 Welcome, viewers, to our ongoing program, Nuclear Free Future Conversation, coming to you from Channel 17, Center for Media and Democracy, here in Burlington, Vermont. I'm your host, Margaret Harrington, and here in the studio with me is Dr. John F. Ruer, from Physicians for Social Responsibility, who has a long history in the anti-nuclear movement. Welcome, John. Welcome to our program. Please to be here. Yes, and as we've been going on for about nine years here with the Nuclear Free Future Conversation, and I had the opportunity to meet you at your wonderful presentation at the Friends Meeting House in early November about what's going on right now in the nuclear risk. And that is the title of our program, what we can do about the risk of nuclear war. And John, with your long history in the anti-nuclear movement, I'm sure that you can give us some perspective on what is going on right now. Yes, these are exciting times in both a positive and a negative way. You know, those of us who are over 55 or so have some memory of living with the almost constant threat of nuclear war as younger people. I was taught that the Soviet Union was so evil and communism so monolithic that nothing but a nuclear war could ever stop the spread of it and that the Soviet Union would never fall without the power of nuclear weapons. Of course, history proved otherwise. But we grew up with a constant worry of what was gonna happen to us. The idea of duck and cover that if an air raid signal sounded, everybody just got under their desks at school and went down into their fallout shelters and that maybe would let us survive somehow. But we didn't know much about the details of what that meant. Right, and you go back to your school days, were you in grade school when these drills would happen? What would happen at that time? Well, every Monday, as I recall, there was just a long air raid signal. And when I was very young, they actually had us go move into the hallways and get under the desks and that was dropped after a number of years. We just listened to it and didn't talk about it too much. A stronger memory is seeing the fallout shelter signs on so many buildings and leading above the steps toward the basement. And I can remember my neighbors in suburban Baltimore digging a hole and a shelter of some sort and asking my dad, why aren't we doing that? And I don't remember why he said we didn't need to do that, but we didn't. Do you recall at the moment, did he kind of assuage your anxiety about this or did he say it's going to be okay or what? It was just never really talked about. It was just part of life and wasn't discussed as much as I wish it had been. That curiosity about what it was about and my natural scientific curiosity led me to do some research on my own. And as I grew to be a teenager and in high school, I remember measuring the walls. We had a particularly solid stone house and measuring the walls and looking in books for the radiation protection factor to see how long I could live with the fallout if it did happen. But it was a matter of fact. It wasn't a terribly fearful thing as it probably should have been. It sounds like, John, from the very beginning, you were somebody who would do something about it, right? I mean, because a lot of us were just fearful. What is going on? We hear there's air-ride signs. We see the bomb shelter sign go down in the basement of the school or in the streets. It was just so very, very frightening. And as you say, it was a clear and present danger when you were growing up, right? Right, but like most people, I didn't think I could do anything about it. This was the world I was given to deal with it. And that's kind of a sad attitude that we're raised to believe because that allows all the people in power to do whatever they want and we just obey. It wasn't really until I started my medical training, finished my medical school, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency on a platform that, including filling his cabinet with people who thought we could no longer have to deter the Soviet Union from taking over the world, we could actually launch a nuclear war, beat them, and then we'd somehow come out winning. So by that time, my curiosity was really piqued. So I spent a lot of time with a book saying, what would nuclear war look like? And I had the medical sophistication and education by that time to know what blast effect would be, what the radiation would be, what the fires would be. And it was pretty frightening. So that's when I discovered physicians for social responsibility who had been working on this for a decade and a half. And they had the physical and medical effects well-documented in peer-reviewed journals so I could see factually what it would look like. And I became a speaker for them and what impressed me was when you tell people the facts, when you let them look at them, say, here's the potential for nuclear war that your president's calling for. We can have this, but here's what it's gonna do. If people spend a few hours with it, almost always they say, no, let's not do that. Yeah, and it can't happen too, right? Isn't that the way the mindset is? It can't happen here. It's going to happen over there. Like the bombs will go to this at the time, the Soviet Union. Well, I don't know how many people believe that. It was more like a psychic numbing that it can happen but I can't think about it because I can't do anything about it. But when you learn the facts, you learn, no, you can do something about it and we did. People like Dr. Helen Caldicott and others who founded the Physicians for Social Responsibility and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War actually reached Ronald Reagan and Michael Gorbachev explained it to them and