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Yeah, with his last march from Gainesville, Florida Mhm Mm five. Live conversation from the University of Florida, a discussion of social, political, scientific and religious issues of the day. Your host is Dr Michael began in professor of History and Ethics, an assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida.

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Hello and welcome to another conversation. My guest is Harvey Wasserman, a nuclear activist, as he described himself, a noted journalist and author. Harvey Wasserman is somebody who's very greatly concerned about nuclear energy and the detriment little affects that radiation can have on the health of civilization.

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As a journalist, he has published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Mother Jones and Rolling Stone. He's the author of three books. Energy War, Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States, which I certainly want to ask about, and his latest book, Killing Our Own.

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The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation. And that's going to be the principal subject of our conversation, except that he has another book underway or perhaps just out. And while ask about that to Harvey, welcome to conversation. Thanks for having me good to be here.

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And what is that other book that's either on the way or just well, it's gonna be published in January by MacMillan. It's called America Born and Reborn, and it's the first cyclical cycles history of the United States written in this country I know of. Since 1961 there was a book called Contours of American History by William Appleman Williams, and that book was so well received at the House UN American Activities Committee subpoenaed the manuscript.

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I haven't heard from you at this time around, but what I've done is I've mathematician ized American history have divided into six very clear cycles, which happened to be getting shorter. And it's a fairly standard cycle of social upheaval, followed by war, followed by reaction. It sounds like Oswald Spangler Yes and Toynbee and played a little bit, Uh, maybe a little astrology thrown in.

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I'm sure my critics will say that, but are they always the same cycles, you know, things can become can be cyclical, cyclical without the same thing that happened a generation ago. Happening again. Well, essentially, it is the coming to power of a strong male leader uh, it has been in the past.

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I'm saying that this will change, but followed by a sort of a springtime awakening of transcendental consciousness feminism, uh, minority upheaval, ecological, uh, consciousness. And the sort of collision of this new spirit into the status quo has always produced a war. First the revolution and the Civil War, the World wars, Vietnam.

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And then it's followed by a period of extreme right wing reaction and then an aftermath, sort of a winter time of materialism, which is when we were in that phase. Right now, this is the sixth cycle of U. S. History. The cycles are getting shorter. The first was 140 years.

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This last one, if Reagan loses in 84 will be eight. If he wins, it will more likely be 16. So it's actually forms a spiral. And what I'm saying, in essence, is that the generation born during and after World War two will be taking power in the eighties and early nineties with a very different set of values, a very different world view than the one represented by Reagan.

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And we are going to have a synthesis which is going to produce something very different in the United States. How would you characterize? Oh, well, it's almost Marxist, then. Thesis antithesis Hagel was. Yeah, very much. Well, the thesis of the whole set up is the American Native Americans, because when the appearance first came here, the Native American civilization was in many ways very, very advanced in 15 70 for example, the before whites ever got here.

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The Iroquois had a very sophisticated federation, which I'm sure you're familiar with of five Nations, and they later added 1/6. And it was actually the basis proved to be the basis of much of the American Constitution. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine. They're all very deeply influenced by the Native Americans.

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And the air coy society was matriarchal. It was. It was based very democratic, based on consensus, really. And above all, it was ecological. The Native American tribes were very diverse, but the one thing that they all seem to have in common was that they considered themselves inseparable from the natural planet.

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And then that's the thesis. And then the anti thesis is the Puritans who come here with their industrial views with their views of themselves, have chosen of God with their views of human nature as being superior to to, uh, to the natural forces that they really viewed the natural planet as the realm of the devil.

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And, uh so I I sort of see American history as an interplay between this thesis of Native American consciousness and the antithesis of the Puritans back and forth, back and forth. I can I think that Ronald Reagan is a classic Puritan. Frankly, um, you know, he very much believes in the God given right of the American people to rule.

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He's anti ecological. To put it mildly, he's not particularly enamored of women's rights. And what frightens me the most is his view of nuclear war as being something that is almost inevitable as prescribed by the Bible. Certainly Jerry Falwell talks about that. And you do have a significant I would say, Calvinist segment of this country, which still believes that Christians, good God fearing Christians will survive a nuclear war, and that's that scares.

