 grateful to the Tecana alum for hosting this event. And thank you all for joining us today. We're moved to plan this event because of concerns over the rising threat of nuclear war, which is such a huge and scary issue that many of us can't even discuss it. Today, Dr. Helfen will introduce us to Back from the Brink and their brochures on the back table and flyers about Back from the Brink. It's a national campaign to prevent nuclear war. And Dr. Helfen will explain how we can expand the base of support for it. Our goal is that Dr. Helfen's talk will inspire us to take action and make the world safer than it currently is. The program today will be as follows. Dr. Helfen's presentation will be about a half an hour, followed by 15 minutes for small groups sharing among ourselves. Then Dr. Helfen will take a half hour question and answer period. In conclusion, Dr. Helfen will share information on the role we can each take in preventing nuclear war. People will leave these few hours armed with knowledge and inspired to act. As we conclude, please do join us for light refreshments and an opportunity to write postcards at the back of the hall. Now I have the honor of introducing Dr. Helfen. Dr. Ira Helfen is a member of the International Steering Committee of ICANN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which was the recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. He is also co-president of IPPNW, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which was the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. And he is also co-founder and past president of the Decisions for Social Responsibility. Ira has published on the medical consequences of nuclear war in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the New World Medical Journal. He's also a frequent contributor to CNN, working pronounces things better than I do. He's lectured widely on the danger of nuclear war, speaking throughout the world, including India, China, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Israel, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and throughout the United States and Europe. He also addressed a special session of the UN General Assembly in September 2015, 12, 2015. While doing all of this, Dr. Helfin has continued practicing as a physician and currently is an internist and urgent care physician at Family Care Medical Center in Springfield. Dr. Helfin lives in Leeds, and we're fortunate to have him in our community. Ira? Thank you all for coming today. I know that you know this is not going to be an easy session. I appreciate it. You lift the mic. I can't hear you. I can't hear you guys. I can't hear you guys. OK. Sorry. We have the mic for me because I have such a soft voice. Is that better now? OK. I just want to, again, thank you all for coming. I know that you understand this is not going to be an easy session that we're going to be going through. We're going to be talking about some very difficult things, and I appreciate your willingness to do this. The Holocaust Museum in Washington has got a bunch of really overwhelming, powerful exhibits to get it, which we talk about in the show for us. They're the horrors of the camps and ghettos. They're something that people who went through the Holocaust. But of all the exhibits there, the one that I find most troubling in many ways is a hallway that leads between two of the other exhibits, which is lined on both sides with photographs. All of them, like snapshots, taken from one little palette forward. And they're pictures taken in 1937, 1938, 1939, before the war of everyday life in this community. They're pictures of bar mitzvahs, of weddings, of graduations. Closer? Yes. Sorry. Just all kinds of everyday occasions. People in beer gardens, people playing sports, people just sitting with friends in cafes. And the thing about this exhibit is, looking at it, we all know what happened to these people. And they, the danger they were in, they knew what was going on next door in Germany. But they couldn't imagine what was going to happen to their world. And the thing that I find so terrifying about this exhibit is my fear that we are those people. On a day like this, gorgeous whole thing, literally, we cannot imagine that all of this could be destroyed. But the fact of the matter is, it can be, and it will be, if we don't do something to prevent nuclear war. Back in the 1980s, we all understood this. So I look around this room, I think almost everybody here was part of that political milieu, somewhere not the most were. We understood that nuclear war was a real possibility. And that if it happened, it was going to destroy the world. And we took action. And it's very important that we did that, both for what it accomplished then and for the inspiration I think it should give to us now. Millions of people in the United States, in Russia, in Europe, took to the streets. They took to the halls of Congress and other government centers. And they forced an end to the Cold War arms race. At that point in the 1980s, there were like 60,000 nuclear warheads in the world. And the US and the Soviet Union were each building about 3,000 war every year. We were racing towards nuclear war. The Reagan administration came into office, pledged to developing the ability to fight and win a nuclear war in Europe. And that was its policy. And within three years of this taking office, the public campaign that we