Synopses & Reviews
This revised edition includes a new introduction that outlines the costs of operation Iraqi Freedom, details the companies profiting from the war and subsequent reconstruction, and chronicles the rampant conflicts of interest among members of the Bush administration who also have a financial stake in weapons manufacturing. After eight printings in the original edition, The New Nuclear Danger remains a singularly persuasive antidote to war and its horrific costs.
Review
"A meticulous, urgent, and shocking report on the current state and true nature of America’s nuclear weapons program. . . . Chilling. . . . Harrowing. . . . Apocalyptic. . . . The time to take Caldicott’s measured and wise words to heart is now." —
Booklist"Dr. Helen Caldicott has the rare ability to combine science with passion, logic with love, and urgency with humor. . . . At the dark dawn of another war without end, it is once again time to listen up as she sounds the global alarm." —Naomi Klein
"Helen Caldicott has been my inspiration to speak out." —Meryl Streep
Description
The world-renowned antinuclear activist's argument for a response to terrorism based on the country's best interests rather than weapons manufacturers' bottom line. On September 18, one week after the World Trade disaster, Lockheed Martin, the country's leading manufacturer of conventional weaponry, nuclear delivery systems, and national missile defense, took a full page ad in the New York Times echoing JFK's famous call to "pay any price....to assure the survival and the success of liberty." The ad offered an unusually public display of what is typically the invisible hand and muscle of the arms industry guiding American sentiment and government. In her uncannily timely new book, Dr. Helen Caldicott looks at the indebtedness of the Bush Administration to the arms industry and warns of the incredible dangers inherent in allowing weapons manufacturers to dictate foreign policy. Recounting the history of government collusion with industry, Caldicott shows how the merging of weapons firms in the 1980s created hugely powerful "death merchants," including Lockheed and others, ready to lobby politicians and manipulate public opinion on behalf of their corporate interests. Now, with unprecedented acts of terrorism fueling the American public's willingness to grant its government broad power to wage war, the constant pressure from weapons makers to use military force and by extension, buy more of their weaponsposes the very real threat of nuclear war. Enumerating, as a physician, the medical consequences of such a war, Caldicott demonstrates conclusively that the notion of nuclear survival is a complete fantasy, and that nuclear victory is an oxymoron. In the same way that a generation embraced Caldicott's hugely influential Nuclear Madness and Missile Envy, The New Nuclear Danger stands to educate, alert, and mobilize millions of young people and concerned citizens, who must understand the planetary threat posed by overly-aggressive nuclear scientific establishments and weapons industries in a volatile world.
About the Author
The world’s leading spokesperson for the antinuclear movement, Dr. Helen Caldicott is the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, and the 2003 winner of the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. Both the Smithsonian Institute and Ladies’ Home Journal have named her one of the Most Influential Women of the Twentieth Century. In 2001 she founded the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, which later became Beyond Nuclear, in Washington, D.C. The author of The New Nuclear Danger, War in Heaven (with Craig Eisendrath), Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, and Loving This Planet and the editor of Crisis Without End (all published by The New Press), she is currently president of the Helen Caldicott Foundation/NuclearFreePlanet.org. She divides her time between Australia and the United States.