then they agreed, you're right, we can't do this. And so they created the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks and got rid of a lot of nuclear weapons. Right. What year were the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks? They began in the early 80s. Right. So before that was something called the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty whereby the nuclear armed powers, and there were five at the time, said to the rest of the world, well, we really don't want these things. So if you guys agree not to obtain them, then we'll agree to work hard on getting rid of ours. And what has happened was that worked, it kept nations who thought they might get them from getting them, but decades passed and clearly the nuclear powers were not interested in giving them up for geopolitical reasons. And so that's what's so exciting going on now is the nations that agreed then not to have them are finally challenging the nuclear powers to say, we're gonna make these things illegal. You promised to get rid of them a long time ago and you're not doing it. So in June, after 10 years of hard work by the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, 122 nations signed a treaty or adopted a treaty to say that these things are now illegal. Now that's a complicated process in international politics because each country adopts the treaty, but then they have to actually sign the treaty and 53 nations have done that. And then it has to be ratified for their governments, which is a multi-year process. Right. And it also depends, doesn't it, on who is in political power in those countries at the time? Yeah. And again, now there are nine known countries that have the nuclear weapons. There are. Known, that we know about, right? That's right. And we probably know there's only one of those nations that doesn't admit to having them, that's Israel. But nuclear technology is such and monitoring systems and information processing now is such that it would be very hard to have one without somebody knowing. But the exception of a small terrorist weapon that would possibly be obtainable and usable and that's one of the three big threats as I see it. You talk about the psychic numbing and then during all of the Obama years, you have said that many of us were asleep on that, on the nuclear issue during the Obama administration, the progress we were making slowed to a snail's pace. Could you talk about that about, that was like an outcome of the psychic numbing. And I know that people, young people that I talked to thought that the nuclear weapons were already outlawed. They said, oh, you know, it can't happen again. Right, right. Yeah, there's very little factual information among the general public. We were pretty aware of what was happening. We knew it was awful and we numbed ourselves psychically so we could survive and go on living. And the risk did decrease when Gorbachev and Reagan's side of the start talked. We decreased the total number of weapons in the world from 70,000 or so to down to about 15,000 from 50 times overkill down to about eight times overkill. That means we can destroy everything useful eight times over and we still stand with that. And because of the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union breaking up, we felt less threatened. So we went on to other issues like climate change and nuclear power and so forth, which are very important issues to deal with. But those reductions stopped during the Obama are slow to a snail's pace. They're still getting rid of some, but now we've just promised to spend another trillion dollars over the next 30 years to modernize them, which essentially means to replace them, make them more usable. Yeah, I had thought that modernize meant to get the old nuclear weapons into shape, but you're talking about it's probably making new nuclear weapons. It's both, it's apparently, yeah, it's both. The problem is when we do that, then every other country wants to do that and this all the nuclear powers are doing it in one way or another, which is another arms race, a lot of wasted money that's not dealing with the famines in the world and the refugees in the world. And the weapons are actually being made more usable. The fuses are being made more accurate so they can land more precisely in a given era, which means, oh, we can not do as much collateral damage, we can just take out their weapons and not take out the whole city. And in the mind of some military planners, that makes them militarily useful, which is not a very good thing. And so, and is this a covert thing that's going on? It's really, most of us really don't know about it. No, the Congressional Office of Budget Management has it all laid out. There's a wonderful report called the Trillion Dollar Train Wreck that outlines which systems are gonna be replaced, which warheads are gonna be replaced, what they're gonna be replaced with, and the maintenance of the old triad of delivery systems. We can deliver bombs by bombers, we can deliver other warheads with missiles from either submarines or land ICBMs. Right, and in the mainstream news, we hear about the nuclear submarines over in the East now and all about different things that happen, like there are some crashes and that sort of thing that goes on. And that's all we hear about what's going on. And oh my goodness, what is the story behind it? Because you have described the nuclear threat to humanity as the greatest threat to life on earth. And now we have some idea of the viewers and I of you as somebody who does something about it. You don't just sit and worry or be fearful, but as a child you measured the density of the stones in your basement. And so, why do you describe it as the greatest threat to human life