Life in a Lethal Society
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Wald, George
George Wald was well-known for his lectures on current global politics and the arms race. The 1967 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine attended the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings three times, beginning in 1978, and probably few were surprised that Wald devoted his lectures to issues unrelated to “the primary physiological and chemical visual processes in the eye”, research for which Wald was awarded the Nobel Prize. This lecture particularly echoes the turbulence and fears of the late 1970s. Wald began his lecture by saying that he rejects the idea that there is a natural law that dictates that technological societies will self-destruct. Yet his description of the last two hundred years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution painted a grim picture for the future. The proliferation of nuclear warfare in the midst of the Cold War, the depletion of natural resources, the information explosion, and the exponential growth of the world’s population cast doubt over whether the human race would survive past the year 2000. Forty two years have passed since his lecture was delivered and it is thought-provoking to see how the numbers and mindsets have changed. Wald attributed 70-90% of cancers to be of environmental origin, and this statistic is still valid today. Of these cancers, Wald stated that 40% was a result of carcinogen exposure in the workplace, a number that has since decreased to 3-6% of total cancer incidence worldwide. Wald presented a world population growth forecast of 13 billion by the year 2120; a recent United Nations report pointed out “growth at a slower pace”, predicting 11 billion by 2100. Many would disagree with Wald’s statement that “the pollution we get from fossil fuels is for the moment, nuclear waste is forever”, although there is little enthusiasm today for nuclear power, even amid negative attitudes towards fossil fuels. “Life has gone lethal on a grand scale”, said Wald, referring to the marked increase in the amount of nuclear weapons in the last decades. The Cold War ended with the dismantling of the Soviet Union, and nuclear weapons are not perceived as a dominant threat to most people anymore. But are our societies any less lethal than illustrated by Wald in 1978? Wald would undoubtedly have plenty to say in 2020. Hanna Kurlanda-Witek-wald-nobel-biologist-dies-at-90.html-your-health/wp/2015/12/17/study-up-to-90-of-cancers-not-bad-luck-but-due-to-lifestyle-choices-environment/-population-prospects-2019.html
 Some of my physicist friends are Starry-Eid. That will give the Dolmetscher trouble. A Starry-Eid, Hochbegeistert, huh? Are Starry-Eid about the prospect of coming into radio communication with what they call advanced technological societies in outer space. They have been listening now for a generation without hearing anything meaningful. And the thought is becoming more and more widespread that perhaps there are no more advanced technological societies in outer space. Perhaps they destroy themselves just about as they reach our stage as we are threatening to do. May I say at once that I reject that thought completely. I reject completely the thought that there is some kind of natural law at work that spells the self-destruction of technological societies when they reach about our stage. It isn't a natural law. It's all utterly man-made. It's part of the special structure of our society in our time. In 1976, my nation celebrated in what has come to be our tawdry way. The bicentennial, the 200th anniversary of American independence. Well, that was an interesting event, but minor in the long scale even for us. Because at just the same time, the Industrial Revolution was beginning. And in 200 years, the Industrial Revolution has brought us to a strange pass. You know, I see the history of our universe in the perspective of some 15 to 20 billion years, 6 billion years of the solar system, 4.7 billion years of the planet, 3 billion years of life, 3 million years of something like human life, hardly 10,000 years of civilization. And then this miserable, trivial 200 years of the Industrial Revolution to bring humanity to the brink of self-extinction. One talks about that Industrial Revolution in special ways. At its beginning, it seemed to promise humanity endless leisure and abundance. But then new characteristics began to emerge. One describes it frequently in terms of an exponential curve, an exponential curve in which one writes the years along the bottom. Though the way things have gone, it hardly matters what may have happened before 100 years ago. And vertically along the ordinance, one writes many things, population, industrial pollution, the use of fossil fuels, the exhaustion of many other irreplaceable resources, armaments, and something that has a special interest for us, our sort of person. And that is information. We're living in the middle of an information explosion, which for those of us who are scientists and many others is in some ways as uncomfortable as any of these other things. And virtually one exponential curve fits all these phenomena. And that curve is reaching for the moon at just about the same time, the year 2000. I'm one of those scientists and would there were not as many who are finding it hard to understand how the human race is to bring itself much past the year 2000. I'd like to talk about this exponential phenomenon in a simpler and more homely way. Two hundred years ago the industrial use of coal was in its infancy. One hundred years ago the first oil wells were just being opened. I am as old as the industrial use of gasoline. For the first 25 years of the petroleum industry, gasoline was looked upon as a useless and dangerous byproduct. The only question about it was how can one get rid of it before it blew one up? And then in America Henry Ford put motor cars on the road and there was a first industrial use for gasoline. And now for many persons the thought of going on with civilization without gasoline is almost unimaginable. And now we are being told that we can't live without nuclear power. Ladies and gentlemen, the reality is that we cannot live with nuclear power. The population explosion, I wonder whether all of you realize just what the problem is. Let me say it in this way, that population explosion is of course a rather unanticipated product of the industrial revolution. And we've reached the point at which if one were to achieve merely the replacement level with each fertile couple producing two offspring by the year 2000 in all the developed countries of the world, and if one were to reach that same replacement level in all the so-called underdeveloped countries of the world by 2050, then 70 years later, so by 2120, the world population should have risen to about 13 billions. It's now approaching four billions and many of us are beginning to feel crowded. I think it's well recognized by now in medical circles that 70 to 90 percent, so a reasonable figure would be 80 percent of the cancer in our country at least, is of environmental origin and hence preventable. I hope there will be a chance for your comments. If I finish soon enough, I can't be sure. I would be much more anxious to hear from you than perhaps you are from me, and I hope there will be some