launched here in Western Massachusetts, the Frees campaign, had brought about a complete change in US nuclear policy. In the State of the Union address in January of 1984, Ronald Reagan said, ''Nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.'' And this was such a complete reversal of the policies that had brought him to office that we mostly missed it at the time. We didn't think it was real. We thought it was just campaigning rather than the 84 presidential election. But it turns out it really was a change in part on this man's part. An electric change in his administration. We had met with Reagan. We had met with Gorbachev and the Soviet Union. We meeting people in IPW. I didn't get in person to be involved with you through those meetings. And as a result of those meetings, it was a result of the public pressure that we were creating and the cultural upswilling that the movies, the books that were being written urging people to take action and describing what was going to happen if there were nuclear war. As a result of all of that, we were able to fundamentally change this nuclear policy and Soviet nuclear policy and I believe that we saved the world. Unfortunately, when the Cold War ended, we all began to act as though this danger had gone away. And the problem is, the danger hasn't gone away. Our attention to it has. There are still in the world 15,000 nuclear warheads which is more than enough to destroy the world many, many times over. And we are in the opinion of people like former Secretary of Defense William Perry closer to nuclear war today than we have ever been, including at the worst moments of the Cold War. And so it is important for us to understand both the evidence of this threat and the enormity of this threat. What's going to happen if these weapons are used? And I want to spend a little bit of time today, not a lot, but a little bit, talking to you about what's going to happen if there is a nuclear war. I suspect that many of you know what I'm going to be talking about. But I also suspect that it won't hurt any of us to be reminded because we all do a pretty good job of pushing this information out of our minds for the obvious reason that it's really no pleasure to think about it. But as we learned in the 80s, if we don't think about it, we won't act on it. And if we don't act on it, nothing's going to change and very bad things are going to happen. So let me begin by talking first about, the increased threat that we're facing. Why the threat of nuclear war is great now that it was even five or six years ago. I can identify at least seven reasons why the danger is greater. Four of them relate to geopolitical conflicts and three of them are other sorts of factors that we need to take into consideration. On the geopolitical side, the first and most important is the deterioration of relations between the United States and Russia, which are currently at the worst point they've been in 25 years, at least, since the end of the Cold War. We were told throughout this period we did not need to worry about nuclear war between the United States and Russia. They were no longer enemies. They were kind of friends and things were fine. As recently as the summer of 2014, I remember a meeting that I had at the State Department with Rose Godemuller, who was then the Undersecretary of State for nuclear weapons related issues. And she told me the US doesn't even be able to account the possibility of nuclear war with Russia. It's just not something we think about. We only concern ourselves with terrorists in rogue states. Well, I think that approach was wrong then. But then, since then, have shown it's clearly wrong now with Syria and Ukraine and other issues. The possibility of conflict between the United States and Russia is real. It's growing. And if it happens, there's a very good chance that this will be a nuclear conflict. The second geopolitical area of concern is US-China relations. They're the worst they've been in 40 years. During the last decade of the Cold War, China was essentially honoring number of data, a full partner in the effort to contain Soviet Union. And the US had a very, very positive relationship to develop very quickly after the early period of hostility between the United States and China. But it blossomed very quickly into a real partnership and friendship. That's not true anymore. We are engaged in a very difficult tense relationship with China for supremacy in East Asia. There are huge trade issues between us. And there's a military component to this conflict. The US and China, naval forces, play chicken on a regular basis in the South China Sea. And it is an extremely dangerous situation which could lead, probably inadvertently in this case, to conflict, which could very rapidly escalate to nuclear conflict. That's the second geopolitical area. The third is the one that I think has gotten the most attention over the last year and that's the situation in Korea. And we need to understand fully how close we came to war earlier this year. We truly dodged a bullet. And I think the most important thing to understand is that that bullet hasn't landed yet. It's still a ricocheting around and we don't know what's going to be the ultimate outcome of this situation. For the moment, Trump is having a love fest with his fellow dictator in North Korea. But we're not sure how long this is going to last. At some point it's going to become