The Hundredth Monkey/2 Then It Happened
By that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes before eating them.
The added energy of this hundredth monkey somehow created an ideological breakthrough!
But notice.
A most surprising thing observed by these scientists was that the habit of washing sweet potatoes then jumped over the sea —
Colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys at Takasakiyama began washing their sweet potatoes!*
(*Lifetide by Lyall Watson, pp. 147-148. Bantam Books 1980. This book gives other fascinating details.)
Thus, when a certain critical number achieves an awareness, this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind.
Although the exact number may very, the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon means that when only a limited number of people know of a new way, it may remain the consciousness property of these people.
But there is a point at which if only one more person tunes-in to a new awareness, a field is strengthened so that this awareness is picked up by almost everyone!
Your awareness is needed in saving the world from nuclear war.
You may be the "Hundredth Monkey" . . . .
You may furnish the added consciousness energy to create the shared awareness of the urgent necessity to rapidly achieve a nuclear-free world.
"If I knew then what I know now, I never would have helped to develop the bomb," spoke George Kistiakowsky, an advisor to President Eisenhower who worked on the Manhattan Project.
Let's look at the almost incredible nuclear monster we have created in the last forty years on planet Earth . . . .
Herbert Scoville, Jr., former deputy for research of the Central Intelligence Agency warns,
The unfortunate situation is that today we are moving—sliding downhill—toward the probability or the likelihood that a nuclear conflict will actually break out—and that somebody will use one of these nuclear weapons in a conflict or perhaps even by accident.
The only result of a substantial nuclear exchange would be a hollow victory in which the "winners' would be no better off than the losers.
An all-out nuclear war could make our planet uninhabitable for a million years!
A nuclear war can end the way we live.
It cannot be won — it can only be lost.
Winning equals losing.
The word "war" is too mild to apply to this nuclear craziness.
Carl Sagan at the Conference on the Long-Term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War stated:
We have an excellent chance that if Nation A attacks Nation B with an effective first strike, counter-force only, then Nation A has thereby committed suicide, even if Nation B has not lifted a finger to retaliate.*
(*The Cold and the Dark by Paul R. Ehrlich, Carl Sagan, Donald Kennedy, Walter Orr Roberts, p. 33. W. W. Norton and Co., 1984.)
Suppose you and your family are rafting down an unexplored river.
Most of your attention is on steering the raft away from the rocks and keeping it off the banks so that it will not get damaged or stranded.
Several miles downstream unknown to you lies a huge waterfall that will fling you and your family on the rocks below.
It is easy to miss the significance of certain signals that are coming to you.
You have noticed a distant, rumbling background sound. But what does it mean? You can see a mist in the air ahead of you. There's nothing alarming that seems to call for your immediate attention.
And, besides, you are so busy guiding the raft and keeping it off the rocks that you don't want to think or anything else right now.
Maybe the rumbling will go away . . . .
But the distant rumbling is getting louder.
We can ignore it — or we can use our intelligent minds to inform us of the dangers we must avoid.
What are the signs and the scientific data that are so easy for us to ignore — but which are giving us a clear warning of a certain catastrophe that lies ahead if we remain on our present course?*
(*In 1954, actors John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead and producer Dick Powell filmed "The Conqueror" on the sandy dunes outside St. George, Utah. We had previously conducted a number of atomic bomb tests in Nevada about 150 miles away. For three months, the filmmakers were breathing the dust laced with radioactive plutonium fallout. Twenty-five years later John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead and Dick Powell had all died of cancer. Of the "220 people in the cast and crew, ninety-one had contracted cancer by late 1980, and half of the cancer victims had died of the disease." From Killing Our Own by Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, p. 81, Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1982. Also see The Day We Bombed Utah: America's Most Lethal Secret by John G. Fuller, New American Library, 1984. This book documents the way the government has repeatedly lied to us and withheld documents — even in court proceedings under oath.)
In 1970, a pediatrician in Grand Junction, Colorado, noticed an increase in cleft palate, cleft lip and other birth defects.