on earth? Because as you said, the climate change issue is here, the nuclear power issue is here, the hunger, famine issue is there, and all of that. But overall is the nuclear threat. Well, there are lots of problems that human beings face. But the most immediate one to our existence is nuclear war. What we've gotta realize is that in the next 30 to 60 minutes, if some politician or someone makes a mistake, that Soviet or a Chinese sub a few miles off the coast of North America can incinerate 100 cities at a time in the next 30 minutes. And my view is if anybody, if that happened, anybody looking back at the history building up to that wouldn't say anything other than how did they miss that? They knew it was coming and they didn't stop it. When I was talking about this a lot, 30 years ago in the Reagan era, I came to the conclusion after looking at all the accidents that mistakes human beings had made that nothing but the grace of God had saved us. We tried as hard as we could to destroy ourselves. And if there's any proof of the existence of God, it's the fact that somebody has stayed our hand. At the United Nations this summer, I was extremely impressed by meeting a man who was a British naval commander in the Navy. In his career, his job was to practice at two different times, flying a fighter bomber from Britain over St. Petersburg and dropping a large nuclear weapon. And another time, following Russian submarines in the North Sea, getting ready to drop nuclear depth charges. It was all preparation for a nuclear war. And he began to see how ridiculous this was. He knew that his plane couldn't get back. And when he talked to his navigator about, we're not gonna make it back once we drop that bomb. He says, well, if we're dropping that bomb, there's nothing to come back to. He began to realize the reality of that. The logic of that. The logic of that. And when he realized that when they dropped the nuclear depth charge on the submarine to destroy it, that the helicopter, unlike the fighter plane, was not gonna get away from the blast. And when he confronted his commanding officers about that, they said, well, you don't have to worry about that. This is all deterrence. It'll never happen. And he realized we could make a mistake on any of these. Of course it could happen. Well, when I talked to him about that, he said he came to the same conclusion I did. It was a miracle that this hasn't happened. He said, the guy you really need to talk to is General Lee Butler, who was a friend of his who I'd heard about. But this general commanded all the U.S. nuclear forces for a number of years in the 1990s. And he's written a book where he clearly states that we're only here by luck, good planning, and divine intervention. And he says, the more I think about it, the largest proportion is divine intervention. So to see these people who knew everything about nuclear weapons and watched the mistakes being made, come to the same conclusion that I did just looking from the outside had a profound effect on me this summer. It is a miracle we're here. And it's very, well, we're being educated. The viewers and I about this, but it's very, it's consoling in the midst of all is to know that professionals like General Butler has written about it. So he's doing something about it, too. He hasn't just absorbed this into his own psyche and his own life, but he's reaching out to all of us and viewers, that's what Dr. Rohr is doing right now to us. So there's really two messages I have for people. One is that nuclear weapons are worse than most people think they are. Certainly if they're used, and even if they're not used, they're worse than doing much more damage than people think they are. And secondly, every one of us is much more powerful in reversing the risk of that than we think we are. That's what I want people to hear. These things are worse and need attention, and we're more powerful in getting rid of them than we think we are. The second point being made really largely by the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, which just received the Nobel Peace Prize for 2017. This is a group of incredibly creative and energetic people, folks who've been around as long as I have who didn't put the nuclear thing down, but have been studying it for the last 40 years and have enormous amounts of information. And then young, energetic people who say, that's not the world I want to live in. We've got to get rid of this threat. And after 10 years of hard work, they actually did something that's never been done in history, they got the little guys without nuclear weapons to speak up to the big guys and said, we want to ban these. They receive enormous pressure talking to people at the UN and the diplomats saying, we would sign this in a heartbeat if the US didn't threaten to take away this aid and that aid and so forth. Oh, that is enlightening. So there are threats behind all of this. Well, I haven't personally seen those threats made. I've heard that from people who know. Well, John, what is driving this holding on to the nuclear weapons and to, is this what defines the United States as a superpower? The holding these nuclear weapons, having more nuclear weapons than any other country? No, if you talk to certainly all the past nuclear planners like General Lee Butler, like General Colin Powell, they'll tell you these weapons are worthless. Even for deterrence, they're pretty worthless. But most people in power now still believe in this outdated concept of deterrence. That somehow if you have these, you won't, nobody's gonna bother you or take you over. But history shows that it's just not true. It's not necessary. The odd thing from the view of the United States in particular clinging to these things is that we