undeniable that the North Koreans are not fulfilling their part of the bargain that they're not disarming their nuclear arsenal. And Trump can respond in one of two ways. He can pretend that that's not true. He can just lie and say that he did score the greatest political diplomatic victory in history that nobody else could possibly have done. Or he can get really angry, which he does also. And a verdict of fiery fury mode and we could be right back in the kind of standoff that we were in at the beginning of the year. So it's still a very dangerous situation in the Korea's. The fourth geopolitical area, I think it's every bit as dangerous and it gets almost no attention in the United States. And that's the situation in South Asia. India and Pakistan fight almost every day their war in Kashmir. It's low level hostility, a few border shells, a few artillery rounds, some rifle shells, a couple of people killing on either side of the border. No one who follows events in South Asia closely would be surprised if that fighting escalated into a larger conflict. No one would be surprised if there were another major terrorist attack in India like the one at the Indian parliament or at the hotel complex in Mumbai. Both of which brought these two countries to the brink of war. And there are other ways as well that we can imagine the very tense situation between these countries escalating into a nuclear conflict. So those are the four geopolitical areas that we're working on. There may be a fifth brewing totally necessarily with the United States in Iran. We did a good job diffusing that situation a few years ago under the Obama administration and the Trump administration has done everything for its power to ignite that crisis. In addition to these geopolitical areas, there are at least three of the circumstances which contribute to the increased danger. First is climate change, something which we don't want to think about as a direct relationship to nuclear war. The US and the other nuclear weapons states all tell us that it is their hope to eventually get rid of their nuclear weapons. But the time isn't right. We have to wait for the future when things are safer and that we can do it. The problem is the world isn't getting safer. As climate change progresses, as large areas of the world become less able to support their population, conflict is going to become more likely, not less likely. And as this process progresses, if nuclear weapons are still on the table, the chance they're going to be used is increasing. The second of these other non-geopolitical factors is the danger of cyberterrorism. We used to think that the worst thing that could happen with regards to terrorists and nuclear weapons was that a terrorist group could get hold of one of these and blow up a city, New York, or Tel Aviv, or Moscow, Bombay, perhaps. What we now understand is that the real danger is that terrorists could carry out a cyber attack and hack into the command and control systems of the United States or Russia or one of the other nuclear powers and either directly cause the launch of nuclear weapons or perhaps more likely create a false alarm so that the country being hacked believes that it's under actual missile attack from one of its enemies and launches its weapons in response. This is a nightmare. We spend an enormous amount of money on cybersecurity, but despite that, the Pentagon computer systems get hacked into many, many times every day, and people who are responsible for this are terrified that it's just a matter of time before somebody cracks all the way in to the command systems for our nuclear weapons. The final consideration that's making nuclear war more dangerous is the Trump presidency. And I always feel a little bit strange talking about this because I do not mean this as a partisan comment. This is not my assessment. This is the assessment of the security experts in his own party. During the 2016 presidential election, nearly 100 Republican security, national security experts famously issued their statement saying that Donald Trump lacked the knowledge, the temperament, and the judgment to be in command of the nuclear arsenal. Since then, his first secretary of state has reported to have called him a moron with regard to his understanding of nuclear weapons. Others in the White House have referred to him as an idiot or a thin grater. It's kind of insulting to the graders. This is an extraordinary situation. The US has maintained for decades that it would be intolerable for even a single nuclear weapon to get into what we call the wrong hands by which we meant a terrorist group or a rogue state. But we have turned 6,800 of these weapons over to the command of Donald Trump, who I think is manifestly unqualified to be in command of the nuclear arsenal. And we have to recognize the enormous danger we have created with this situation. As long as he's present, this additional factor needs to be taken into account. So for all of these reasons, we have to accept that the use of nuclear weapons, which we fought for a period of time after the Cold War was a problem we did not need to worry about anymore, the use of nuclear weapons remains a real and imminent threat and a growing threat. Let's talk a little bit about what will happen if these weapons aren't used. And I want to start by talking about the limited nuclear war. This is one of the, and in terms of our understanding of