opportunity in the course of these meetings. About 40 percent of those cancers in our country are happening in the workplaces. I'm talking of the cancer production that comes associated with the black lung of the coal miners, the brown lung of the textile workers, the vinyl chloride poisoning of the plastics workers, the PCB poisoning of the workers with electrical products, with talking of asbestosis and silicosis and the results of exposure to the innumerable and very rapidly expanding organic chemicals coming into further industrial use. It's become rather difficult to remain alive while earning a living, and some of the lectures that will be held at this meeting, to which I look forward, themselves look forward to being able to do therapeutic things about cancer, to do something about curing cancers. But ladies and gentlemen, what I've just finished saying means that the primary need is not to cure cancers, the primary need is to keep them from happening. It is the prevention of cancer that we should be bending our energies and devoting our resources, mainly to. I said that we can't live with nuclear power, it is intolerably life-threatening in three quite independently different ways. First of all, the thing that is talked of most and probably is the least important is the danger of nuclear accident. And when he is this argued back and forth by the proponents and opponents of nuclear power, I should like to say something very simple and direct. In our country, those superb realists, the insurance companies, refused from the beginning to insure nuclear power facilities. And for that, Congress passed for the first time in 1957, a so-called Price Anderson Act, that lays four fifths, four fifths of the liability for nuclear accident upon our taxpayers. They will be the ones to suffer and they will be the ones to pay themselves. The second of these life-threatening dangers of nuclear power, of course, involves the realization that every kind of nuclear installation, power installation now in existence produces plutonium 239 as a byproduct. That is at once the most toxic substance we know and the most convenient material from which to make atom bombs, fission bombs. Its toxicity is such that the inhalation of one milligram would cause death within hours of massive fibrosis of the lungs. The inhalation of one microgram, one millionth of that amount, produces reasonable chance of an eventual lung cancer. As for making atom bombs, the trigger quantity, so-called, of plutonium 239, the smallest amount from which one can make a fission nuclear weapon is two kilograms, something less than four and a half pounds. You could carry that in an ordinary brown paper bag such as we bring groceries home in and with complete safety. To make a Hiroshima-sized bomb take six to seven kilograms, something like 13 or 14 pounds, you'd need a shopping bag for that. And wherever in the world now, nuclear power facilities have been opened, the potential exists for producing these fission bombs, an ordinary standard nuclear power station produces enough plutonium 239 per year to make as many, perhaps, as 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs. The present nuclear club, the nations that possess nuclear weapons numbers, six, but it is rather confidently expected that within the next decade it may have risen to about 25. You know, one here's a great deal in my country, perhaps in Germany too, at present that fossil fuels are polluting too. They pollute the environment also. The whole is dangerous in this respect. I want to say something about that. There is a qualitative difference. The pollution we get from fossil fuels is temporary. It's mostly of the moment, but nuclear wastes, which I'm just about to talk about, they are forever. In terms of human history, forever. You just think civilization, hardly 10,000 years, but the half-life of plutonium 239 is 24,400 years. After 24,000 years, half of it is left. After 48,000 years, a quarter of it is left. After 72,000 years, an eighth of it is left. And that's too much plutonium 239. No one, no one knows what to do with the nuclear wastes. In our country, they're simply being stored on site. One hears confusing and misleading things about this problem frequently, that actually it is not a problem that the amount of nuclear waste per family, per year, getting all their electric power out of nuclear sources would amount to, a common phrase is, an aspirin tablet. Don't be fooled by that kind of statement. One comes down not to one aspirin tablet, but perhaps 10 or 20, only by the process of reprocessing the nuclear fuel. And in the United States at present, we have no commercial reprocessing, none whatsoever. Science were made to start it and they ended futile abortive. We have no reprocessing. We have the whole business to deal with. And no one, no one knows what to do with it. A recent copy of Science Magazine reported a very recent extensive study we've heard a lot about burying that stuff in salt mines and salt domes. And here our geologists were saying that it's by no means clear that that is a possible way of disposing of this material. There is the thought of perhaps burying this material under the sea in the places where the tectonic plates that form the surface of our globe leave a crack and to which one might perhaps sink this nuclear waste in the hope that it will keep sinking. I had a call in my office from a Royal Commission from New Zealand a few months ago and this came up and we pulled out a map and the most attractive place among the tectonic plates on the globe runs as it happens right under New Zealand. That made my visitors happy. Is what I'm talking about science? Is it biology? Is it a proper concern of scientists and biologists? I've just had an experience that raised this question very pointedly for me. I was looking forward to attending indeed opening a I'm sure pleasant quiet thoughtful meeting on the origin of life to be held in Cardiff, Wales beginning on August 7. And last Friday morning I received a telegram by the organizer of this conference confirming that it was all settled. But two hours later I had an urgent request to appear in Australia beginning with taking part in Hiroshima Day, August 6 and then speaking in other places in Australia about both nuclear power and nuclear weapons, two matters upon which the Australian government will have to make early decisions. So there I was, the origin of life, the end of life. That's the symmetry of that situation. The origin of life I've been deeply interested in for years I would love to be at that meeting. But you know, that's just history. But what we're talking about here is what may happen to human life and much other life on this planet. And that we might be able to do something about. I call this lecture life in a lethal society. Why do I call it a lethal society? Well, I've already begun to tell you it has gone lethal on the grand scale. Not only through these things that I've already mentioned and many others that there is no time to go into, but in one particular sense. And that is that killing and destruction and now the biggest business on earth. Military expenditures in 1977 were $350 billion, expected to go to $400 billion this year. The biggest business on earth and nuclear weapons, a fraction of that business, represent the most immediate threat to our lives and much of life on the earth. So let's talk about that for a few minutes. It's already 10 years ago that the stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the United States and the Soviet Union reached the explosive equivalent of 5 to 15 tons of TNT for every man, woman and child on the earth. 