Dr Helen Caldicott’s sage perspective on Australia’s nuclear-powered subs (22 September) was a searing reality check of how democracies can suffer from the insanity of the industrial-military, neo-liberal, white, patriarchal, theological, capitalist complex of ideologies, algorithms, and worldviews.
As eminent Indian thinker, Ashis Nandy, wrote about nuclear power, ‘The capacity for planetary suicide, once acquired, cannot but introduce irreversible changes to the psychological, social, and ethical life.’ And yet it was Paul Tibbets, the pilot of ‘Enola Gay’, the plane that bombed Hiroshima, who famously said, ‘The morality of dropping that bomb was not my business’.
Only this could explain how, in our age, nuclear capability and technical prowess have become perverse ‘peace-making’ options, where collective suicide by nuclear winter is an actual possibility.
Like Dr Caldicott, I support a different path away from #Morrisonviolentfutures where we completely abandon the struggle to give technological teeth to our genocidal mentality, to instead develop and hone the tools and conditions of conviviality, deep learning and education.
The experience of visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed me how we need to be peace-builders through other means than playing with lethal and dangerous toys. This IS the actual issue worth protesting about in every community across Australia.