nuclear weapons, this is relatively new information. During the 80s, we assume that it would take a large war between the United States and the Soviet Union to prevent the entire planet. What we have discovered in the last decade is that even a much more limited nuclear war involving a tiny fraction of the world's nuclear weapons and a war that could take place between the smaller nuclear powers like India and Pakistan, would be disastrous not only for the countries that fought this war, but for the whole planet. The studies that have been done all of the day in particular scenario in which India and Pakistan go to war and use 50 corrosion-sized bombs each on urban targets in the other country. At the time that the first study was published, it was roundly criticized for creating a worst, worst, worst case scenario that was unrealistic. This wouldn't happen. We now understand that India and Pakistan have not 50 nuclear warheads each, but 130 nuclear warheads each. And many of them are three to 10 times more powerful than the corrosion bomb. So this scenario that I'm going to describe to you in a minute is actually probably a significant under arrest in the world happening if India and Pakistan do go to war. But it's bad enough. 100 corrosion-sized bombs detonated over urban targets in these two countries killed 20 million people in the first week. But the explosions, the fires, from the immediate radiation effects to prevent and respect it during all the world war two about 50 million people died over the course of eight years over the entire globe. This is going to be 20 million people, maybe 30 million people in one small corner of the globe in the course of the week. But the global effects are even more catastrophic. These weapons put about five and a half to six and a half million tons of sand into the upper atmosphere, blocking out the sun, cooling the planet, drying the planet, shortening the growing season. And as a result of this worldwide climate disruption, food production throughout the world also declines because of these adverse conditions. And as a result of that, there's a worldwide famine, which we have estimated could put up to two billion with the being two billion people at risk of starvation. The death of two million people over the course of the decade would not be the extinction of our species. It would be the end of our modern civilization. No civilization in history has ever been stood a shine of this magnitude. And there is no reason to assume that the very fragile interconnected economic system, which we all depend on, would survive a shine of this magnitude. We all saw what the housing bubble did to the world economy in 2008. We're talking about disruption in its borders and borders and borders of magnitude larger. And our current economic system would collapse under this strain. That's a limited nuclear war. A large scale nuclear war, as we must understand, is still possible. It would be far worse. I want to describe this briefly, just to describe to you what happens in a single city. Most of us have images in our minds, someplace in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the experience there, the destruction of those two cities is a very important warning of what nuclear weapons can do. But the most important thing we need to understand about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that they do not begin to compare us for what a modern nuclear war would look like. A large city like Boston would not be targeted with one Hiroshima-sized bomb. It would be targeted with something like 10 to 15 to maybe 20 bombs, each of which are 30 to 50 times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb. And these weapons would create a fireball reaching out to two miles in every direction from the center of the attack. Four miles across. In this area, the temperatures would rise to 20 million degrees, which is hotter than the surface of the sun, and everything would be vaporized. The buildings, the trees, the people, the upper level of the Earth itself would disappear. To a distance of six miles in every direction, the heat would be so intense that automobiles would melt. And to a distance of 16 miles in every direction, the heat would be so intense still that everything flammable would burn. Cloth, plastic, paper, wood, gas, and heating oil, it would all ignite. Hundreds of thousands of fires which over the next half hour would coalesce into a firestorm. 32 miles across covered over 800 square miles. Within this entire area, the temperature would rise to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. All of the oxygen would be consumed and every living thing would die. In the case of Boston, four or five million people. In the case of New York, 12 to 15 million people. And if this were part of a war between the United States and Russia, every major city in the United States and in Russia would be destroyed in this way. And if NATO were drawn into the conflict, the same thing would happen to most of the cities in Canada and New York. But again, these direct local effects, as horrendous as they are, are only part of the story. A limited war in South Asia was five million tons of silver in the upper atmosphere. A war between the United States and Russia today was 150 million tons of silver in the upper atmosphere. And that drops temperatures across the planet, an average of 14 degrees Fahrenheit. In the interior