20 minutes ago, by accident. I want you to shut your eyes now and imagine the bomb’s going to land in 10 minutes. Try and imagine what you would do. Where would you go? Think of your children, your families, where you live, what you hold most precious in your life. . . .

“OK now--open them again and I’m going to drop a big bomb right here . It’s going to be a 20-megaton bomb, five times the collective energy of all the bombs dropped in the Second World War. And it will come in at 20 times the speed of sound, in five minutes now, and explode with the heat of the sun right here and dig a hole three-quarters of a mile wide and 800 feet deep, pulverizing us, the buildings and millions of tons of earth below to radioactive fallout, shot up in the mushroom cloud. . . .”

Helen Caldicott was not finished. She wanted these people to know about what she, as a physician, calls “the final medical epidemic.” She wants them to know about human beings “charcoalized,” people sucked out of buildings by blast-induced winds, people decapitated by shards of glass traveling at 100 m.p.h., fallout shelters “turned into crematoria.”

She wants them to know because she hopes desperately to leave behind a legacy of activism, to break through the psychic numbness that she says afflicts people when they are forced to contemplate what she considers the inevitable--”a catastrophic nuclear war.” She wants millions of Americans to camp out in Washington, demanding a halt to “the biggest nuclear buildup the world has ever seen.”

‘Sick of Meetings’

Thousands of people have signed petitions demanding a nuclear freeze, have donated their time and money. “They did it for four or five years and they got nowhere,” Caldicott said. “I am sick of meetings and organizations. We haven’t been provocative at all. We’ve been pathetic.”

Her voice rose--”Don’t give a damn about what people think of you!” If your child had leukemia, she asked, is there anything that you would not do to try to save that child’s life? And that, she contends, is the bottom line:

“I’ve got three kids and I would die for my kids. I would go through any sort of mental or physical pain for my kids. There have been moments when I have been at the point where I would fast unto death if I thought it would save the world. What’s death? I’m going to die anyway. We’re talking about evolution, the creation, the whole thing . . .”

But for now, Caldicott says, “I’ve got to go away. I’ve earned it. Sixteen years of this flat-out dreaming about it (nuclear catastrophe) is enough. I mean, I don’t know why I’m not in a mental institution.” Now, she says, “I have to take a break and go into the wilderness and go spin cloth for two years.

“I’ve got May, with various commitments and honorary degrees, and then I’m going to virtually stop.” She has agreed to speak in India in November and then, Caldicott said, she will “go home (to Australia--the Caldicotts, Australian citizens, divide their time between Boston and Australia) and decide what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”

She is “passing the baton” to Dr. William Caldicott, also a pediatrician, her husband of 23 years and the man who followed her lead when two years ago, at the age of 45, he resigned his teaching post at Harvard to be a full-time advocate for the anti-nuclear cause.

And if he does not yet speak with the eloquence and fire of Helen Caldicott, his commitment seems no less complete. He has given a great deal of thought to the role men have played in the nuclear arms buildup--relating it to men’s need for power, their worship of what he sees as the wrong heroes.

‘Human Race May Be Doomed’

This is Dr. William Caldicott speaking: “If we men don’t start to change the way we behave, and if we don’t start to understand the way we behave and why we behave the way we do, I think the human race may be doomed.”

Women, he contends, “better understand life and death, and what threatens their children, and the planet. But I’ve come to understand that it’s men who have to understand. Because it’s men who are wiring up this planet for certain explosion if something isn’t done.”

For Caldicott, a first step was to re-think “success.” He had his prestigious post as professor of pediatric radiology at Harvard Medical School, his title of director of research, Department of Radiology, Boston’s Children’s Hospital.

And, he will tell you, “I hated it . . . I was totally and utterly paralyzed . . . Finally I realized that work is not what life is all about,” that “the really important events were not happening in my research laboratory.”

While he had been preoccupied with security, a nice salary and all the perks, Caldicott concluded, the ultimate decision was being made--the decision of “whether to wipe out the whole of history, culture, music, art, and also to destroy the future of life on this planet, the whole gene pool, not only of human beings but of all the plants and animals, birds, insects, grass. The human race is deciding whether or not to call it quits.”