The homes of these people had been built with waste rock and sand from a uranium refining operation!
The University of Colorado Medical Center obtained federal funds to investigate this.
But these funds were cut off a year later.
Why?
Navajo Indians who went down into uranium mines in Arizona have died — and are right now dying — of lung cancer, previously rare among Navajos.
In a recent study, Dr. Gerald Buker pointed out that the risk factor of lung cancer among Navajo uranium miners increases by at least 85%!
Robert Minogue and Karl Goller of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission jointly wrote on September 11, 1978:
The evidence mounts that, within the range of exposure levels encountered by radiation workers, there is no threshold, i.e., a level which can be assumed as safe in an absolute sense . . . . any amount of radiation has a finite probability of inducing a health effect, e.g., cancer.*
(*Shut Down, p. 72. The Book Publishing Co., 156 Drakes Lane, Summertown, TN 38483. 1979. In the nuclear honeymoon decades of the forties and fifties, the harmful effects of nuclear radiation on human health were underestimated by as much as ten thousand times! Ibid, p. 167.)
Nuclear submarine workers at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, are developing cancer at a rate that is double the expected incidence.
Dr. Helen Caldicott, author of Nuclear Madness, was invited to speak to a meeting of these workers, but only four men appeared.
They told her that the Navy had threatened them with the loss of their jobs if they came to hear her talk.
Are jobs more important than life itself?
In November, 1980, a group of physicians and scientists held a symposium at the University of California in Berkeley. At this symposium Dr. Kosta Tsipis, Professor of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stated,
. . . our earth is surrounded by a thin layer or ozone. Ozone is a particular isotope of oxygen that has the lovely property of absorbing much of the ultraviolet rays of the sun. The ultraviolet rays of the sun are the ones that cause skin burns. When you go to the beach and you get sunburned, that's what does it. In addition, the ultraviolet rays of the sun blind eyes that are exposed to them for any period of time. The very fact that we can exist on this earth—that there is a fauna, animals with eyes on this earth—is based on the existence of the ozone layer that filters out most of the ultraviolet rays of the sun and therefore allows us to survive.
What happens when a nuclear weapon explodes is that a very large number of nitrogen oxides are generated by the radiation that flies out from the explosion. As a matter of fact, a one- megaton weapon will generate 10 molecules of nitrogen oxides. These molecules are lifted up together with the fireball, and reach (for a one-megaton weapon) the altitude of say 50, 60, 70 thousand feet, where the ozone is. At that point, these molecules will start eating up the ozone— literally—taking it away from circulation . . . for long periods of time. It is a very complex photochemical process, but we know that it occurs . . . . The National Academy of Sciences felt quite sure to state that if you have exploded . . . in a very short period of time 50% of the weapons that will be available in the arsenals of the Soviet Union and the United States by 1985, this simultaneous explosion will create enough nitrogen oxides to take out 50 to 70% of the ozone layer above the northern hemisphere and 30 to 40% of the ozone layer in the southern hemisphere, because we assume that all of these explosions will take place in the northern hemisphere . . . .
The latest word out of the scientific laboratories is that a 20% depletion of the ozone layer will allow enough ultraviolet light to come to earth that it will blind all unprotected eyes. Now, we can all wear glasses, but the animals and the birds will not wear glasses, and they will all be blinded and they will all eventually die. And this is the largest-scale ecological catastrophe that one can imagine—that all the fauna on the earth will be blinded and eventually die.
I can think of nothing else that is a more massive ecological dislocation — to use a mild word. The entire ecosystem will collapse. Because if we don't have insects, for example, to pollinate the flowers, we won't have fruit . . . . The whole thing collapses, and that is what will happen, most probably, if only 50% of the weapons in the arsenals of the two superpowers in 1985 were to be exploded within a few days in a nuclear war.
If you're within a few miles of a nuclear detonation, you'll be incinerated on the spot!
And if you survive the blast, what does the future promise?
