Manning Clark House Symposium
Science and Ethics: Can Homo sapiens Survive?
Canberra, 17-18 May 2005

The nuclear arms race is madness: diagnosis and cure

Conference paper by Mike Denborough

Sixty years ago on August 6th and August 9th the greatest crimes in historwere committed when nuclear bombs were dropped on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and ever since then the world has lived under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

Albert Einstein is recognised by all to be a great scientist for his formula

E=mc² which showed that limitless amounts of energy could be produced by splitting the atom, and which led to the production of the atom bomb. He, of all people, must have realised the disastrous human consequences that this would produce, but, unfortunately, he initiated the production of a nuclear bomb by suggesting it to Roosevelt. When he later had second thoughts and expressed his opposition to the weapons to Truman, the Manhattan project at Los Alamos was well under way, the military minds were involved and it was too late. If Einstein had attended a conference on "Science and Ethics" perhaps the world would be a very different place.

I would also like to thank the organisers for asking me to speak at this conference. The topic which I have been asked to address is ³The nuclear arms race is madness: diagnosis and cure². The first part of the topic is self-evident. What we have to ask is why we allow this highly dangerous threat to the survival of the planet to continue. There seem to be two main reasons for this. The first is that we are all too greedy for money, power,prestige and comfort to the extent that we are even prepared to invade distant countries to ensure a continuing supply of oil and a permanent military presence in the Middle East, regardless of the tens of thousands of civilians who are killed in the process. Another reason is that most humans are deluded by religions, such as Christianity, the Muslim religion, Zionism, Marxism or biotechnology. If one believes in commandments which will lead to an everlasting happy life, there is far less incentive to clear up the terrible mess which we are making here on Earth.

The cure is simple, and no erudite mathematical formulae are needed. There is only one answer. We have to put the genie back in the bottle, and we have to abolish all nuclear weapons.What we do need is the willpower to carrythis out, and if we are going to hand our small, beautiful, fragile planet on to our descendants in reasonable condition, we are going to have to wage peace much more vigorously.

And so I gratefully accept the opportunity to speak, in the hope that my small contribution might add to the enormous upswell of anti-war and anti-nuclear actions round the world.

It is obviously a vast topic and I thought that the best way that I could address it would be to draw on my own experiences as an opponent of the nuclear arms race over the past 40 years.

A suitable subtitle might be "One medical scientistıs experience of opposing the nuclear arms race over the past 40 years from the Royal Melbourne Hospital to Newtown jail".

In September 1959 I became a British citizen and emigrated to Australia as one of the first ³Ten Pound Poms² to come to this country by air. I arrived in Brisbane on a Saturday morning with 15 shillings in my pocket to be met by a very concerned prospective father-in-law, who told me that I would be pleased to know that he had arranged a job for me at the Repatriation Hospital starting on the Monday.

I took up a one-year Research Fellowship at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in the recently formed University of Melbourne Department of Medicine in February 1960. Within 2 months of arriving there I described a previously unrecognised genetic disorder which predisposes to death during general anaesthesia. This subsequently came to be called Malignant Hyperthermia (MH), and is now recognised to be the commonest cause of anaesthetic induced death. Our subsequent work established the biochemical basis of MH, devised a specific diagnostic test, a specific treatment, and identified the genetic mutations responsible for it. We have also shown that the muscle cell membrane abnormality which predisposes to MH also predisposes to other important clinical conditions such as heat-stroke and the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). It has been gratifying to have received widespread recognition for this work. So in the 60ıs I was happily doing the two things which I like doing best, which are looking after patients and doing clinically related basic research, and I was even paid a small academic salary to do so!

But there were a few dark clouds. I vividly remember the Saturday in 1962 when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred and it seemed inevitable that, for the sake of their false ideologies, Kennedy and Kruschev were going to destroy us all, without even telephoning one another. Fortunately Kruschev backed off, he and Kennedy telephoned one another and this led to the banning of atmospheric nuclear tests in the Northern Hemisphere, which had been going on since 1945. It seemed that, at long last, good sense might have prevailed.