His work at Harvard--what he terms the “manic drive” to write and research and succeed--had nothing to do with that reality, he said, and so, early in 1984, he “quit cold.”

Four years earlier, Dr. Helen Caldicott had made a similar decision. Leaving Harvard behind, she began crisscrossing the country with her message. Along the road to becoming a household name, she reactivated a little group called Physicians for Social Responsibility that shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Only recently returned from a lengthy trip around the world, during which they met with international nuclear disarmament activists, physicians and government leaders and, on the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, addressed a Japanese audience in that city, the Caldicotts had chosen an audience of therapists for their first Southern California appearance.

Helen Caldicott got things started, talking about what she views as an insane nuclear arsenal buildup by both superpowers, about “missile envy” (which happens to be the title of her most recent book), about the “fallacy” of a policy of deterrence, about the “patronizing attitude” of the Pentagon toward the American people.

“It’s rather like when doctors used to say, ‘There, there, Mrs. Brown. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you. Don’t ask any questions.’ And finally Mrs. Brown gets buried having no knowledge of her illness at all . . . the things that are going to kill us all, that we pay for, are classified as secret.”

She talked about “the hostility between the Superpowers--you’ve seen it with this dreadful accident at Chernobyl. Instead of talking about human deaths and how we can help the poor Russians . . . the right wing are using this arrogantly to increase the hostility and the underlying message is, we’ve got to have a war with Russia because they’re so evil. They jazz up all this hatred.”

Fallibility of Men, Machines

And she talked about the fallibility of men and machines, the follies and foibles by which wars historically have been started, the cancer epidemic that would be the lasting legacy of one atomic bomb explosion.

It is a terrifying scenario, Caldicott said, “and that’s partly why our kids are taking drugs, drinking alcohol and committing suicide in higher numbers than ever before. They are scared out of their skins.”

Helen Caldicott was on the top of her form. She warned of “the end of the world,” of a “global gas oven.”

Dr. Bill, taking over, said in a bit of understatement, “Helen induces strong feelings in people because she’s very direct. If she thinks it’s a lie, she calls it a lie.”

His approach is more anecdotal, somewhat gentler. He talked about feelings, for example, the “feelings of denial” that enable military men and those who build bombs to go on with the work at hand.

He spoke about politics, asking what kind of thinking could lead anyone to believe the United States could win a limited nuclear war against the Soviet Union. He denounced the concept of war-for-profit, money in the pockets of those who build the weapons.

The majority of Americans support a freeze, he said, but “it doesn’t matter because we cannot get into Washington with that idea.” Noting that a $26-million advertising budget had been allocated for Calvin Klein’s new perfume, Obsession, Caldicott asked, “What do you think the budget of the defense contractors (and their lobbyists) is?”

Finally, pausing, Caldicott said, “This is kind of a heavy dose that Helen and I have brought here today . . . it turns people off . . . it’s really quite unpleasant.”

He explained, “We would never leave an audience (of other than therapists) like this. It would be irresponsible. We would talk about the beauty of the planet and the children.” But the idea here was to explore feelings, talk them out.

When it was time to do that exploring Bill Caldicott said, “We need to come out of this with some answers that we hope will make us feel powerful.”

One woman suggested a mass taxpayers’ protest in April of 1987. A “super idea,” Helen Caldicott said, even while acknowledging that the Caldicotts do pay U.S. income taxes because “we don’t want to get kicked out of the country.”

This is the sort of initiative that Helen Caldicott likes. Now that she is retiring, she said, “Women come up to me with fire in their eye and say, ‘I’m going to do what you’ve done.’ That’s exciting, and I think it’s healthy. I’m dropping out now because it means that people have to look back in their own heads and say, ‘Oh, hell. That means I’ve got to do it.’ ”

As long as she was leading the crusade, she noted, “People would say, ‘I just want to thank you for my children.’ And I’d think, damn. That’s not the message I was putting out. The message is, you’ve got to do it. Don’t thank me . . . “

Some in the audience expressed a need to keep the terror they felt in their consciousness, not to dismiss it by acting and doing. One woman spoke of it as “a private grief, a very separate lump” and said she wanted to hang onto that lump--”It’s mine.”