The silent but deadly radiation, either directly or from fallout, in a dose of 400 rems could kill you within two weeks.
Your hair would fall out, your skin would be covered with large ulcers, you would vomit and experience diarrhea and you would die of infection or massive bleeding as your white blood cells and platelets stopped working.
If you have less exposure to this deadly radioactivity, you may develop leukemia in five years.
Hiroshima survivors were thirty times more likely to have this fatal disease than the unexpected population!*
(*Between 1945 and 1963 several hundred thousand soldiers were marched through areas where the Nevada atomic weapons tests were conducted. The rate of leukemia among these men had been 400 times the national average! Shut Down, p. 165, The Book Publishing Co., 1979.)
A smaller amount of exposure sets you up for cancer in twelve or more years.
Even a tiny invisible particle of plutonium is so radioactive that it can cause cancer or alter your genes so that your children may be deformed at birth!
Plutonium has been called "thalidomide forever."
(*Dr. John Gofman is the co-discoverer of uranium-233 and a leading medical researcher. In his 908-page book Radiation and Human Health (Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1981) he tells exactly how radiation produces cancer, leukemia and birth defects. This book enables you to estimate diminished life-expectancy from various radiation exposures. It evaluates the genetic consequences to future generations of our current radiation exposures.)
Uranium, mined from the earth, is converted by a processing facility or a nuclear power plant into plutonium, strontium-90 and many other dangerous radioactive poisons.
Plutonium is used in making high-yield nuclear bombs. It has a half-life of 24,400 years and is poisonous for at least a half-million years.
Dr. Helen Caldicott writes:
As a physician, I contend that nuclear technology threatens life on our planet with extinction. If present trends continue, the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink will soon be contaminated with enough radioactive pollutants to pose a potential health hazard far greater than any plague humanity has ever experienced. Unknowingly exposed to these radioactive poisons, some of us may be developing cancer right now. Others may be passing damaged genes, the basic chemical units which transmit hereditary characteristics, to future generations. And more of us will inevitably be affected unless we bring about a drastic reversal of our government's pronuclear policies.*
(*Nuclear Madness by Dr. Helen Caldicott, p. 1. Bantam Books, 1980. Copyright 1978, 1980 by Helen M. Caldicott.)
We are about to drown in nuclear sewage. We now have about one hundred million gallons of dangerous radioactive effluents that no one knows what to do with. And it's globally increasing at a catastrophic rate.
There is no way to safely dispose of this extremely dangerous, corrosive, radioactive garbage in leakproof containers that will be continuously protected by competent guards free from war, earthquakes, floods and tornadoes for hundreds of thousands of years!
What right have we to burden future generations with this ever-increasing threat to their well-being?
We conducted over 70 nuclear bomb tests around the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1963.
Each mushroom cloud scattered trillions of plutonium atoms throughout the world!*
(*By 1970 natives of the Marshall Islands were suffering from increased incidence of cancer, retarded growth and miscarriages.)
Let's suppose just one particle of plutonium landed in a forest near you.
It could rest on a limb of a tree, be stirred up in the air and inhaled by a bird.
This single plutonium particle could create a radiation-induced disease in the bird, who would die prematurely.
Suppose the dead bird decomposes in a field and when driving by, you breathe dust that contains this invisible bit of plutonium.
This particle of human-made plutonium could ruin the genetic regulating mechanism in one of your cells that prevents wild cancerous growths.
Your body could then begin producing cancer cells . . . .
It's a matter of probability and risk — not certainty.
And this same deadly plutonium atom could escape from your remains and be recycled with bad news consequences for the next half-million years!
"All of us, particularly the inhabitants of the northern hemisphere, carry some plutonium in our lungs and other organs," according to Dr. John T. Edsell, Professor of Biochemistry at Harvard.*
(*Dr. John Gofman estimates that, because of the damage to part of their clearance mechanism, the lungs of cigarette smokers "might be a hundred times more sensitive to the effects of plutonium.")