5 to 15 depending on how one computed them. That's about their level now. That comes out to be 40 to 120 tons of TNT for every man, woman and child in the two superpowers in the United States and the Soviet Union. A half hour's interchange between the superpowers using those weapons would put the whole of humanity in very serious danger and wipe out the populations of the superpowers and almost surely those of the neighboring nations. If that were to happen, it would be a good idea to be in the southern hemisphere. Most of that stuff is concentrated in the northern hemisphere, but ultimately even that offers no protection because you know the Vietnam War taught us that one can commit utter devastation with so-called conventional weapons. Tought us that one can commit ecocide and genocide on the grand scale with conventional weapons. But there is a qualitative difference as with the difference between fossil fuels and nuclear power there is a qualitative difference between conventional weapons and nuclear weapons. However devastating their effects when one has stopped using conventional weapons, that's it, it's over. One can count the dead and hot up the destruction and that's it. But not with nuclear weapons. They are unlimited in their effects in space and time. The fallout entering the atmosphere eventually covers the entire globe and ladies and gentlemen, not only nuclear waste is forever, nuclear fallout is forever. Am I exaggerating? Would that I were? I don't enjoy saying this kind of thing. I believe it to represent reality. But let me reassure you, if there were that full scale exchange with the present stockpiles between the Soviet Union and the United States, would it really wipe out every human being? Rather conservative calculation has just appeared in the atomic scientist bulletin Bernhard Feld who has been chairman of Pugwash for some time, wrote it and he is conservative. And he puts the explosive equivalent of the present stockpiles at 15 billion tons of TNT. And to exterminate every human being on earth, he thinks would take 60 billion tons of TNT. The Vladivostok agreement of 1974 between Messers Brezhnev and Ford gave license to roughly doubling the present stockpiles of nuclear weapons by 1985. And if that happens and there is is yet no assurance that it won't happen, we would then be halfway to that conservative estimate of what it would take completely to wipe out the human race. You know, killing off virtually all the people in the United States, that's an idea that's been bandied about for years now. And we had, he is, he doesn't live any longer, but we had a senator from Georgia named Richard Russell who was holding a patriotic speech in the United States Senate and talking about this, the wiping out of the American population. And he said in his speech and I quote, if we have to get back to Adam and Eve, I want them to be Americans and I want them in our country and not in Europe. That's genuine patriotism. Last August I was a member, the American member of an international commission that went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to evaluate finally what those two bombs had done. Why should one be interested? Now then, last year, 32 years after they were dropped, well for the very interesting reason that they are our only experience with the action of nuclear weapons upon populations if it weren't for those two bombs, we would only have computer simulations of what nuclear bombs can do to populations. You know, sometimes one argues that those bombs were not needed, that it was useless. We owe a fantastic debt to the people who suffered. The terrible agonies of those two bombings, they have shown us, if we will only watch and listen, they have shown us what a nuclear attack is like. And why was it that one still didn't know how many were killed and how many injured for a perfectly simple reason? All the records were destroyed in those bombings. The only thing one had to go on was the identification of victims by families. No families, no identifications, apparently no victims. That meant that a lot of soldiers, Japanese soldiers who were quartered in both places, that meant most sadly tens of thousands of Koreans who had been impressed as laborers and carried to Japan to labor during the war and no one counted them. And they're still not counted. But what our commission found was that in those two bombings, the city of Hiroshima was leveled and 140,000 persons plus or minus 10,000 had died within that year. And Nagasaki 70,000 plus or minus 10,000 had died within that year. Ladies and gentlemen, there is a kind of mythical feeling certainly in my country and perhaps throughout the world of what an atomic bomb attack is like. You know one thinks, bang, the next morning when reads in the newspaper the account of how many were killed, that isn't the way it is at all. Those that were killed immediately are the lucky ones in many ways. The meaning of a nuclear bombing is just filled with people who are maimed, burned, blinded, poisoned and a lot of them take a long time to die. When I go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and I've been for the last five years, I still visit the bomb survivors more than 30 years after it in those hospitals that maintain them. So that's our problem, a highly biological problem. And how are we to deal with it? I'd like to say a few words about that because I think that also is largely misunderstood. You know, we constantly talk about matters, about matters that we speak of as matters of state, political, strategic, military considerations, security considerations and tend to leave out of account the enormous business that is involved in these situations. And that's what I'd like to talk about. And please let no one misunderstand my own position. If I am talking disarmament, which I haven't talked, but of course I feel is utterly necessary and getting rid of all nuclear weapons, I don't dream of doing this unilaterally as an American. No, bilaterally, multilaterally. It should cover all the nations involved in the world. And I wonder how many of you are aware, because many Americans hardly are, that right now right now there is coming to an end in the United Nations General Assembly, the special session on disarmament that began on May 24th and is running for a month. And may I say at once that that special session on disarmament has been systematically sabotaged by both the superpowers, by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Heads of both states refused to appear at it. Our own President Jimmy Carter chose to call the first meeting of NATO, I believe, ever to be held in Washington, just as it began. I should tell you that the word disarmament became inoperative, officially in the United States many years ago. It ceased to be used. The trouble with the word disarmament is that it has a meaning. It means fewer arms. This place has been taken by two entirely meaningless terms. They are arms control and arms limitation. The assault talks arms limitation. You just think a moment. Arms