regions of North America and Eurasia, the temperatures dropped 45 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. We have not seen conditions on this planet, that cold, in 18,000 years, since the coldest moment of the last Ice Age, so what we essentially would do with this war would be to create, in a matter of days, a new man-made nuclear Ice Age. Under these conditions, all of the ecosystems which were involved since the end of the last naturally occurring Ice Age would collapse. Food production across the entire planet would stop. And the vast majority of the human race would start to die. Under these conditions, it is possible that we would become extinct as a species. It is important for us to understand that this is not just some nightmare scenario. This is the danger which we face every day that these weapons continue to exist. If not by design, then by accident, they may be used. We know that at least six occasions during the nuclear weapons era, and there are probably others that are still classified, but we know that these six occasions when either Moscow or Washington began preparations to launch the nuclear weapons to the state of belief that they were under attack on the other side. Now, we've been told throughout the nuclear weapons era that nuclear weapons deterred their use. Now, we don't have to worry about them because no one would ever use them. But deterrence has already failed at these six times. The decision has been made to abandon this policy and to launch the weapons. And on each of these occasions, we were seeing at the last minute when it became clear that the side that was contemplating nuclear war was not under attack by its enemies. Robert McNamara said at this situation, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. And we need to understand that. We've been phenomenally looking, and our luck is not going to hold out forever. Sooner or later, our luck will run out. And these weapons will be used if we don't take action. And that's the really important point that I need to make today. What I have just described is the future that will take place if these weapons are not eliminated. But it is not the future that must be. Nuclear weapons are not like some asteroid coming out of space. They're not a force of nature. They're not an act of God. We built these with our own hands. We know how to take them apart. We already dismantled more than 50,000 of them. We simply have not made the decision to eliminate the ones that are left. And that's what we need to do. This is the overriding issue of our era. And we need to understand that. There are many critical issues that we all have to deal with. Susan talked about all of the different things that you could allow us trying to work on. And all of these are important issues that demand our attention. But we have to understand that if we do not prevent nuclear war, that all the good work that we do on everything else will be forgot. This is the essential thing which we must do. And there's every reason to believe that we can. It's a huge task. It's kind of intimidating. But we've already done this once. We faced, you know, 60,000 nuclear warheads in a lot of the region in 1981. And we all put our shoulders to the wheel. And we got rid of the Cold War arms race. We stopped it. We reversed it. We got rid of all these nuclear weapons. We know that this can be done. In recent times, a couple of very inspiring stories. One is the work that IPPNW did through ICANN. In 2007, international decisions with prevention of nuclear war stired worldwide campaigning called the International Campaign to Emolish Nuclear Weapons with the explicit goal of securing passage of a treaty that would make nuclear weapons illegal. Like chemical weapons, biological weapons are illegal in the international world. In just 10 years, July 7, 2017, we secured one of the United Nations of 122.1, one extension, adopting the treaty and the prohibition of nuclear weapons. The ratification process for this treaty is now underway. And when 50 countries have ratified the treaty, it will become wall. This is incredible accomplishment of the international community. Brought about largely by the work of civil society, working with some governments who were quite keyed into the importance of doing these work. But it was the role of civil society who really decides it. And interestingly, when Ambassador Lee White, the ambassador from Costa Rica, who chaired the negotiating session at the UN, was asked at a function in Washington last fall, why did this happen? Why did the governments of the world finally take this action? She had one sense of response. Civil society taught the governments of the world the medical consequences of nuclear war. Period, full stop. It's kind of shocking to think that the governments of the world needed to be taught this. They didn't know the medical consequences of nuclear war are, but they don't. And the vast majority of the population doesn't either anymore. And so that's really the challenge before us. And to deal with that, here in the States, we have launched this campaign called Back from the Brink. It started jointly, well, it actually started here in Western Massachusetts, as opposed to what we had in September of last year, 2017, about the climate change was increasing the danger of nuclear war. And a group of us at a workshop there, sort of inspired by ICANN and inspired by the