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That's really scares the dickens out of me. All right, Well, now, yes, uh, one could say that President Reagan is anti ecological in that he supported a secretary of the interior who did not seem to be sympathetic to the wishes of environmentalists to say, to put it in white phrases, Yes, to put it in polite phrases.

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But, um, to go from there and say that Well, of course you didn't go exactly from there. He sort of came off the wall with this that he's in favor of of of nuclear or thinks I'm sorry, thinks that nuclear war is inevitable. He has. He has, um, used to himself about that.

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Maybe this is the generation that's going to have a nuclear war. And, um, there are those on the more radical right among the moral majority and so on the Falwell contingent, which has essentially medieval view of how how human history works and this idea of a cleansing, uh, fulfilling the apocalyptic prophecies of the Bible is very much in tune with nuclear war.

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And in fact, I just read an article about it in the Columbus Citizen Journal from Ohio Today, the religion reporter they're talking about how, yes, there is a segment of the population that does not fear nuclear war because they believe essentially that they will survive it in, you know, We also have a situation where the leaders of our government, when you remember in February 1980 George Bush when he was campaigning for the presidency, talked about a limited nuclear war in which you would have survivability of command and control.

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That's a direct quote. Now what he's talking about there is the fact that many of these leaders, the president and the Cabinet and I assume the heads of the top corporations do have access to underground shelters and two special airplanes where they believe they will survive a nuclear war.

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And this is not religious. This is just basic fact, and what we have is it's boiling down to two classes of people. We have people who have keys to places where they think they can survive a nuclear war. And then there's the rest of us, and to me this is incredibly dangerous because the people who have their finger on the button don't believe that they will be the ones wiped out.

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And so you get lots of posturing and people saying, Well, we'll never want a nuclear war will never do this. But the US has not renounced the use of first strike weapons. And, um, we do have to account in our political work for the fact that our president and, uh, the cabinet, um, do have can't help but have in the back of their mind the idea that they may escape.

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I mean, you also have t k. Jones, the famous undersecretary. All you need is a spade and shovel. Everyone will make it. Yeah, a few inches of dirt and you'll survive. Well, I'm sure that you saw the much ballyhooed ABC. I didn t for television the day after.

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I thought that that movie suggested that nuclear war was survivable because there certainly were a lot of extras playing survivors. Yeah, and fresh horses materialized at the proper moment. That was the one moment where I really I thought it was well done. I thought it was okay.

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I'm glad NBC did it. I was incensed literally, frankly, and sense that they had six men and no women on the panel. Afterwards. I thought that was gross, uh, insult to the women's movement and to the freeze movement there was, except for Carl Sagan, who is a scientist.

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There was no real active participant in the from the freeze movement. And women are more vocal about this issue than men Well, and their views are different. Men are are less afraid of nuclear war. They're more militaristic. They're more supportive of Reagan as we know about the gender gap.

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And I think a Randall Forsberg or Helen Caldicott on that show, even if balanced by Phyllis Schlafly was essential. And I'm amazed at ABC and at the same time they had both Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, who could hardly think more alike. I was worked for Kissinger on the National Security Council.

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I just was very shocked that they would do that. Frankly, I think the most, uh, well, scary thing said was said by Elie Wiesel, who simply said, I am scared, and that is a very sensitive human being who represents the very probably the deeper and better angels of our nature.

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Speaking out against, uh, the threat that nuclear war poses to all of us in connection again with that movie. The New York Times, the day after the movie played, ran a lengthy article on the so called nuclear winter. This is a thesis that Carl Sagan has developed and others with him Are you familiar with that?

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Would you like to express that a little bit? Well, it's basically the phenomenon, that explosion of that much force. And actually it's not really required that they be nuclear weapons, conventional weapons and in great enough quantity could provide that catastrophe as well. Just throwing an enormous, almost incomprehensible cloud of dust and particles into the air, which would block out the sun, which would lower temperatures, they say, by as much as 40 F for quite a long period of time.