control, meaningless. One can control them up or down. So far it's always been up. And however far up they go, they'll always be limited. You know, my nation is making three hydrogen warheads per day. That's been going on at that rate for about six years, and the Russians keep pace with that kind of production. The strategy in the two countries is a little different. We have, we Americans. We have two and a half times as many warheads deployed as the Russians. But they have twice the explosive power, the so-called throw weight. They prefer to rely upon fewer bigger weapons. One of the problems in our American arsenals is the question, are there enough targets for the number of bombs that we've prepared? Before I forget, let me mention another thing. The atom bomb that flattened Hiroshima and destroyed 140,000 people, 140,000 Japanese people, plus an unknown number of Koreans by the end of that year. That was a pitiful 12 and a half kiloton bomb that rates in the present arsenals as a tactical weapon, not strategic. It would not, for example, be counted in the salt talks. It's too small for that. When it's supposed to get used to tactical weapons, they don't really count. And when we produce three hydrogen warheads per day on top of the amount of overkill, let me tell you what it's like, the overkill, we have enough stuff now deployed in the United States, not all in the United States, but under American auspices, to destroy every city in the Soviet Union of over 100,000 population, 40 times over. And they have enough to destroy every such city in the United States 20 times over. So why are we making three hydrogen warheads per day and the Russians, the equivalent, sounds crazy? It is, it's insane. Unless in our part of that, on our side of the iron curtain, unless one holds an arms contract, and then it's business, and the more of it, the better. And it isn't very different on the other side of the iron curtain. I've traveled a lot lately in, never in the Soviet Union. My only visit to the Soviet Union was to try to attend a meeting of dissident physicists in Moscow last year, but unfortunately I had been sent over Leningrad, and in Leningrad they caught up with me and told me I was welcome to visit any place in the Soviet Union except Moscow where there were no hotel rooms. So my entire experience of the Soviet Union is 30 hours, 30 hours. I came away with a rather poor impression. I've reached the conviction a while back that if one organizes a society to maximize production, it ends up not very different from a society such as ours organized to maximize profit. Those people in the Soviet Union who are producing their nuclear weapons are as much concerned with getting on with that and are paid off in terms of personal power and status. And all the pequisites that go with those things that are the equivalent of what keeps our Western captains of industry interested in these activities. I think that thinking of these matters entirely in terms of statecraft and strategy and national security is a blind. There is something else at work. I think and I'm trying to speak responsibly and I wish there were more time to go on with these thoughts because I think everything I'm saying I can defend. I don't think in the Western world, our world, that the governments are running the nations. I think the governments are serving as the agents of great corporate and financial power. And I want to talk about that a little. Most persons don't understand what a really big modern corporation is about. So let me try to tell you in a few words. The biggest corporation in the world. Here I am in Germany and any name of a big American corporation I mentioned will be as familiar to Germans as to Americans. Those things are worldwide now. The biggest corporation in the world is Exxon. The sales of Exxon in 1977 were $58 billion. The second biggest corporation in the world is General Motors. A German said to me in my last visit, here we call the General Motors car the Opel. Yes, General Motors, annual sales, last year, global sales, $53 billion. There are only 18 nations in the world with gross national products as big as the annual sales of either Exxon or General Motors. All of you know what a gross national product is. That's everything that goes on. Let me say it a little differently. The annual sales of Exxon are as big as the gross national product of Australia. You just think of a pleasant conversation between the Premier of Australia and the Chairman of the Board of Exxon. Who is he, incidentally? I don't even know his name, though it's easily to be found out. You think of that pleasant conversation, that poor Premier of Australia. He had to get himself elected. He has to do things looking forward to the next election. He faces a big opposition. None of those limitations apply to the Chairman of the Board of Exxon. Corporations such as that, and I've mentioned only two among dozens of such transnational giants, corporations such as that represent the biggest concentrations of power and wealth that have ever existed in the whole of human history. They're not to be thought of as businesses. They are major powers. Do they have military forces? Yes. They have our military forces. Do they have systems of information, of surveillance? Yes. On the American side, they have the FBI and the CIA. Do they have systems of control? Yes. They have our governments. You know, that arms business is not only lucrative and huge. It is thoroughly concealed. The American arms business is thoroughly concealed from Americans. You know, I asked a few months ago, asked myself, who makes the hydrogen bombs? And I started by calling on the telephone a number of persons who live with these matters and surely would have known. They didn't. They just shrugged their shoulders. I had to start a research. It's gone very well. I now know who makes the hydrogen bombs. And yet this is a thoroughly concealed business. I have never seen in a quarterly or annual report of either Exxon or General Motors any mention of a military contract. And yet I just looked last night. I have the data for 1977. And Exxon is number 38 in the top 100 prime contractors for arms in the United States. And General Motors is number 24. I'd like to say something that I think is interesting about those huge transnational corporations. You know, I believe it to be deeply implanted in the theory of Marxism that it is precisely industrialization that prepares the road for socialism. It's precisely industrialization that socializes a country so that eventually the dictatorship of the proletariat so-called can take over what is already a finished product. When I was in Vietnam a couple of years ago, I found their theorists very worried because they told me, you know, we have a deep problem. We are trying to achieve socialism without having gone through an industrial phase. Now you know, one hesitates to say it when it's frightened of the very thought. All of us are. But we can't live much longer with the present militant forms of nationalism that exist all over the world. We need some kind of world government. And you know, we have a kind of world government. It is the transnational corporations. And so, you know, one might think that just as industrialization prepared the way for socialism, one might make a parallel theory that transnational corporations prepare the way for world government. There's only one difficulty with that thought, and that is their lethality, their life-threatening quality and activity. They are bringing us, those transnational corporations, our bringing humanity to the brink of self-destruction in many ways and as rapidly as can be managed. So ladies and gentlemen, I have already spoken too long. Please forgive me. I think that I think myself that I have not in any way stepped beyond my conception of the role of a natural scientist in this situation. You know, are we, are we scientists merely to study and measure and record what goes on as nature goes down the drain? Are we to be the passive witnesses of all that destruction without making any attempt to prevent it, not in my book? I think being a scientist is in many ways a religious vocation in the broadest sense. And I think that we as scientists are trying not only to understand nature, but must take on the responsibility to take care of it, to take care of the earth, to take care of life, to take care of human life. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