Frees, came up with a plan for this campaign, which was launched nationally by PSR, the Uniconsert Scientist, Soba Mekai, the Buddhist organization. The campaign is model of the Frees. The central strategy is that you could get enough people around the country to endorse a different nuclear policy, but what we have now will create a national consensus to change the rest of the policy. And so we put together a very simple statement of what US nuclear policy should be. It's five points. The most important, which is the fifth, it's a call in the United States to enter into negotiations with the other nuclear armed countries for an agreement that is forcible, verifiable, time-bound, for eliminating the rest of their RCS. And this is something US has to say, is our goal, but it's never seriously pursued. So that's the most important point back from the brink. Call up the US to adopt this strategy. We also have four interim steps that we ask the US to do as these negotiations progress. First, we ask the US to renounce the first use of nuclear weapons. The US has refused, historically, to rule out using nuclear weapons, even against non-nuclear weapons states. We want that to change. Secondly, we ask the United States to take its nuclear weapons off air to your alert. Currently, they can be launched in 15 minutes. This is extremely dangerous. It makes us vulnerable to cyber-terrorism. It increases the chance of a bad decision being made in a moment of crisis. This is going to blow up the world in a way today. We don't need to do it in 15 minutes. We want them off air to your alert. Third, we ask that the United States change law to end the unchecked authority of the President of the United States to launch nuclear war. As it stands now, Donald Trump or anybody else in that office can, on his or potentially the future, her initiative, simply say, I'm going to start a nuclear war and give the order. And it does not require anybody else to sign the order. This is an extraordinarily dangerous situation. The framers of the Constitution more than 200 years ago said that only, you know, only Congress should be able to declare war. We've given one person the ability to destroy the planet, that to change. And fourth, we call the United States to abandon its current plan to spend $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years, modernizing and enhancing every aspect of the nuclear arsenal. So that's the five point program. And we are taking this program to communities all around the country, to faith groups, to labor unions, to professional associations, to civic groups, to town meetings, to city councils, to state legislatures, trying to get them to endorse this in platform. And it is our hope and our belief that as happened with the Frees in the 1980s, if enough groups endorse this, essentially that becomes the national consensus that this is what our policy should be. And we are then in a position, as we do this, to put pressure on our leaders in government to change U.S. policy accordingly. Our group here in Western Massachusetts has gotten a number of towns and a number of faith communities to sign onto this, also some civic groups. We want to expand this campaign very, very rapidly here in Western Massachusetts. Nationally, we've had some tremendous successes over the last few months. The U.S. Conference of Mayors voted unanimously, unanimously, to endorse back in the break. 30% of those Mayors are Republicans, if I may unanimously put this. The Los Angeles and Baltimore City Council both voted unanimously to adopt back in the break. And the California state legislatures who voted not unanimously but overwhelmingly, both houses, to endorse this policy. We want to build on that momentum and really carry this campaign forward. So I'm going to stop at this point with just a couple of quick closing words and then we'll come back to this campaign and how we can build it in just a little bit. One thing I just want to close what this is. When I make a presentation like this, some of you may not have known this information before, some of you may have known it but forgotten it by calling it back to mind or teaching it the first time. It is putting it in all this responsibility on you because once somebody knows about this, there's a requirement to take action. If you see somebody fall down on the street, you can't just step over them. If you know your whole planet is at risk, you can't just go on with your business and not do something about it. And there is now, for all of us who know this information, a responsibility to take action. And that is a burden. And it's going to be with us until we agree with these requirements. But I really do want to emphasize that I think this is also somebody's gift that I'm offering to all today. Every one of us wants to do something good with our life. We living today have been given the opportunity to save the world. So that's what you're going to learn. Repair the world? To save the world. And that's the best thing anybody can ever do in their life. So let's look at this problem in that context from that perspective. And let's all make a pledge to ourselves that we are going to do what it takes. No one is going to do this alone. But if each one of us does that part of the job which is ours to do, we're going to be successful. And we're going to be able to look in the mirror and say, I stay in the world. And that's pretty good. Thanks.