The Savannah River nuclear plant, according to Dr. Carl Johnson of the Medical School of the University of Colorado, may have already polluted 1,000 square miles of Georgia and South Carolina with plutonium.*
(*"And as late as 1979, radioiodine was measured in vegetation in nearby Columbia, Georgia, at a concentration that corresponds to a human thyroid dose of 24,000 millirems per year — 320 times the amount permitted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). High levels of tritium, which the plant releases routinely, have also been detected in the Savannah River and in local milk and vegetation . . . . Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, former director of the Health Physics Laboratory at Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee, notes that in 1969 the flesh of a deer taken from the plant site was discovered to have the equivalent of the 2,250 millirems per year of cesium, or 90 times the EPA limit for a human." "Nuclear County," by Zachary Sklar, Geo, Vol. 3, p. 32, August 1981.)
A 1975 study found that more than 10,000 pounds of this deadly chemical are thinly dispersed in the earth's atmosphere.
Your precious body is probably already carrying this hidden handmaiden of genetic ruin and death.*
(*Radioactive atoms are already in our food chain. The United States Department of Agriculture in Food, The Yearbook of Agriculture 1959, p. 118, reported that strontium-90 from the United States and Russian atomic bomb tests had scattered radioactive strontium- 90 over the entire earth. It was first detected in animal bones, dairy products and soil in 1953. It is now in the bodies of all human beings regardless of their age or where they live. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. XVII, No. 3, p. 44, March 1962, stated that children growing up in the United States have about 6 to 8 times more strontium-90 in their bones than their parents.)
Let's make sure that we don't get additional doses!!#!
We've already trapped ourselves in a small degree of irreversible nuclear damage.
To avoid further harm to ourselves and our children, the people of the world must somehow avoid further nuclear insanity.*
(*A leakage on September 11, 1957, and again on May 11, 1969, in the AEC Rocky Flats plutonium plant released plutonium near Denver, Colorado. There has been a 24% increase in cancer in men and a 10% increase in women in the portion of the Denver metropolitan area nearest to the Rocky Flats plutonium processing plant.)
One million tons of TNT is known as a megaton. A grand total of over three megatons of nonnuclear explosives were used in World War II from 1941 to 1945.
Today, nuclear bombs up to 20 megatons each are poised for action.
Only one of these could destroy a large city and make the land dangerous for eons!
Dr. Bernard Feld, professor, MIT, and the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said,
Sometimes later in this decade, military plans which are being seriously discussed now by the military establishments on both sides would lead to . . . an immediate exchange . . . in a nuclear war of something between 10,000 and 20,000 megatons each.
The fallout in the United States would be total. That is to say, there would be no areas, really, that could escape. There would be lethal fallout covering the entire United States and essentially the entire Soviet Union. Worldwide this would lead to something . . . somewhere in the region of, let's say, 20 radiation units per capita everywhere on earth.
And this I would regard as a situation which we would all have to consider to be absolutely intolerable.
And, therefore, it seems to me that we have no choice in the direction in which we have to move. The problem that faces us is not whether nuclear disarmament is feasible, but how we can go about convincing our leaders. And, presumably, they will be convinced when all the people, or at least a majority of the people, of our countries are convinced of the unacceptability of the current course of events in which missile is piled on top of missile, in which weapon is piled on top of weapon, and in which doctrines concerning their use are being proliferated not only in the insane superpowers but in other so-called civilized countries as well.
How are we going to convince ourselves that this is an intolerable direction, stop where we are, turn it around and eventually reduce these stockpiles . . . ?
David Hoffman points out, "In a nuclear war, the best defense is not to have an offense."*
(*David Hoffman is the co-founder of "Interhelp," a think tank focusing on practical ways to get us out of our nuclear predicament.)
War no longer functions for settling disputes between nations.
War itself must be abolished in the twentieth century — just as slavery was eliminated during the nineteenth century.
Our survival demands new ways for operating our civilization!
A single conventional bomb can blow up the reactor rods that fuel a power plant.