 Some of my physicist friends are Starry-Eid.  That will give the Dolmetscher trouble.  A Starry-Eid, Hochbegeistert, huh?  Are Starry-Eid about the prospect of coming into radio communication with what they call  advanced technological societies in outer space.  They have been listening now for a generation without hearing anything meaningful.  And the thought is becoming more and more widespread that perhaps there are no more  advanced technological societies in outer space.  Perhaps they destroy themselves just about as they reach our stage as we are threatening  to do.  May I say at once that I reject that thought completely.  I reject completely the thought that there is some kind of natural law at work that spells  the self-destruction of technological societies when they reach about our stage.  It isn't a natural law.  It's all utterly man-made.  It's part of the special structure of our society in our time.  In 1976, my nation celebrated in what has come to be our tawdry way.  The bicentennial, the 200th anniversary of American independence.  Well, that was an interesting event, but minor in the long scale even for us.  Because at just the same time, the Industrial Revolution was beginning.  And in 200 years, the Industrial Revolution has brought us to a strange pass.  You know, I see the history of our universe in the perspective of some 15 to 20 billion  years, 6 billion years of the solar system, 4.7 billion years of the planet, 3 billion  years of life, 3 million years of something like human life, hardly 10,000 years of civilization.  And then this miserable, trivial 200 years of the Industrial Revolution to bring humanity  to the brink of self-extinction.  One talks about that Industrial Revolution in special ways.  At its beginning, it seemed to promise humanity endless leisure and abundance.  But then new characteristics began to emerge.  One describes it frequently in terms of an exponential curve, an exponential curve in  which one writes the years along the bottom.  Though the way things have gone, it hardly matters what may have happened before 100  years ago.  And vertically along the ordinance, one writes many things, population, industrial pollution,  the use of fossil fuels, the exhaustion of many other irreplaceable resources, armaments,  and something that has a special interest for us, our sort of person.  And that is information.  We're living in the middle of an information explosion, which for those of us who are scientists  and many others is in some ways as uncomfortable as any of these other things.  And virtually one exponential curve fits all these phenomena.  And that curve is reaching for the moon at just about the same time, the year 2000.  I'm one of those scientists and would there were not as many who are finding it hard to  understand how the human race is to bring itself much past the year 2000.  I'd like to talk about this exponential phenomenon in a simpler and more homely way.  Two hundred years ago the industrial use of coal was in its infancy.  One hundred years ago the first oil wells were just being opened.  I am as old as the industrial use of gasoline.  For the first 25 years of the petroleum industry, gasoline was looked upon as a useless and  dangerous byproduct.  The only question about it was how can one get rid of it before it blew one up?  And then in America Henry Ford put motor cars on the road and there was a first industrial  use for gasoline.  And now for many persons the thought of going on with civilization without gasoline is almost  unimaginable.  And now we are being told that we can't live without nuclear power.  Ladies and gentlemen, the reality is that we cannot live with nuclear power.  The population explosion, I wonder whether all of you realize just what the problem is.  Let me say it in this way, that population explosion is of course a rather unanticipated  product of the industrial revolution.  And we've reached the point at which if one were to achieve merely the replacement level  with each fertile couple producing two offspring by the year 2000 in all the developed countries  of the world, and if one were to reach that same replacement level in all the so-called  underdeveloped countries of the world by 2050, then 70 years later, so by 2120, the world  population should have risen to about 13 billions.  It's now approaching four billions and many of us are beginning to feel crowded.  I think it's well recognized by now in medical circles that 70 to 90 percent, so a reasonable  figure would be 80 percent of the cancer in our country at least, is of environmental  origin and hence preventable.  I hope there will be a chance for your comments.  If I finish soon enough, I can't be sure.  I would be much more anxious to hear from you than perhaps you are from me, and I hope there  will be some opportunity in the course of these meetings.  About 40 percent of those cancers in our country are happening in the workplaces.  I'm talking of the cancer production that comes associated with the black lung of the  coal miners, the brown lung of the textile workers, the vinyl chloride poisoning of the  plastics workers, the PCB poisoning of the workers with electrical products, with talking  of asbestosis and silicosis and the results of exposure to the innumerable and very rapidly  expanding organic chemicals coming into further industrial use.  It's become rather difficult to remain alive while earning a living, and some of the lectures  that will be held at this meeting, to which I look forward, themselves look forward to  being able to do therapeutic things about cancer, to do something about curing cancers.  But ladies and gentlemen, what I've just finished saying means that the primary need is not  to cure cancers, the primary need is to keep them from happening.  It is the prevention of cancer that we should be bending our energies and devoting our resources,  mainly to.  I said that we can't live with nuclear power, it is intolerably life-threatening in three  quite independently different ways.  First of all, the thing that is talked of most and probably is the least important is  the danger of nuclear accident.  And when he is this argued back and forth by the proponents and opponents of nuclear  power, I should like to say something very simple and direct.  