Kevin Kamps/Beyond Nuclear introduction of at “Crisis Without End: Fukushima” book event at Busboys & Poets/Teaching for Change bookstore, Wed., Oct. 8, 2014

Good evening everyone. Thanks for being here. I have the honor and privilege of introducing the editor of this new book, Dr. Helen Caldicott.

Reading her Curriculum Vitae, the course of her life, is a tour de force.

Any one of her pursuits alone – as physician, author, speaker, teacher, activist extraordinaire – would represent a major contribution to the good of the world. But she’s done them all, often at the same time, and has somehow kept this up for decades. Through “a desperate passion,” rumor has it.

She has been honored, over the course of four decades, with a very long list of awards, honorary doctorates, keynote and commencement addresses. She has been named one of the most important women of the 20th century, a distinction she has carried into the 21st, without letting up.

Her 2011 Nuclear-Free Future Lifetime Achievement Award was very well deserved. But obviously, she’s far from finished!

She has walked the Halls of Power – meeting with President Reagan, the US and Soviet ambassadors -- and presented alongside cosmologist to a filibuster-proof majority of the US Senate at the height, or should I say dark depths, of the Cold War.

But her influence has extended to the humblest of grassroots. I can attest to that personally.

My earliest mentors in anti-nuclear activism, back in Kalamazoo, MI, were hugely inspired by attending the June 12, 1982 million-strong Disarmament Rally in New York City, in which Helen played such a leading role.

Helen was still serving as President of PSR in the early 1980s, when I was in junior high. My science teacher tacked an op-ed, written by an area university professor, from the local newspaper on the classroom bulletin board. It described what would happen to my hometown in a nuclear war. It made a deep impression on me. That op-ed was part of a PSR campaign.

I got my hands on Helen’s first books in the mobile library on the 1992 Walk Across America for a Nuclear-Free World, my baptism by fire to anti-nuke activism: Missile Envy had been out for several years; If You Love This Planet was hot off the press that year.

1 Back home in the Midwest in the mid-1990s, and getting involved with anti- activism for the first time, I found an audio tape (remember those?!) of Helen at the local public library. I still remember her wise, powerful and inspiring messages. She urged the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements to learn at the feet of the civil rights movement. And she pointed out that there were enough people in the room to turn the country upside down on these issues.

Her 1994 book, Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do, was loaned to me by a fellow anti-nuke activist during a critical campaign.

I was wowed by attending Helen’s 1998 Symposium on the Effects of Low-Level Radiation at the New York Academy of Medicine. It featured such pioneers as Alice Stewart and Karl Morgan – the only time I ever got to hear them speak in person. As awful as the information was, such as about Chernobyl’s impacts, the event only deepened the hook in me.

Being invited to speak at Helen’s Nuclear Policy Research Institute Symposium: Nuclear Power and Children’s Health, in Chicago in 2004 was a huge honor for me. The event shed important light on Nuclear Illinois, with its childhood cancer cluster in Morris, and its radioactive ground and surface water contamination at Braidwood.

This is not the first time Helen has worked with Teaching for Change, and presented in the Langston Room here at Busboys and Poets. She unveiled her book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, also published by The New Press, here in 2006. She took the opportunity that night to autograph her portrait by Andy Shallal on his powerful wall mural of progressive luminaries.

She keynoted the Midwest Association annual fair in central WI in 2007. They planted a tree in her honor. I check on it every summer solstice. It’s doing well!

That same year, Helen, along with Dave Freeman, inspired, and helped secure the funding for, Arjun Makhijani’s landmark book Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap to U.S. Energy Policy.

Helen and Arjun and I, and 400,000 others, just marched in NYC at the People’s Climate March, including a thousands-strong Nuclear-Free/Carbon-Free Contingent spearheaded by Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

Also in 2007, concluding her work with NPRI, Helen handed the reins to Beyond Nuclear, thereby becoming our Founding President.

Helen’s March 2013 Symposium, “Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe,” co-sponsored by PSR, was a very powerful event,

2 now summarized in this new book. Deep thanks to Helen and the publisher for making this happen.

3