Featuring two eminent speakers who have worked on the issues of nuclear power - Dr. Helen Caldicott - and nuclear arms - Joseph Gerson - for decades, these remarkable speakers bring these issues into the current context of 21st century wars and the growing awareness of global warming.

Dr. Helen Caldicott has devoted the last 35 years to an international campaign to educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age and the necessary changes in human behavior to stop environmental destruction. She currently divides her time between Australia and the US where she lectures widely. Dr. Caldicott is also the Founder and President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute (NPRI), headquartered in Washington DC, has written for numerous publications and has authored seven books, and has been the subject of several films. While living in the United States from 1977 to 1986, she co-founded the Physicians for Social Responsibility, an organization of 23,000 doctors committed to educating their colleagues about the dangers of nuclear power, nuclear weapons and nuclear war, and on trips abroad she has helped start similar medical organizations in many other countries.

Dr. Joseph Gerson has served the American Friends Service Committee since 1976 and is currently Director of Programs and Director of the Peace and Economic Security Program for the AFSC in New England. His program work focuses on challenging and overcoming U.S. global hegemony: its preparations for and threats to initiate nuclear war, and its military domination of the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East.  Gerson’s most recent efforts have focused on education, organizing and mobilization to end the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq, preventing nuclear war and advancing the struggle for nuclear weapons abolition, the establishing of the global “No Bases Network”, and peaceful resolution of the U.S.-DPRK and U.S.-Iran nuclear confrontations. His book Empire and the Bomb: How the United States Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World will be published by Pluto Books and the University of Michigan Press in April, 2007.

Recorded Wednesday, October 10, 2007 at Unitarian Church of Evanston.