In our country, those superb realists, the insurance companies, refused from the beginning  to insure nuclear power facilities.  And for that, Congress passed for the first time in 1957, a so-called Price Anderson Act,  that lays four fifths, four fifths of the liability for nuclear accident upon our taxpayers.  They will be the ones to suffer and they will be the ones to pay themselves.  The second of these life-threatening dangers of nuclear power, of course, involves the  realization that every kind of nuclear installation, power installation now in existence produces  plutonium 239 as a byproduct.  That is at once the most toxic substance we know and the most convenient material from  which to make atom bombs, fission bombs.  Its toxicity is such that the inhalation of one milligram would cause death within hours  of massive fibrosis of the lungs.  The inhalation of one microgram, one millionth of that amount, produces reasonable chance  of an eventual lung cancer.  As for making atom bombs, the trigger quantity, so-called, of plutonium 239, the smallest  amount from which one can make a fission nuclear weapon is two kilograms, something less than  four and a half pounds.  You could carry that in an ordinary brown paper bag such as we bring groceries home  in and with complete safety.  To make a Hiroshima-sized bomb take six to seven kilograms, something like 13 or 14  pounds, you'd need a shopping bag for that.  And wherever in the world now, nuclear power facilities have been opened, the potential  exists for producing these fission bombs, an ordinary standard nuclear power station  produces enough plutonium 239 per year to make as many, perhaps, as 100 Hiroshima-sized  bombs.  The present nuclear club, the nations that possess nuclear weapons numbers, six, but it  is rather confidently expected that within the next decade it may have risen to about  25.  You know, one here's a great deal in my country, perhaps in Germany too, at present that fossil  fuels are polluting too.  They pollute the environment also.  The whole is dangerous in this respect.  I want to say something about that.  There is a qualitative difference.  The pollution we get from fossil fuels is temporary.  It's mostly of the moment, but nuclear wastes, which I'm just about to talk about, they are  forever.  In terms of human history, forever.  You just think civilization, hardly 10,000 years, but the half-life of plutonium 239  is 24,400 years.  After 24,000 years, half of it is left.  After 48,000 years, a quarter of it is left.  After 72,000 years, an eighth of it is left.  And that's too much plutonium 239.  No one, no one knows what to do with the nuclear wastes.  In our country, they're simply being stored on site.  One hears confusing and misleading things about this problem frequently, that actually  it is not a problem that the amount of nuclear waste per family, per year, getting all their  electric power out of nuclear sources would amount to, a common phrase is, an aspirin  tablet.  Don't be fooled by that kind of statement.  One comes down not to one aspirin tablet, but perhaps 10 or 20, only by the process  of reprocessing the nuclear fuel.  And in the United States at present, we have no commercial reprocessing, none whatsoever.  Science were made to start it and they ended futile abortive.  We have no reprocessing.  We have the whole business to deal with.  And no one, no one knows what to do with it.  A recent copy of Science Magazine reported a very recent extensive study we've heard  a lot about burying that stuff in salt mines and salt domes.  And here our geologists were saying that it's by no means clear that that is a possible  way of disposing of this material.  There is the thought of perhaps burying this material under the sea in the places where  the tectonic plates that form the surface of our globe leave a crack and to which one might  perhaps sink this nuclear waste in the hope that it will keep sinking.  I had a call in my office from a Royal Commission from New Zealand a few months ago and this  came up and we pulled out a map and the most attractive place among the tectonic plates  on the globe runs as it happens right under New Zealand.  That made my visitors happy.  Is what I'm talking about science?  Is it biology?  Is it a proper concern of scientists and biologists?  I've just had an experience that raised this question very pointedly for me.  I was looking forward to attending indeed opening a I'm sure pleasant quiet thoughtful  meeting on the origin of life to be held in Cardiff, Wales beginning on August 7.  And last Friday morning I received a telegram by the organizer of this conference confirming  that it was all settled.  But two hours later I had an urgent request to appear in Australia beginning with taking  part in Hiroshima Day, August 6 and then speaking in other places in Australia about both nuclear  power and nuclear weapons, two matters upon which the Australian government will have  to make early decisions.  So there I was, the origin of life, the end of life.  That's the symmetry of that situation.  The origin of life I've been deeply interested in for years I would love to be at that meeting.  But you know, that's just history.  But what we're talking about here is what may happen to human life and much other life  on this planet.  And that we might be able to do something about.  I call this lecture life in a lethal society.  Why do I call it a lethal society?  Well, I've already begun to tell you it has gone lethal on the grand scale.  Not only through these things that I've already mentioned and many others that there is no  time to go into, but in one particular sense.  And that is that killing and destruction and now the biggest business on earth.  Military expenditures in 1977 were $350 billion, expected to go to $400 billion this year.  The biggest business on earth and nuclear weapons, a fraction of that business, represent  the most immediate threat to our lives and much of life on the earth.  So let's talk about that for a few minutes.  It's already 10 years ago that the stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the United States and  the Soviet Union reached the explosive equivalent of 5 to 15 tons of TNT for every man, woman  and child on the earth.  5 to 15 depending on how one computed them.  That's about their level now.  That comes out to be 40 to 120 tons of TNT for every man, woman and child in the two  superpowers in the United States and the Soviet Union.  A half hour's interchange between the superpowers using those weapons would put the whole of  humanity in very serious danger and wipe out the populations of the superpowers and almost  surely those of the neighboring nations.  If that were to happen, it would be a good idea to be in the southern hemisphere.  Most of that stuff is concentrated in the northern hemisphere, but ultimately even that  offers no protection because you know the Vietnam War taught us that one can commit  utter devastation with so-called conventional weapons.  Tought us that one can commit ecocide and genocide on the grand scale with conventional  weapons.  But there is a qualitative difference as with the difference between fossil fuels and nuclear  power there is a qualitative difference between conventional weapons and nuclear weapons.  