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Halt photosynthesis. Yes, there is another natural process, right? And the see. The thing is that there are so many unexplained un calculate herbal byproducts of a nuclear war. Now, I spent two years of my life interviewing radiation victims, and we went to, um, Utah and Nevada, where Mormons were told by the government in the fifties and early sixties that there was no possible danger from radiation from bomb tests at the Nevada test site.

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Now we see an epidemic of cancer, leukemia, birth defects where there was no such problems before, and basically it was partially a miscalculation and partially the fact that the government did cover up the true killing power of radiation we found in 1976 there was a bomb exploded in China.

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They did a test one test in China eight days later on my farm in New England. The milk was too radioactive to give our Children. This is from one bomb. It's It's literally true that the Russians could kill almost as many Americans by exploding their entire arsenal on Russia as by doing it here because of the cloud of particles and because of the radiation, and also because of the damage would be done to the ozone.

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This was one of the big insights in Jonathan shelves Fate of the Earth. He talked about the fact that the ozone layer would be destroyed. It would have tremendous solar radiation would come in, from which we are not shielded little so called little things, like the fact that all the birds would go blind and were dependent on the birds to eat the insects.

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And once the birds are gone, as we learned from Rachel Carson's silent spring about DDT, which killed birds that once the bird, the birds are really what keep the insect population in check. So here's another. Who knows what other little side effects we found in writing Killing Our Own, My most recent book about radiation victims.

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That the infant death rate in the city of Harrisburg tripled in the three months after the accident at me. Now the amount of radiation released that movie was minuscule, virtually insignificant compared to what would happen in a nuclear war. And yet this this city 11 miles away wasn't impacted.

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Think of Well, I can guarantee that. I mean, I hate to scientifically, it's easily verified that, uh, even if we wiped out the Soviet Union with our nuclear arsenal and they didn't get any shots off at us, the radiation would make it highly unlikely that another generation Americans would be born because the prevailing winds would carry that radiation across the bearing straits, uh, many times over.

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The Chinese test, which affected us in New England eight days afterwards, went around the cloud went around the world and was detectable two weeks later. In other words, it went around twice. It never goes away. We're still breathing plutonium that was released from our bomb tests.

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Now you are very concerned about the detrimental impact of radiation on the health of people in our society and all societies worldwide. Opponents of your view maintain that we're receiving radiation all the time from the sun from various plants. I'm not sure all the sources of rocks rocks.

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Okay, how do you respond to that? Well, we are, and it's not harmless. We do have a natural cancer rate. Cancer does occur among the human population. It did occur among human beings without before, not nuclear weapons or nuclear power plants were invented. And, uh, it's part of, you could say.

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And if there's a divine scheme, it's part of the evolutionary process. But I've heard estimates of about 130 mg per year. Background, uh, just normally from being on the planet. And it's true, and it does. It does have its physiological impacts, and just because it's there doesn't mean we want to add more of it.

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Uh, in fact, we don't want to add more of it. Uh, you don't you don't do it just because it's there originally. And so, um, and in fact, one of the side effects of a nuclear war would be the opening up of the ozone layer to allow too much solar radiation.

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And there are those, uh, who claim that life on Earth was possible only after the ozone layer developed, which shielded radiation out enough to allow the delicate mechanisms of the organic life to develop. So, you know, we get that with nuclear power plants all the time.

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You know, they have warranted scientists standing next to a nuke and say we get less radiation here than we do in Grand Central Station. It may be true, but that's no reason why you want to go do it. It's probably true. The Grand Central Station, this radioactive.

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They have a lot of granted, and Erin Grant it has been shown to release certain amounts of raid on gas and other radionuclides, which are harmful. Harvey. Let's grant that nuclear war would be horror beyond our imagining. Do you have faith in the human race that it will avoid this self destruction not only the self destruction of humanity, but of the planet itself?

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In many of its parts and functions, I ask that because we have not used any massive exchange of poison gas, which surely became possible with long range bombers and later missiles in the years of the Second World War. And afterwards, no one speaks at least not widely or popularly of biological weapons today, right?

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Well, the Reagan administration just tried to do to get nerve gas. Well, yes. Nerve gas. Yes. And I think that was voted down at the last very close. Yeah, uh, but, uh, in the main, we have fastened our our vision on on nuclear weapons, and they're almost seems to be in the minds of many, an inevitability such as you spoke of earlier, that the human race is going to sacrifice itself for for some, uh, political reason or personal reason.