have the most powerful military in the world. Nobody can touch us in a conventional war. And if we only had that, we could feel pretty safe about anybody invading us. Wouldn't help with terrorism or cyber threats and a lot of other things, but it would keep us from a military invasion. Nuclear weapons, as I said before, can be here in the next 30 minutes with no surprise to anybody and we're all gone. I would think that would make the United States leave the charge, let's get rid of these things. We did it before. It was the United States that led the charge to against chemical weapons. They said, you know, we can beat everybody every other way, we don't need chemical weapons and other people can do some nasty things with them. Let's get rid of them and we did. See, we've done this before with other weapons of mass destruction. The world has outlawed chemical weapons, biological weapons, cluster munitions, you know, those terrible things that break into lots of bombs just to kill civilians in large numbers. And landmines. And this is the last weapon of mass destruction that we just haven't made illegal, so it's time to do that. And well, with the international campaign to ban landmines, the United States has not signed that treaty. But are you saying that it's not as important to sign the treaty as to be against the landmines as the United States is saying it is? Well, what matters is the behavior. The behavior matters. And the arguments against the nuclear weapons ban is that, well, what difference does it make? Non-nuclear nations signing it is like non-smokers giving up tobacco. Right, right, yeah. How does it help the smokers or vegetarians outlawing meat? What's the point? The point is enormous because it takes what we all know since the first weapons were used that these are immoral things. They cannot be used in any just war by anybody's criteria because of the mass slaughter of civilians. It now makes them illegal. And that has enormous weight in public opinion. So the United States, interestingly, adopted and signed the comprehensive test ban that we won't test, actually blow up weapons, and make them to test them. But it's never been ratified in the Senate, yet we still stick to it. Like landmines, you say, we've never even signed that, but we still don't put landmines out to our knowledge anymore. And so this creates moral pressure where the rest of the world, who feels under pressure to have these, can say, oh, these are illegal now, you shouldn't have these. And that changes the conversation in a really positive way. When you talk about moral pressure, is that one of the things that we can do? People who, the ordinary people, can we put, how can we act in all of this, in this great tumult? Well, just changing the consciousness of saying the chemical weapons, for example, my dad spent his entire life at Edgewood Arsenal, the Army's chemical warfare manufacturing and research plant. In his mind, those were still reasonable ways to help his country stay safe. Now everybody's horrified by those. When Syria may have used them, we're not even sure, but there were some chemicals used, whether it was intentional or not, it's up in the air. But even the thought of them using it, the whole world instantly Russians had no way. The Russians came in. Our enemies, in that conflict, came in and said, we'll make sure they're not used. And to a large extent they did. So having the illegal change is the conversation for everybody. It puts moral pressure on the government, the people that say, I want money for nuclear weapons, but they're illegal, you can say. That cultural change is everything. Because ultimately what people believe is what they'll support and not support and vote for and not vote for. And right now, nuclear weapons, we still have this schizophrenia. We know they're terrible, but most people think that somehow they're keeping us safe. They spend enough time looking at them, almost everybody agrees. No, they're not keeping us safe. They're too big a risk. And Dr. Rory, you're talking about changing a culture. And I know that in your own life, you do that. Tell us something about what your work is at St. Michael's with your teacher and also in your practice as a physician. My career was mostly in the emergency room, where I spent 30 years fixing people up for what they do to each other and themselves. And I'm just at a point in life now where I'd like to help people not think that they have to hurt each other to create the kind of world and safety everybody longs for. And how do you do that? I study conflict. I study what is it that creates conflict? How can we take conflict from being destructive to make it constructive? Conflict's a good thing. We probably need more of it rather than less, but we need to make it in a way that conflict becomes, okay, you disagree with me. That means you have some idea, some piece of the truth that I can learn from and work it out in such a way that we both benefit rather than we destroy each other. So you teach conflict resolution? I teach courses on nonviolent action and nonviolent communication. So nonviolent communication is what you, is a way you can talk, a language you can use that makes it less threatening to each other and makes connection more easy. And nonviolent action is what you do with people who won't communicate with you when somebody threatens you. And my students right now are writing their research papers on different conflicts around the world, mostly on North Korea. What can we do to reduce the risk from a conflict with North Korea? And the premise is they see how violence has been used to terrible effect back in the 50s with a war that hasn't ended in Korea. And now the threat of yet a new war, this time maybe with nuclear