Other black clouds came over towards the end of each year from 1965 onwards when I read reports from a learned body in Canberra called The Radiation Protection Safety Committee, which included, amongst others, Mark Oliphant, Director of RSPhysS, Ernest Titterton, Prof in the above (both of whom had worked on the Manhattan project) and Colin Courtice (later Director of JCSMR) who had worked at Aldermaston. Despite the fact that atmospheric tests in the Northern Hemisphere had been stopped since 1963 for health reasons, and that it was now accepted that there is no level of radiation below which there is no health risk, this committee concluded that the fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests which were being carried out by the French in the Pacific posed no health risk to Australians. It was obvious that scientific lies were being told for political reasons, and I wondered whether the ANU might be an abbreviation for the Australian Nuclear University.

When I expressed these concerns to my friends, and colleagues and even to my local Federal MP, nobody seemed interested and I became increasingly frustrated, until 1969 when I received some remarkable information. This was a result of the work of a distinguished SA CSIRO scientist called Hedley Marsden. In the mid-50ıs Oliphant, Titterton and Menzies alone gave the British permission to carry out atmospheric nuclear tests at Maralinga, which caused severe radioactive pollution of vast areas of our continent. Marsden was recruited to measure the fallout, and he did this by measuring the radioactive iodine content in sheep thyroid glands all over the country. This is an accurate measure of fallout, as radioactive iodine is a product of atomic explosions and sheep are exposed to it by eating grass, and the radioactive iodine is taken up by the thyroid gland where it can be measured. Radioactive iodine is also excreted in cowsı milk so humans would also be affected. It is interesting that at this time free, compulsory milk was available in all

Australian schools. Marsden showed that there was extensive fallout all over Australia after the Maralinga test, but he was denigrated and pressure was put on scientific journals not to publish his work. He only managed to get it published in an obscure CSIRO journal and he did not go to the media so nobody knew about it. After Maralinga, Marsden continued to do these studies and later handed them over to Roger Melick, one of my colleagues, who had a particular interest in the thyroid. Roger told me that every time the French carried out an atmospheric nuclear test in the Pacific these tests showed that there was considerable radioactive fallout all over Australia. So there was clear scientific evidence that the French tests were having an adverse affect on the health of Australians and others in thePacific.

On the basis of this we expressed our concerns to Andrew Peacock, who was Rogerıs Federal representative. He telephoned McMahon who was PM at the time, but was told to forget about it and that Australians would not be in the least bit interested in this in the coming federal election. We then wrote a letter to all the media describing the facts, and this was the most effective letter that I have ever written. It was published widely and the whole country was incensed at what was happening. When Whitlam was elected in 1972 he read the mood of the Australian people more accurately and sent Lionel Murphy, the Attorney General, to the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and this forced the French tests underground.

In 1974 I moved to the JCSMR at ANU. One Friday afternoon in April 1982 I was in my laboratory at Canberra Hospital when I received a phone-call from Ian Ross, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, who asked me to go and see him. He said that there was no point in my thinking why, because I would never be able to guess. When I walked over to him this didn't stop me from thinking that the University had come to realise the value of my research, and were about to give me an increase in funding. When I got there I was surprised when he asked me if I would become the Acting Director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (CRES), which had been founded by FrankFenner. The Director Prof. Taylor was leaving to fill one of the three Senior Executive positions in CSIRO. I replied that I did not think that I could as I was overcommitted already with my research and clinical studies, and apart from the enormous environmental hazards posed by the nuclear industry I new little about the environment. He told me to think about it over the weekend and let him know definitely on Monday. My wife Erica is always much more sensible than I am and when I told her what Ian had said, she replied They obviously want you to do the job. Why donıt you do it and do something that you want to do at the same time?² I immediately realised that what I wanted to do was to organise a Symposium on Nuclear War, something which had not been done in a university before.

On Monday morning I told Ian I would do the job, got the green light for the

symposium, and went into CRES. I immediately went round all the 90 or so members of CRES, introducing myself and asking their opinion about the symposium. I got unanimous support and particularly strong support from Nugget Coombs, who was a Visiting Fellow at CRES, who said he would introduce me to Patrick White.