However devastating their effects when one has stopped using conventional weapons, that's  it, it's over.  One can count the dead and hot up the destruction and that's it.  But not with nuclear weapons.  They are unlimited in their effects in space and time.  The fallout entering the atmosphere eventually covers the entire globe and ladies and gentlemen,  not only nuclear waste is forever, nuclear fallout is forever.  Am I exaggerating?  Would that I were?  I don't enjoy saying this kind of thing.  I believe it to represent reality.  But let me reassure you, if there were that full scale exchange with the present stockpiles  between the Soviet Union and the United States, would it really wipe out every human being?  Rather conservative calculation has just appeared in the atomic scientist bulletin Bernhard  Feld who has been chairman of Pugwash for some time, wrote it and he is conservative.  And he puts the explosive equivalent of the present stockpiles at 15 billion tons of TNT.  And to exterminate every human being on earth, he thinks would take 60 billion tons of TNT.  The Vladivostok agreement of 1974 between Messers Brezhnev and Ford gave license to roughly  doubling the present stockpiles of nuclear weapons by 1985.  And if that happens and there is is yet no assurance that it won't happen, we would then  be halfway to that conservative estimate of what it would take completely to wipe out  the human race.  You know, killing off virtually all the people in the United States, that's an idea that's  been bandied about for years now.  And we had, he is, he doesn't live any longer, but we had a senator from Georgia named Richard  Russell who was holding a patriotic speech in the United States Senate and talking about  this, the wiping out of the American population.  And he said in his speech and I quote, if we have to get back to Adam and Eve, I want  them to be Americans and I want them in our country and not in Europe.  That's genuine patriotism.  Last August I was a member, the American member of an international commission that went to  Hiroshima and Nagasaki to evaluate finally what those two bombs had done.  Why should one be interested?  Now then, last year, 32 years after they were dropped, well for the very interesting reason  that they are our only experience with the action of nuclear weapons upon populations  if it weren't for those two bombs, we would only have computer simulations of what nuclear  bombs can do to populations.  You know, sometimes one argues that those bombs were not needed, that it was useless.  We owe a fantastic debt to the people who suffered.  The terrible agonies of those two bombings, they have shown us, if we will only watch  and listen, they have shown us what a nuclear attack is like.  And why was it that one still didn't know how many were killed and how many injured  for a perfectly simple reason?  All the records were destroyed in those bombings.  The only thing one had to go on was the identification of victims by families.  No families, no identifications, apparently no victims.  That meant that a lot of soldiers, Japanese soldiers who were quartered in both places,  that meant most sadly tens of thousands of Koreans who had been impressed as laborers  and carried to Japan to labor during the war and no one counted them.  And they're still not counted.  But what our commission found was that in those two bombings, the city of Hiroshima  was leveled and 140,000 persons plus or minus 10,000 had died within that year.  And Nagasaki 70,000 plus or minus 10,000 had died within that year.  Ladies and gentlemen, there is a kind of mythical feeling certainly in my country and perhaps  throughout the world of what an atomic bomb attack is like.  You know one thinks, bang, the next morning when reads in the newspaper the account of  how many were killed, that isn't the way it is at all.  Those that were killed immediately are the lucky ones in many ways.  The meaning of a nuclear bombing is just filled with people who are maimed, burned,  blinded, poisoned and a lot of them take a long time to die.  When I go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and I've been for the last five years, I still visit  the bomb survivors more than 30 years after it in those hospitals that maintain them.  So that's our problem, a highly biological problem.  And how are we to deal with it?  I'd like to say a few words about that because I think that also is largely misunderstood.  You know, we constantly talk about matters, about matters that we speak of as matters  of state, political, strategic, military considerations, security considerations and tend to leave  out of account the enormous business that is involved in these situations.  And that's what I'd like to talk about.  And please let no one misunderstand my own position.  If I am talking disarmament, which I haven't talked, but of course I feel is utterly necessary  and getting rid of all nuclear weapons, I don't dream of doing this unilaterally as  an American.  No, bilaterally, multilaterally.  It should cover all the nations involved in the world.  And I wonder how many of you are aware, because many Americans hardly are, that right now  right now there is coming to an end in the United Nations General Assembly, the special  session on disarmament that began on May 24th and is running for a month.  And may I say at once that that special session on disarmament has been systematically sabotaged  by both the superpowers, by both the United States and the Soviet Union.  Heads of both states refused to appear at it.  Our own President Jimmy Carter chose to call the first meeting of NATO, I believe, ever  to be held in Washington, just as it began.  I should tell you that the word disarmament became inoperative, officially in the United  States many years ago.  It ceased to be used.  The trouble with the word disarmament is that it has a meaning.  It means fewer arms.  This place has been taken by two entirely meaningless terms.  They are arms control and arms limitation.  The assault talks arms limitation.  You just think a moment.  Arms control, meaningless.  One can control them up or down.  So far it's always been up.  And however far up they go, they'll always be limited.  You know, my nation is making three hydrogen warheads per day.  That's been going on at that rate for about six years, and the Russians keep pace with  that kind of production.  The strategy in the two countries is a little different.  We have, we Americans.  We have two and a half times as many warheads deployed as the Russians.  But they have twice the explosive power, the so-called throw weight.  They prefer to rely upon fewer bigger weapons.  One of the problems in our American arsenals is the question, are there enough targets  for the number of bombs that we've prepared?  Before I forget, let me mention another thing.  The atom bomb that flattened Hiroshima and destroyed 140,000 people, 140,000 Japanese  people, plus an unknown number of Koreans by the end of that year.  That was a pitiful 12 and a half kiloton bomb that rates in the present arsenals as a tactical  weapon, not strategic.  It would not, for example, be counted in the salt talks.  It's too small for that.  When it's supposed to get used to tactical weapons, they don't really count.  