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Arrogance, pride, whatever. But I'm just wondering if people who who worry about the problem as deeply as you do do not nonetheless have some residual hope or faith. Whatever is the appropriate virtue here that humanity has the wisdom, the good sense to pull back from the abyss.

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I don't think I'd be, uh, flying around speaking on the issue if I didn't have that since, um, perhaps, uh well, I've had no different experiences than many others. Uh, my first, uh, demonstration was at a roller rink in Columbus, Ohio. where we were trying to integrate it.

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You know, we were We had picket signs that don't skate, integrate, you know, And they did. And the civil rights movement has made tremendous strides because people gone out and fought. Um, they we had a war in Vietnam where we were told that we would have to win it.

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It would go on forever. We'd never stop the war machine. It was long, It was costly. It was debilitating. But we're not in Vietnam anymore. And I'm convinced that if there had not been an anti war movement, we would still be there. Uh 1973. My local utility company in Massachusetts tried to build a nuclear plant four miles from our house.

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We stopped them. And I've seen nuclear industry around the country. The reactor industry, as is well known, really put on the ropes, and people talk about economic conditions, and they're very real. But at the base of those economic changes has been a dedicated group of people fighting against nuclear reactors for all the right reasons.

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And now we have Well, we actually had a success that people don't talk much about in terms of nuclear war in the 19 fifties, the U. S and the USSR were blowing off atomic weapons in the atmosphere. You know, fearsome pace. We were testing in Bikini and the Marshall Islands.

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And in Nevada, the Russians on their own soil and large quantities of radiation were being put into the atmosphere. Radioactive fallout. It became a worldwide issue. People organized and fought. There was a temporary test ban in 1958 and followed by a permanent test atmospheric test ban in 1963 which was signed by John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev and Harold MacMillan of Great Britain, and that that not only has that atmospheric test ban held since 1963 but I would contend that it has saved probably more lives than any single any other single treaty.

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Well, there's an example of humanity coming to the rescue of itself, some residual wisdom at work, right, Right. And you know, now we now we're faced with this perhaps greatest of all political tasks stopping the nuclear arms race. And I think the Reaganites and the proponents of the nuclear arms race our right to a certain extent, uh, by stopping nuclear production of nuclear weapons.

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We may very well be putting our foot in the door for a general disarmament. And I hope we are, Uh, there is something very, very basic involved here about stopping building these weapons. I personally believe we can do it. I think it's gonna take a lot longer than a lot of us would like to think.

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But I do believe it will be done. I do a nuclear freeze movement still alive and well, Does it still have the momentum that it generated a year ago? Well, it goes in cycles. Of course I should have remembered. I mean, it comes and it goes.

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It waxes and wanes, just like of summer, fall, winter and spring it made. The fact is, though, that the polls show very consistent, uh, public acceptance of the idea of a nuclear freeze in the range of between 70 and 90% of the American public are in favor Now.

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I remember in 1968 after the Tet Offensive that the American public opinion did a definitive shift on the war in Vietnam. But the last Americans didn't leave until seven years later. More than seven years later, in 1975 1979. You had another shift on on nuclear power plants before T M.

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I and the China syndrome. There was a substantial majority of the American public in favor of building more reactors after it was against, and it's gone against since. But there's still these reactors are still trickling in. They're still they're going to want to try open one and, uh, California, now near an earthquake fault.

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And we got to go out there and people gotta get arrested and do the whole thing. It just lingers on. And same as with a nuclear freeze, the public support is there. It's going to take a long time. Do you find that there is any marked shift on the part of young people college age toward one side or the other of the nuclear debate?

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Uh, first of all, do you find that this particular College age group of 1983 bears any resemblance to what we popularly called the allegiance of the sixties? And that was one of which you were 1 1963 to 1973. Uh, that constitutes the sixties, from the Beatles to the leaving of Vietnam.

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That's right, Yes. Um, well, it's funny on the surface, Uh, and this is a big argument I have with my new book because I talked about the birth of a new kind of consciousness. Now, on the surface, college students today are very conservative, very materialistic. And they seem to be to have lost all the concerns that we had in the sixties that's on the surface.