In those days all Russians were considered to be monsters. Fraser had forbidden our athletes from competing at the Moscow Olympics, and the> Bolshoi Ballet was not allowed to come to Australia. In this atmosphere it seemed important to have US and Russian speakers at the symposium. This was

achieved although I had to throw a number of tantrums along the way.

I learnt that Frank Barnaby, the first Director of the Stockholm Peace Research Institute, whom I knew by correspondence, would be visiting Canberra in two weeks time. He was a British physicist who had been involved in the Maralinga nuclear tests in the 50ıs, but unlike Titterton and Oliphant he had seen the error of his ways and had been working to ban nuclear weapons ever since. I went to the airport to meet him and to ask for his help. He said that unfortunately he was overcommitted, but immediately his Australian wife Wendy told him that he should do it and he agreed. He came to my office the next day and subsequently played a very significant role in planning the conference.

In December 1980 two medicos, Bernard Lown, a distinguished Russian born US cardiologist, whom I knew professionally, and Yevgeny Chazov of the USSR Cardiological Institute, Brezhnevıs physician, who had a long-standing professional association, did a very significant thing when they formed the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). They mobilised the influence of the medical profession in 40 countries against the threat of nuclear weapons, and had a profound beneficial effect. In 1985 all 10,000 members of IPPNW, including me, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I wrote to Lown inviting him and Chazov to the ANU symposium but they were unable to accept because of a previous commitment in Europe. Then one evening I went into Civic for the showing of an anti-nuclear film called ³The Day After² organised by a paediatrician, John Walters. After the film a shortish man in a raincoat came up to speak to me and gave me his card ³Valeri Ivanov, 1st Secretary Embassy of the USSR². I told him that John Walters had organised the showing of the film, not me, but he said that he wanted to speak to me because he had heard about the ANU Symposium. I told him how disappointed I was that Lown and Chazov couldn't come. He said that he would fix it. He told me that if I brought a letter to him at the USSR Embassy the following morning he would send it to Chazov in the diplomatic bag, and he could send a deputy to the symposium. I did this and then returned to my office at Canberra Hospital. Within a couple of minutes there was a knock on the door and someone else wanted to give me a card. This was ³____ Riley, ASIO². At that time there was a TV Series on known as ³Riley, Ace of Spies² notable mostly for Shostakovitchıs beautiful music ³The Gadfly Suite². So I said to him ³You must be the Ace², but he didnıt seem to be amused. ASIO used to sit in a funeral parlour opposite the Soviet Embassy, and this man had seen me come out of the embassy and had followed me back to the hospital. He now wanted to recruit me as a double-agent, but I explained to him that this was of no interest to me, and that I was simply trying to reduce the threat of Nuclear War. From then on ASIO and the KGB were in touch with me. One of my most amusing experiences was when an ASIO man was in my office and a KGB man was on the telephone and I put them on the line to one another. ASIO tapped my telephone. In those days you could hear them connecting in, but nowadays the technology is much better, and they do it silently.

About a week later Ivanov told me that Oleg Gavrilov, the Director of a Cancer Research Institute, would be able to come, so I went to see the Head of Foreign Affairs for a visa for him. On the day before the Symposium I had a telegram from Chazov to say that the Australian authorities in Moscow had refused to allow Gavrilov to come. I was very disappointed but was delighted the next day when Gavrilov arrived. The Australian authorities had delayed his plane on the runway at Moscow airport for ages before giving him his visa, but he eventually got away. He was a very impressive man and made> a notable contribution to the Symposium, which was held on May 30 and 31 1983.

