As he sits in the sun-lit lobby of a Madison hotel, Dr. Ira Helfand reflects on the difficult thing he asks people to do: imagine the worst.
“You look around on a pretty nice day like this, and you can’t imagine all of this as a smoldering ruin strewn with dead corpses,” Helfand says. “We just can’t make ourselves imagine the carnage. Some of that’s good, ‘cause we’d go crazy. But fear is a terribly important human emotion. It’s the appropriate response to real danger.”
Helfand is a practicing primary care physician in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. His advocacy of nuclear disarmament––giving lectures, writing papers on the medical consequences of nuclear war––has earned him part of two Nobel Peace Prizes, in 1985 and 2017. In the week before his Madison appearance, he addressed audiences in India and Sweden, dispensing his horrifying truths in the calm, thoughtfully parsed speech of an M.D. disclosing a dire diagnosis.
He’s been part of the anti-nuclear movement since the late 1970s, long enough to have watched activism heat up and then cool down after the Cold War. But he’s kept up his seemingly quixotic quest to alert the public about the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, and he thinks the moment is ripe for the cause to regain momentum.
“We’re in the same kind of moment as back in the 1980s,” he says. “Trump’s extreme rhetoric and incompetence are frightening people again. While that’s a very bad situation, because it’s extraordinarily dangerous, the silver lining is that people are starting to look at the issue of nuclear war again.”
In recent months, concern over nuclear weapons has focused largely on North Korea. The nation has launched long-range missiles over Japan and threatened Guam. It has continued to develop nuclear weapons and to test them underground. In response, the Trump Administration has engaged in what it calls a “maximum pressure campaign,” combining bellicose military threats with severe economic sanctions.
Talks between Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, are expected to take place sometime in May or June. North Korea has said it is open to discussing denuclearization with the United States, although it may be apprehensive about doing so. Regimes in Iraq and Libya were toppled by the U.S. military after dismantling their own nuclear programs.
The threat level has been escalated by the recent appointment of John Bolton as U.S. National Security Advisor. In February, the former ambassador the the United Nations penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, making “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First.”
The threat level has been escalated by the recent appointment of John Bolton as U.S. National Security Advisor.
If the nuclear summit fails to deescalate the crisis, Helfand fears it “will be used as a pretext by Trump and Bolton to say, ‘Well, we’ve tried diplomacy and it hasn’t worked, so there’s no choice now but military action.’ ”
It’s out of this atmosphere––the renewed prospect of devastation, radiation, darkness, and starvation––that Helfand thinks the nuclear disarmament movement can regain an aggressive footing.
When Helfand was a senior at Harvard, in the late 1960s, two young black children drowned in a sinkhole located on university property. Administrators refused to fill the hole, fearing that doing so would acknowledge liability. He took part in a protest, which by his account led to his expulsion for displaying “grave disrespect” to a Harvard administrator two days before he was supposed to graduate. He spent the next few years attending Boston University across town, this time in pre-med, while driving taxi and waiting tables.
Dr. Ira Helfand
Dr. Ira Helfand.
Helfand’s ascent as an anti-nuclear activist happened later, coinciding with Ronald Reagan’s time in the White House. Reagan labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and placed American nukes in Germany, within striking range of Moscow. “It was a terrifying time,” Helfand says. “But in response, millions of people around the world demanded that this situation change.”
In 1982, half a million protesters gathered in New York City, wielding placards with slogans like “Kill The Bomb, Save The People.” The movement was embraced by a broad swath of the American, European, and Soviet citizenry.
“As a result of the political pressure, policy did change,” Helfand says. “By focusing on the medical consequences of nuclear war, by saying, ‘Hey, look this is not some kind of chess game that can be won,’ we were able to change the terms of the debate to a degree. Both Gorbachev and Reagan experienced epiphanies of sort and came to a conclusion that they needed to end the arms race. And they did.”
But over time, he urgency of the issue seemed to fade, and audiences thinned at Helfand’s disarmament lectures: “People didn’t want to hear about nuclear weapons.”
All the old arguments returned: The United States will always need nuclear weapons because the Russians and the Chinese will never give up their own. They will always be needed for “deterrence.” As Margaret Thatcher put it, “Nuclear weapons can’t be uninvented.”
Some commentators have even suggested that nuclear war is survivable. If “you get an alert on you phone that a missile is inbound . . . what do you do?” asked David French in the conservative National Review earlier this year. “Do you prepare to die or do you prepare to live?” French suggests the latter: “Understand that you have far more control over your survival than you might think . . . Gather as much food and water as you possibly can and hunker down.”
“Nonsense,” Helfand chuckles. “Radiation is persistent, and you’re not going to be able to stay in your shelter forever. You’ll run out of food.”
In 2007, a study published by Helfand’s group concluded that a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan (resulting in an exchange of the equivalent of 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs) would kick up enough soot to start a “nuclear autumn,” significantly reducing food production worldwide. “We’ve projected that as many as two billion people would be at risk for starvation as a result of a limited war in South Asia––enough destruction to destroy modern civilization.”
On the evening of April 10, Helfand gives a talk at a Madison church, where he tries stirring the crowd to action. He goes through his description of what a full-scale nuclear war would mean for the world, as he has countless times before. He concludes with a quote from scripture.
“By focusing on the medical consequences of nuclear war we were able to change the terms of the debate.”
“In Deuteronomy, God says, ‘Behold, I have placed before you life and death,’ ” Helfand tells his audience. Several dozen heads nod in recognition. “This stuff is terrible to think about. But you have to figure out how to hold onto this information in your brain. Don’t forget this stuff.”
Audience member Lauren Good, with the group Madison Quakers, isn’t quite sure if Helfand’s brand of fear-based motivation was for her.
“I’ve done this before,” she says. “Years ago, there was a movie I had to watch for class about nuclear war. I was quite debilitated and dysfunctional for a while after watching it. But I never knew what to do with that fear.”
Helfand acknowledges the “darkness” that perpetually rings the edges of his perception. But he thinks it’s important to educate people about the dangers of nuclear war, to help build a mass movement.
“I want people to leave my lectures frightened about what could happen if they don’t do anything,” Helfand says. If he can impart a bit of his defiantly gloomy vision––shocking people out of what writer Zadie Smith has identified as the uniquely American desire for “happiness conceived in perfect isolation”––his work is a success.
Lucas Sczygelski, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an editorial intern at The Progressive.