weapons. And they have to count the costs of that, the expense of those weapons, the potential loss of life and the actual loss of life in the 50s, which is maybe four or five million people, much larger than I knew before my students taught me. And then the environmental costs. And of course the cost to us spiritually and morally, when we say we're gonna incinerate, when the president says we're gonna totally destroy North Korea, that's 26 million human beings. What does it do to us as a people to say, okay, well they have to die, keep us safe. We'll kill 26 million. I think that does something to our souls. Dr. R, you bring up the North Korean thing, and I just saw in the news that a young man who had walked across into North Korea was just found and was rescued from prison in North Korea. He was a young man who was motivated by a faith that he could speak to the North Koreans and convert them to peace. And he was an African-American man. He was then through former president Jimmy Carter, he was brought back to the United States. But he just died here in the United States only this past weekend. And he was by suicide somewhere in California. And I looked up his story and his favorite song which he was teaching to the South Koreans who he was teaching English to was, you were born to be loved. You were born to be loved. And he went over there with that message but it was like without the power of the rational message that you have for us. And for your students and viewers, let's open up to Dr. Rohrer and understand that there is something that we can do. Of course. We have a lot of confusion in our society about what love means. Everybody likes mercy and justice and love but we're taught to believe that bad guys are just so evil and bad that they don't understand anything but the language of violence. And history shows that's just not true. More dictators have been overthrown by nonviolent methods than by violent methods. Oh. And then the sense of empowerment that you give us and your students is that we actually can do something that what, it doesn't just happen out there. We're not bystanders in this whole thing. No, I think we're educated to be bystanders. And unfortunately by the state for sure, just give us your tax dollars and your sons and we'll save you from whatever the boogeyman of that decade is. And the churches sadly I think give a message that's sometimes similar that you just obey all our rules and we'll get you to heaven. And that unfortunately is both the state and the church in a position of power where they can abuse people and get them to do things that ordinary human beings otherwise would not do. And I think claiming our own power as we're all born with to live full and wonderful lives is something we're all capable of. Well, we have a lot of good mentors for that. The Gandhi's of the world, the Martin Luther King's and Mother Teresa's all say. And you don't have to be sately to do this. Ordinary people, very capable. All those great people said, this is not for just saints, this is for everybody. Jesus himself said that. It's fun. It's fun to know the truth. And actually the most exciting thing I've ever seen. It's fun to know the truth. It's fun to know the truth. Yes. It's sometimes costly because you won't be able to play the game that the powers that be want you to play to serve them. So it can be costly but once you give up the need to depend on them, the system for everything and find the worth in yourself, then you become actually much more powerful to create the world you want rather than reluctantly helping somebody else create the world they want to your detriment. Dr. Rower, you're going to give on screen some websites that people can connect to. Yes. And to continue this. Yes. If people are interested in doing something about the threat of nuclear war and the use of nuclear weapons by terrorists, accidents, or intentional politicians, I would recommend that you connect with one of a good number of groups out there, but the ones I recommend are the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons, which is just ICAN, I-C-A-N-W, dot, O-R-G. Physicians for Social Responsibility, PSR, dot, O-R-G. Or the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, which is wagingpeace.org. They all send out newsletters, listservs that will be reminders to you. Oh yeah, this week I probably ought to do something about nuclear weapons. And they'll just tell you, call your senator's office about this or that. So politics, of course, is part of it. Lobbying is important. And probably the most important thing now is education. As in my experience back then and now shows that once people hear this stuff, they're willing to change. So not many people are hearing it. So get it into the media, invite speakers, PSR. All these groups I mentioned have speakers bureaus that'd be happy to send one somebody to talk to your group. Insist that movies get shown about it. What's really missing, and I get in a community here in Burlington, is the lack of public debate. I'm amazed that University of Vermont or St. Michael's or somebody hasn't had a major debate on what we should do about North Korea. Or what is it, do we want North Korea to be threatened with nuclear weapons or don't we? Is that good strategy or not? Nobody's even talking about it. That would be a tremendous step in the right direction. Well, let it be that we will continue this conversation. You will come back to this, I hope. I'd be happy to. And maybe with a student. And we can have, we can begin the debate here. Good idea, Margaret. Thank you so much, Dr. Rohrer, for joining us today and continuing your wonderful waging piece against the nuclear threat. Thank you so much, Dr. Rohrer. Thank you, viewers. Till next time.