We were able to get a number of other notable speakers. Frank Barnaby invited an old US friend of his Bernie Feld who had worked on the Manhattan project, ³the original sin² as he called it. Ever since then he had done all he could to get rid of nuclear weapons and at the time was Editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Frank Barnaby, who had done more than anyone to alert the world to the dangers of the nuclear arms race, also spoke. Bernard Vogt, who with Petra Kelly, had founded the Green Party in Germany, gave a paper and Patrick White presented a very moving literary masterpiece. Over 400 participants came from all over the country, the symposium made a very powerful impact and got extensive media coverage. The Canberra Times was particularly helpful and published many of the papers over a period of a couple of weeks. All the papers were published in a book by Croom Helm. 1984 was the year of massive Palm Sunday rallies in Australia and I was asked to speak to an audience of 10,000 in Brisbane. Not long after that I was asked to speak at the formation of a Peace Group in Goulburn. There is not much good that I would like to say about the Australian Labor Party, but one thing that one can say is that one always gets advance warning of what the ALP is going to do. At that time it was clear that at the upcoming Annual Meeting of the ALP which was going to be held in Canberra, Bob Hawke was going to overturn all the longstanding anti-nuclear policies of the ALP so that he could bribe South Australians with the thought of profit from a uranium mine at Roxby Downs and so get Bannon elected. Many people were incensed at this hypocrisy and when I was being driven to Goulburn by a longstanding member of the ALP she asked me to join the ALP to try to stop Hawkeıs treachery. I refused because I didn't think that that would have much effect. Next she told me that electoral refunding had just been introduced by the ALP and that if a Party or Candidate received 4% of the total vote they would be paid a certain amount of money for each votereceived. With this in mind she asked me to stand as an Independent for Senate seat in NSW, but again this did not seem to me to be significant enough, and so, being a simple physician, I suggested that we should form a< new Party. After a short discussion she agreed and we wrote a constitution for ³The Nuclear Disarmament Party of Australia (NDP)² which included the anti-nuclear policies of the ALP which Hawke was about to abandon. A Public Meeting was called in a Church Hall in Currie Crescent, Kingston. Some 70 people attended and, with one exception, agreed to the constitution, and the NDP was registered.

I subsequently formed State and Territory branches everywhere except the Northern Territory. We got considerable media attention and in the December election we got over 600,000 votes and over 4% everywhere except Tasmania, where we got 3.9%. We elected an NDP Senator from W.A. and in 1987 elected another NDP Senator from NSW. We encouraged anti-nuclear activists around the world and had some notable successes, such as preventing Hawke from allowing the Pentagon to test their missiles from Sydney.

Meanwhile nuclear incidents even more frightening than the Cuban Missile crisis continued to occur, the best known one involving a Colonel Petrov. Inthe crazy days of Mutually Assured Destruction when tens of thousands of US and Soviet nukes were pointed at each other, the triggers to destroy the

world lay in two hands ­ in the US it was the President and in the USSR it was a senior military officer. In 1985 it was in the hands of a Colonel Petrov when he received a computer message informing him that the US had released a massive nuclear strike on the USSR. He was under strict instructions that if this occurred he must press the nuclear trigger to retaliate. Fortunately for us all, for once in his life, he disobeyed his instructions and Homo Sapiens survived.

In 1985 the fire at Chernobyl nuclear power station contaminated the whole of Europe and amazingly, this and the fact that the teeth of all children in the UK contain plutonium from contamination from the local nuclear power industry, have not silenced the proponents of nuclear power as a source of energy.

Then in 1989 the Berlin Wall came down and everyone thought that the threat of Nuclear War was over and lost interest in the Nuclear Disarmament Party. In 1991 a week after graphic TV footage of the Indonesian massacre of East Timorese civilians at Dilli, the arms manufacturers of the world held a display of their ghastly toys called AIDEX at the Show Grounds in Canberra.

Australians were incensed and hundreds came from all over the country to picket AIDEX. Hundreds were arrested, of which I was pleased to be one, and the arms bazaar has not been held in Canberra since then.

In 1995 a Monday edition of the Canberra Times announced that the French were about to resume their nuclear tests in the Pacific. I met four other peace activists at the Workerıs Club for lunch and we organised a protest at the French Embassy on the Sunday. Thousands turned out and the protest soon became global. I was in Vienna shortly afterwards and was pleased to see an Anti-French Nuclear Test protest there. As a result the French were once again forced to stop their tests.

But by 1998 it was obvious that the nuclear threat was greater than ever, and we stood Nuclear Disarmament Party candidates for the Senate that year and in 2001 and 2004.

