Helen Caldicott on the dangers of nuclear war

It takes Dr. Helen Caldicott to educate a new generation of the horrors of nuclear war.

NUCLEAR NOSE TO SPITE ITS NUCLEAR FACE

Helen Caldicott

Via Facebook

I am watching what is going on in the political realm in the US with absolute amazement.

There is a concerted effort to discredit President Trump because of his previous relationships with Russia. But surely we need a president who can liaise and negotiate with Russia as our lives depend entirely upon Russian policy and actions.

Together Russia and the US own 94% of the 16,400 global nuclear weapons stock-pile. North Korea could blow up a city but only Russia and America can blow up the world. Did you know that there are at least 12 Russian hydrogen bombs targeted on New York City, LA and most major US cities? Towns of 50,000 or more are targeted with at least one bomb.

Canada, Japan, Australia, Europe, England are similarly targeted while the US targets China and Russia. Donald Trump is the only person in the US with the authority to press the button. If the Strategic Air Command detects a Russian attack, Trump will have only about 3 minutes to make a decision to destroy life on earth. As of today 96% of Russian strategic missiles are ready for immediate launch. A bilateral nuclear exchange between the two nuclear superpowers would take little over one hour to complete.

Did you also know that the US still has an official policy to fight and win a nuclear war?

Let us examine the medical effects of such an event so we can understand the lunacy of this policy.

A hydrogen bomb will land at twenty times the speed of the sound, and explode in the fraction of the millionth of a second, with the heat of the sun. It will excavate a crater three-quarters-of-a-mile wide and eight hundred feet deep converting the buildings, and millions of tons of earth below to pulverized radioactive injected into a mushroom cloud. Six miles in all directions–every building destroyed, concrete and steel melt, every person killed, most vaporized. Twenty miles in all directions people are killed or lethally injured. Winds of five hundred miles an hour turn humans into missiles traveling at a hundred miles an hour who will then die from compound fractures and internal organ injuries. The shock wave enters the nose and mouth causing acute pneumothorax and ruptured lungs. Windows will “popcorn” producing shards of glass flying at a hundred miles an hour hour decapitating people and inducing severe lacerations. Everyone will be burnt, some vaporized, some charcoalized, some with third degree burns. Everyone will die - some immediately, some in a few days, in the most extraordinary agony, and suffering from acute radiation sickness. I often visualize people staggering around amongst the radioactive smoking wreckage looking for their vapourized children.

The US Federal government has stockpiled huge quantities of morphine, in case of nuclear war but all hospitals will be destroyed and all doctors dead or injured. 

Forty miles from the epicenter one glance at the flash will induce blindness from retinal burns. The whole area will then be engulfed in a firestorm of three thousand square miles - a holocaust! A fallout shelter is useless because it becomes a crematorium as the fire consumes the oxygen and bakes the shelter.

Now apply that scene to the whole country - every city and town. The Federation of American Scientists estimate that if the nuclear attack occurs in summer, America will be consumed in fire, coast to coast, north into south. And it could happen tonight or tomorrow by accident, design or computer hacking.

Millions of tons of smoke and soot will be injected into the stratosphere there to cover the earth with a cloud so thick that it will block out the sun for up to ten years inducing a short ice age and everyone and everything will freeze to death in the dark.

It is clear that the majority of Americans and the media are practicing psychic numbing and manic denial as they sleepwalk to Armageddon.