If You Love This Planet, Dr. Helen Caldicott

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Chris Hedges

This week’s program was first aired on August 9.
Dr. Caldicott talks with American journalist, author, and war correspondent Chris Hedges about military culture and the consequences of combat. Hedges, a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute, specializes in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies, and his most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009). He is also the author of War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, What Every Person Should Know About War, and When Atheism Becomes Religion: America’s New Fundamentalists. In 2002, Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He also received in 2002 the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently writes a weekly column for Truthdig.com. Read his latest columns and his earlier work here. Particularly relevant to this program is Hedges’s article, The Pictures of War You are Not Supposed to See. (more…)

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Phil Radford (Greenpeace image)

This week, we hear a repeat of Dr. Caldicott’s May 31 program featuring her interview with Phil Radford, the Executive Director of Greenpeace USA. Radford and
Dr. Caldicott discuss the state of environmental activism and many other issues. For six years, Radford was Greenpeace USA’s Grassroots Director. During that time, he created a $9 million Grassroots Program which greatly expanded Greenpeace USA’s on-line, grass-roots and student organizing and training, as well as street and door-to-door canvassing. Recent corporate targets of Greenpeace campaigns include Kimberly-Clark, a major tree cutter, and ExxonMobil, a major polluter and global-warming denier. Greenpeace is largely sustained by hundreds of thousands of small monthly donations. Radford earned a Bachelor degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1998, and holds a certificate in Non-profit Management from Georgetown University.

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Storm van Leeuwen (WISE)

This week, Dr. Caldicott interviews two guests. First, she
chats with Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen, one of the international group of expert reviewers of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (”IPCC”). van Leeuwen is a senior scientist at Ceedata Consultancy in the Netherlands. In this conversation, van Leeuwen discusses the CO2 output of nuclear power production. Read the report by van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, Nuclear Power: The Energy Balance.

Sen. Scott Ludlam

In the second segment of the program,
Dr. Caldicott speaks with Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlam about the push for a nuclear waste depository in central Australia. Listen to Dr. Caldicott’s earlier conversation with Sen. Ludlam, recorded in August 2009. Read a November 11 media release by Sen. Ludlam, Greens condemn deal to sell uranium to Russia. Read the June 19 antinuclear.net news item, Senator Scott Ludlam raises nuclear problems in Senate Estimates. Longer show description to follow.

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Greg Mello

Greg Mello, this week’s guest, is the Executive Director of the Los Alamos Study Group, based in New Mexico. The Study Group, which Mello co-founded in 1989, is a non-profit organization for the purposes of policy analysis and education regarding nuclear weapons policies and institutions, particularly Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other energy and environmental issues. Dr. Caldicott first interviewed Mello in May. In this second conversation, they dig deeper into the new generation of bombs under development at U.S. nuclear weapons labs. They also cover Mello’s role advising government and sounding the alarm to educate journalists, scholars, and citizens. As background, read the October 8 blog item It’s Not Nuclear Weapons That Need “Modernization,” But New START and the Study Group’s October 1 press release Huge “emergency” funding increase for nuke labs today. Check out Massive giveaways to weapons manufacturers that will occur after the Senate ratifies the New START to hear a November 4 interview with another Study Group expert, Darwin BondGraham. Read BondGraham’s Oct 29 article START: Arms Affirmation Treaty. Longer show description to follow.

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Dr. Vladimir Romanovsky

This week, Dr. Caldicott discusses the relationship between permafrost and climate with Dr. Vladimir E. Romanovsky, a Professor in Geophysics at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where he heads
up the Geophysical Institute Permafrost Laboratory. Dr. Romanovsky’s research specialty is permafrost geophysics, with particular emphasis on the ground thermal regime, active layer and permafrost processes, and the relationships between permafrost, hydrology, biota and climate. In the interview,
Dr. Caldicott mentions former Soviet colonel Valery Yarynich. Col. Yarynich, Bruce Blair of the World Security Institute and others co-authored the article Smaller and Safer: A New Plan for Nuclear Postures, in the September/October 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs. As background on permafrost, read the September 20, 2010 article Artic Ice
in Death Spiral. Also see the September 7, 2006 article Scientists Find
New Global Warming ‘Time Bomb’ . Longer show description to follow.