In 2001, soon after 9-11, Yvonne Francis and I stood for the NDP for the Senate in NSW and were handing out an A5 leaflet in the University of Sydney saying simply No War, No Racism, No Retaliation. We were surprised when a security guard told us that we were not allowed to do this. When we asked him Why not? we were even more surprised when he said that it was because the University is private property. We asked him to check with the Vice-Chancellor and he then came back and gave us a $500 dollar fine each and told us that we were banned from the university for 12 months. He said that if we continued he would have us arrested. We then rang every media outlet in Sydney but no one was interested, and we were handcuffed by police and taken in a Black Maria to Newtown lockup. We asked what we were being charged with and were told it was for ³Remaining on the Grounds². We were kept for a few hours and were then told that we would have to appear before a magistrate. We went campaigning again at 1 p.m. the next day only to find that when we got home at 7 p.m. that our computer with which we contacted the media and our members had been stolen. Two nights later Alexander Downer spoke to a large invited audience in the Great Hall at the university about his pro war views. This story illustrates the fact that we no longer have Universities in this country which encourage students to think. We merely have Business Institutes which show students how to make money. There is more freedom of speech outside the walls of the University of Sydney than within them.

I have given you some examples of how notable scientists and medicos such as Hedley Marsden, Bernard Lown, Yevgeny Chazov, Frank Barnaby and Oleg Gavrilov are doing their best to halt the technological race to extinction, but we are all going to have to do a lot more to wage peace against the Axis of Evil, by which I mean Big Businesses and their venal minions like George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard.

As scientists and medicos we must educate people to realise that religion is a delusion, and only leads to war and killing. We must tell them that Hell is here on Earth, under the shadow of the mushroom cloud with people like Bush, Blair and Howard calling the tune.

We must let them know that the only way to make sense of our strange, short existence is to make the very best of every minute that we have, and, by our efforts, try to leave the world a better place in which there is a greater respect for human rights. We must try to inform them of what is really going on in the world, and ask them to realise that most of the media, and especially Fox News, are presenting an inaccurate and unscientific account. Nowadays the Internet is by far the most effective way of learning what is happening, and of making contact with anti-war and anti-nuclear activists throughout the world.

We must communicate freely with everyone, abolish all spy organisations, and repeal the Anti-Terrorism Bill which is designed to remove our few remaining freedoms.

The worldıs wealth which at the moment is in the hands of 1% of the population must be redistributed. Survival is more important than greed and we must make everyone realise this especially the multinational corporations, and the US and Australian administrations. Whilst hectoring other countries about nuclear weapons the US is by far the worst offender. It still has tens of thousands of aging nuclear weapons deployed, is continually upgrading them, and is planning to send nuclear weapons up into space, thereby abrogating the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, and as a result Russia is developing new nuclear weapons. The US is also spending billions of dollars on developing new weapons and has withdrawn the funding to decommission Russiaıs old nukes.

Homo Sapiens is extremely lucky not to have been destroyed already by nuclear war. If we are going to survive we will have to stop wars and abolish nuclear weapons. Australians can play a very significant role in this, the most important issue of all time. For a start we must bring all Australian troops home from the criminal invasion of Iraq, which was carried out by the US in order to ensure for the US a continuing supply of the worldıs rapidly diminishing oil, and to set up a permanent military presence in the Middle East with 14 military bases, disregarding the destruction of the infrastructure of the whole country which this has caused, and the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. We must also prohibit nuclear weapons anywhere in Australia. New Zealand did this over 20 years ago and survived. Most important of all we must close Pine Gap the biggest US nuclear base outside their own country. We must also close TidbinbillaSpace Station, which is closely involved with the US military in putting nuclear weapons into space (should this eventuate the apocalypse will be inevitable). Our actions in closing Pine Gap and Tidbinbilla could be the catalyst for a world-wide reversal of the nuclear madness.

If we all wage peace strongly enough, Homo Sapiens will survive, and we will be able to spend all the money and effort which is being spent on killing, on vital scientific and medical issues such as global warming and global dimming.