Helen Caldicott

From Philosopedia

Caldicott, Helen Broinowski (1938— )

Caldicott, a leading antinuclear activist and physician, first alerted the Australian public to the potential health risks of fallout from French nuclear weapon testing in the South Pacific. After moving to America to practice medicine at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston and to teach pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, she revived Physicians for Social Responsibility to focus on the hazards of nuclear power and founded Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament.

Caldicott was featured in the Oscar-winning film If You Love This Planet, which was declared political propaganda by the United States Department of Justice.

In 1982, Caldicott was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.

An Australian-born pediatrician, she wrote Nuclear Madness: What Can You Do? (1979) and has established anti-nuclear groups in several countries. She has written, “How stupid that we lack the imagination to settle conflicts, so we have to go and kill each other. And the people who get killed are not the men and women . . . who are having a problem with each other; the people who get killed are our kids–17 and 18 year olds, little boys. They are sent off as instruments by people who can’t solve their conflicts . . . [who] don’t take the time to work out how to get in the other person’s frame of reference and understand them and make capitulations and concessions.”

Her 1996 work, A Desperate Passion, is an autobiography describing the friends and enemies she made in her anti-nuclear crusades.

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