If Europe had nuclear power plants during World War II, our bombs could have devastated the continent and made it uninhabitable for thousands of years by radioactive pollution of the air, food and water.*
(*A 1964 Atomic Energy Commission study showed that a serious nuclear accident could kill 45,000 people, injure 100,000 and contaminate "an area the size of Pennsylvania.")
Any nuclear reactors anywhere make us vulnerable to aggression and fanaticism by politicians and terrorists — even if they don't have access to nuclear bombs.
When we even maintain a supply of nuclear bombs as a "deterrent," we are dangerously perpetuating the illusion that our safety and security lie in nuclear materials.
Such a consciousness makes inevitable the competitive stockpiling and future use of these materials.
And the passions of many military and political leaders and terrorists are such that sooner or later they will unleash every bit of destructiveness they can get their hands on!
A nuclear war could blow enough fine dust into our stratosphere to filter out sunlight and create a nuclear winter that could freeze out most human and animal life on the planet.
Here is a report of the conference "The World After a Nuclear War" in Washington, D.C., November, 1983:
Well over a hundred scientists working independently in countries such as the United States, Germany and the Soviet Union presented a grim consensus that was summed up by Stanford University Ecologist, Paul Ehrlich, "The two to three billion who are at least able to stand up after the last weapon goes off are going to be—at least in the Northern Hemisphere—starving to death in a dark, smoggy world." The World Health Organization has concluded that a major nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union could leave 1.1 billion dead from immediate nuclear effects of the blast, fireball and radiation. Another 1.1 billion would be injured. Since medical facilities would be almost wiped out, most of the injured will die. The ultimate toll within a few months is estimated by this study to be more than 2 billion people or roughly half the world's population.
But will the survivors be much better off? Ehrlich points out that even at noon, the earth will be almost dark because of the millions of tons of dirt and debris that the nuclear explosions will throw into the sky. He points out that rampaging forest and city fires may burn 50% to 60% of the United States and send huge amounts of smoke into the sky. It will take many months to settle back to earth. Scientists estimate that temperatures in the plains of North America and the steppes of Central Asia may drop as much as 40C (72F) — it could literally freeze in July.
With our atmosphere enshrouded in nuclear dust carried up into the stratosphere, sunlight would not sustain photosynthesis, according to Joseph Berry, noted plant physiologist, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
Several atmospheric chemists pointed out that in some regions the light would fall to as little as 5% to 10% of the former levels. Carl Sagan said that if a little less than half of our nuclear materials are exploded (5,000 megatons), the midwest would drop 15 to 20 below zero Fahrenheit for months.*
(*Science News, November, 1983. For complete information on this conference, see The Cold and the Dark by Paul R. Ehrlich, Carl Sagan, Donald Kennedy, Walter Orr Roberts. W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1984.)
Have you ever felt overconfident?
Have you ever felt like taking a chance just to see how it comes out?
Have you ever felt so angry that you were determined to hurt someone even if you hurt yourself, too?
Have you ever felt so depressed, so discouraged, that you just didn't give a damn?
Have you ever felt like kicking over a game you couldn't win?*
(*People close to Nixon in his last days in office reportedly deactivated the signal mechanism that our President can use to hurl our nuclear holocaust at Russia and destroy the world.)
The United States and Russia have enough military hardware to destroy every city on earth seven times!
And other nations are scrambling to acquire this dreadful suicidal power!*
(*The U.S., Russia, France, Great Britain, Italy and West Germany are selling nuclear and conventional arms to other countries at the rate of over $350 million per day! It's sad to note that our economies and our diplomacy are developing a dependency on our roles as merchants of death.)
Why do we have to live under these perilous conditions?
Eventually, every large or small country on this planet could have a supply of deadly nuclear bombs.
Nuclear bombs are not that difficult to make . . . .
Eight thousand pounds of plutonium and uranium are now missing from U.S. facilities, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission!
The insane arms race is almost out of control.
Nuclear war by design or by accident is possible and imminent!