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Underneath people lose sight of the enormous changes that have been made since the 19 sixties and things that are taken for granted now that we're not a part of the of what we experience. When I first went to college 1963 co ed dorms attitudes towards sex.

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Um, attitudes towards schoolwork in general, A view of the world. Um, you know, had the United States, um, invaded Grenada in 1963. It would have been a small paragraph on the bottom of a couple of newspapers. Um, and we did invade Santo Domingo in 1965 with 15,000 troops.

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I don't remember any demonstrations against that. I remember anybody questioning it. Things are very, very different now. In terms of of our current framework. We are in a very conservative phase. I mean, it is a conservative cycle, and it's very much evident on campuses. And it does bother me, I must admit.

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But in terms of what's happened between 1963 and 1983 it's a whole. It's a whole new world, and things are continuing to change. It's interesting that you mentioned the Beatles, Harvey, because I love the Beatles. I would date I would date what we call the sixties 63 to 73 from the assassination of John F.

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Kennedy. That's what I would have thought started the process of rethinking, regrouping, reconstituting a culture that we saw the youth element. But surely an important ingredient was injected by the Beatles. No question about it. Hairstyle, the challenge to the establishment of authority, a radical departure from previous musical styles.

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And so far. But I have to say, I have to think and, uh, this I get to argue with my musicology friends that I really think it started with Elvis really and Elvis and the black musicians who are never given Fats Domino and and Chubby Checker and, uh, Little Richard.

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And really there is a continuum of music there and the Beatles really hit it because they were white and also they had incredible magic. I mean, John and Paul really geniuses, and it is a tremendous tragedy that John Lennon was killed and I can't even begin to talk about.

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And that's part of our depression. Now you know the psychological impacts of that. But John Kennedy was very much a part of that. I mean, he was a Beetle in his own way, and the killing of him was terrible. It aged us. It matured us in a certain way.

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But you really 1956 is in a lot of ways, a watershed year. Because was the first time there was, uh, more white collar workers than blue collar workers in the U. S. Um, the civil rights movement was really starting to get off the ground. Um uh, the Sputnik went up in 57 you started to have a lot of computer stuff come in, and then Elvis and so on.

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There was a certain continuum there, but the Beatles, you're right, really coagulated at all. And I had a funny experience. I was shopping with my We've got about a minute for the funny experience. Do it real quick, and I have a six year old nephew and we were shopping for record.

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We have more than a minute. I'm just And, uh, he asked that the record store if there were any new Beatles albums I wish there were. Now you say that we're in the night of materialism now in your in your cycles. How long do we have to go before we get out of it?

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Well, it depends on us. I unfortunately believe with many economists that we're going to have a very severe economic downturn after 1984 after the election. I think all the signs are there. This sort of Reagan recovery is really just part of the natural business cycle, and it is far weaker than it should be in terms of the general post war pattern.

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And all the classic symptoms of the Hoover Coolidge era are in Reaganomics or what's left of economics. And, uh, we are jacking up the economy, which is another major reason why I'm for the freeze. We're jacking up the economy with the amphetamine of military spending, and we're doing the same thing we did in the twenties and in the fifties, which is top down, which doesn't work.

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And given the very, very tenuous international monetary situation, I'm very seriously afraid of a downturn after the elections. Well, I hate to see us, uh, and the program on a donor on, uh well, I think it was a great positive changes which are ongoing. And I think we have two cultures here which you see a new positive in freshening cycle to follow the one that definite scribe.

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Very well. Non nuclear solar energy. Solar energy cycle coming up. Well, you're in the right place. Here at the University of Florida was the Center for research in Solar Energy. And I saw the airport there, which is a very impressive solar energy powered structure. It does work.

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Yes, it does work. And people come from all over the world to study in our center here to learn how these techniques can be used and well in Africa and Latin America and Third World countries in particular. That's the real hope to synthesize the Native American view of the environment from which we are inseparable with the European gift of technology.

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It can be done good, Harvey Wasserman. Thank you very much for being with me on conversation. Thanks for having me. Uh huh. Well, so Well, I hope not. That person. What?