And when we produce three hydrogen warheads per day on top of the amount of overkill,  let me tell you what it's like, the overkill, we have enough stuff now deployed in the United  States, not all in the United States, but under American auspices, to destroy every  city in the Soviet Union of over 100,000 population, 40 times over.  And they have enough to destroy every such city in the United States 20 times over.  So why are we making three hydrogen warheads per day and the Russians, the equivalent,  sounds crazy?  It is, it's insane.  Unless in our part of that, on our side of the iron curtain, unless one holds an arms  contract, and then it's business, and the more of it, the better.  And it isn't very different on the other side of the iron curtain.  I've traveled a lot lately in, never in the Soviet Union.  My only visit to the Soviet Union was to try to attend a meeting of dissident physicists  in Moscow last year, but unfortunately I had been sent over Leningrad, and in Leningrad  they caught up with me and told me I was welcome to visit any place in the Soviet Union except  Moscow where there were no hotel rooms.  So my entire experience of the Soviet Union is 30 hours, 30 hours.  I came away with a rather poor impression.  I've reached the conviction a while back that if one organizes a society to maximize  production, it ends up not very different from a society such as ours organized to  maximize profit.  Those people in the Soviet Union who are producing their nuclear weapons are as much concerned  with getting on with that and are paid off in terms of personal power and status.  And all the pequisites that go with those things that are the equivalent of what keeps  our Western captains of industry interested in these activities.  I think that thinking of these matters entirely in terms of statecraft and strategy and national  security is a blind.  There is something else at work.  I think and I'm trying to speak responsibly and I wish there were more time to go on with  these thoughts because I think everything I'm saying I can defend.  I don't think in the Western world, our world, that the governments are running the nations.  I think the governments are serving as the agents of great corporate and financial power.  And I want to talk about that a little.  Most persons don't understand what a really big modern corporation is about.  So let me try to tell you in a few words.  The biggest corporation in the world.  Here I am in Germany and any name of a big American corporation I mentioned will be  as familiar to Germans as to Americans.  Those things are worldwide now.  The biggest corporation in the world is Exxon.  The sales of Exxon in 1977 were $58 billion.  The second biggest corporation in the world is General Motors.  A German said to me in my last visit, here we call the General Motors car the Opel.  Yes, General Motors, annual sales, last year, global sales, $53 billion.  There are only 18 nations in the world with gross national products as big as the annual  sales of either Exxon or General Motors.  All of you know what a gross national product is.  That's everything that goes on.  Let me say it a little differently.  The annual sales of Exxon are as big as the gross national product of Australia.  You just think of a pleasant conversation between the Premier of Australia and the Chairman  of the Board of Exxon.  Who is he, incidentally?  I don't even know his name, though it's easily to be found out.  You think of that pleasant conversation, that poor Premier of Australia.  He had to get himself elected.  He has to do things looking forward to the next election.  He faces a big opposition.  None of those limitations apply to the Chairman of the Board of Exxon.  Corporations such as that, and I've mentioned only two among dozens of such transnational  giants, corporations such as that represent the biggest concentrations of power and wealth  that have ever existed in the whole of human history.  They're not to be thought of as businesses.  They are major powers.  Do they have military forces?  Yes.  They have our military forces.  Do they have systems of information, of surveillance?  Yes.  On the American side, they have the FBI and the CIA.  Do they have systems of control?  Yes.  They have our governments.  You know, that arms business is not only lucrative and huge.  It is thoroughly concealed.  The American arms business is thoroughly concealed from Americans.  You know, I asked a few months ago, asked myself, who makes the hydrogen bombs?  And I started by calling on the telephone a number of persons who live with these matters  and surely would have known.  They didn't.  They just shrugged their shoulders.  I had to start a research.  It's gone very well.  I now know who makes the hydrogen bombs.  And yet this is a thoroughly concealed business.  I have never seen in a quarterly or annual report of either Exxon or General Motors any  mention of a military contract.  And yet I just looked last night.  I have the data for 1977.  And Exxon is number 38 in the top 100 prime contractors for arms in the United States.  And General Motors is number 24.  I'd like to say something that I think is interesting about those huge transnational  corporations.  You know, I believe it to be deeply implanted in the theory of Marxism that it is precisely  industrialization that prepares the road for socialism.  It's precisely industrialization that socializes a country so that eventually the dictatorship  of the proletariat so-called can take over what is already a finished product.  When I was in Vietnam a couple of years ago, I found their theorists very worried because  they told me, you know, we have a deep problem.  We are trying to achieve socialism without having gone through an industrial phase.  Now you know, one hesitates to say it when it's frightened of the very thought.  All of us are.  But we can't live much longer with the present militant forms of nationalism that exist all  over the world.  We need some kind of world government.  And you know, we have a kind of world government.  It is the transnational corporations.  And so, you know, one might think that just as industrialization prepared the way for  socialism, one might make a parallel theory that transnational corporations prepare the  way for world government.  There's only one difficulty with that thought, and that is their lethality, their life-threatening  quality and activity.  They are bringing us, those transnational corporations, our bringing humanity to the  brink of self-destruction in many ways and as rapidly as can be managed.  So ladies and gentlemen, I have already spoken too long.  Please forgive me.  I think that I think myself that I have not in any way stepped beyond my conception of  the role of a natural scientist in this situation.  You know, are we, are we scientists merely to study and measure and record what goes  on as nature goes down the drain?  Are we to be the passive witnesses of all that destruction without making any attempt  to prevent it, not in my book?  I think being a scientist is in many ways a religious vocation in the broadest sense.  And I think that we as scientists are trying not only to understand nature, but must take  on the responsibility to take care of it, to take care of the earth, to take care of  life, to take care of human life.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.
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