A man spoke of a pervasive feeling of helplessness today among people in emotional trouble and said too often therapists do not “recognize the impact of the outside world” on suicidal patients.

“I feel overwhelmed,” a woman said. “I just want to avoid it. I just hope that if they do bomb, I’ll be in the center.”

Helen Caldicott took the opportunity to compare reactions to the nuclear peril to the stages of grief--denial, anger, acceptance. “Some people tell me that they hear me speak and they’re immobilized for two years,” she said. “And then they get into anger and they’re so bloody mad and that’s a tremendous feeling because it liberates the depression” and empowers them.

Finally, she said, “You get to acceptance. We hope our dying patients get to where they can die at peace with themselves, and with God. You’ve helped people do that, of course. So you accept that the earth might die but, by God, you’re going to do everything you can to save it . . . “

Another woman spoke of her “great sadness” but, with it, an enduring belief “that even if, in a sense, America has lost its soul, in fact all of us have our souls and we deal with people every day who also have their souls. And so we are part of a search. And that’s not going to stop. There has to be hope.”

Reflections on the Good Fight

By the session’s end, the therapists were talking about inviting their Russian counterparts to next year’s conference.

Later, Helen Caldicott reflected on the good fight, a relentless crusade that became a full-time cause when in 1980 she gave up her teaching post at Harvard Medical School and took a leave of absence from the cystic fibrosis clinic at Boston’s Children’s Hospital. She is somewhat satisfied, but she is a little angry, a little disappointed.

The Caldicotts’ marriage has survived intact, weathering some shaky years when her family began to question whether her commitment to them was as strong as her commitment to the anti-nuclear campaign.

At times, it was a lonely crusade. Will it be any less so for Dr. William Caldicott, taking the message to an America touched by the atomic accident in the Soviet Union?

“This accident may be enough. If it had happened in this country, it might well have been the catalyst,” he said. “But I’m not sure the people in this country have enough compassion for the people in the Soviet Union.” He spoke of what he perceives as a pervasive attitude that “one American life is more valuable than other people’s lives.”

Looking back, Helen Caldicott said, “I’ve educated a lot of people, probably millions” on the nuclear issue and “I guess my work started the freeze. I started Physicians for Social Responsibility, got it going.”

PSR, actually founded in the ‘60s, was dying for lack of interest when Caldicott revived it by placing an ad in the New England Journal of Medicine, asking doctors to join her crusade. By coincidence, the ad ran three days after the Three Mile Island accident and, within a month, 500 physicians had joined. Today, there are more than 20,000 members.

‘They’ve Blown It’

Nobel Prize notwithstanding, the Caldicotts do not hesitate to criticize PSR. “They’ve blown it,” he said. “They’re working on a comprehensive test ban treaty. So what? That’s not medical work. Doctors should be calling for total elimination of nuclear weapons. It’s like getting rid of some of the cancer cells. The power to use the organization to bring about real change was lost.”

She added, “What should have been done was to reveal the psychopathology behind the arms race.”

A little bitterness creeps into Helen Caldicott’s voice when she talks about PSR--”Twenty thousand doctors is much more powerful than 20,000 women. Women, they’re sort of soft stuff, you know.” As founder of Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament, she is convinced that one reason a nuclear freeze hasn’t been achieved is the perception that women, in the forefront of the movement, “were soft and a little fuzzy in the head. It makes me hopping mad.”

Now, she’s stepping down and, William Caldicott says, “I’m moving up.” The three children he helped to rear while she was trying to save the world from destroying itself are young adults now. (Their daughter is in medical school in Australia.) The Caldicotts have sold their large Tudor-style home near Boston and that sale, together with some assets they put together when both were practicing medicine, plus fees from the lecture circuit, make it possible for him to be a full-time activist. “I’ll never be as good at this as Helen is,” he observed. “But I’ve found my own voice.”

Helen Caldicott said she was “always looking for a Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King” in her audiences, someone to eventually take over. “I think it could happen,” she says, and one that she mentions is Joan Bokaer, a former Los Angeles woman now heading up Citizens Network, a grass-roots anti-nuclear organization based at Cornell University.

Meanwhile, the caretaker of Helen Caldicott’s cause is William Caldicott. He smiled and said, “Everywhere I speak, I find out Helen’s been there first.”