The Hundredth Monkey by Ken Keyes Jr

THE FOLLOWING WAS TRANSCRIBED FROM A BOOK WITH COPYRIGHT INFORMATION AS FOLLOWS: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG NO. 81-70978 / ISBN 0-942024-01-X.

This book is not copyrighted. You are asked to reproduce it in whole or in part, to distribute it with or without charge, in as many languages as possible, to as many people as possible. The rapid alerting of all humankind to nuclear realities is supremely urgent. If we are wiped out by nuclear destruction in the next few years, how important are the things we are doing today?

AUTHOR’S DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the Dinosaurs, who mutely warn us that a species which cannot adapt to changing conditions will become extinct.

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

Two events converged on me this summer. They supplemented each other and gave me the inspiration and added push I needed. They made me respond to the urgency I had felt brewing in me for some time to express my concern about the worldwide danger of nuclear weapons.

The first event was my viewing the videotape “The Last Epidemic,” taken at a symposium held in November, 1980 on the unacceptability of nuclear weapons for human health. I was deeply impressed by the physicians and scientists who brought their knowledge and eloquence to that meeting. Their stature and level of experience, insight and courage left no doubt in my mind that my priorities had to be rearranged. I had to add my voice and speak out now!

The second experience was my exposure to the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon, which I learned about in talks by Marilyn Ferguson and Carl Rogers. This phenomenon shows that when enough of us are aware of something, all of us become aware of it.

That concept confirmed my own intuitive trust in the basic tenet of my work — that the appreciation and love we have for ourselves and others creates an expanding energy field that becomes a growing power in the world. This radical new support gives me the counterbalance of hope to offset the doomsday story of nuclear destruction.

There is no need to feel helpless or get paralyzed by hopelessness. We know we have the power to make changes if we can join together and raise our voices in unison. There is more power in numbers that we ever hoped to dream about! I call for us to let our numbers grow exponentially as we all take it on ourselves to spread these messages.

We are the bearers of a new vision. We can dispel the old destructive myths and replace them with the life-enriching truths that are essential to continued life on our planet.

St. Mary, Kentucky
Ken Keyes, Jr.
December, 1981

(THE HUNDREDTH MONKEY BY KEN KEYES, JR.)

I appreciate your letting me share the drama of our megaton madness with you.

This book does not deal with petty matters.

It tells how to operate our lives — and our world.

It tells us how to stay alive!

The mess we’ve brought upon ourselves is a most perilous and challenging one.

The broad picture pieced together here will show you the immensity of the nuclear dangers, the futility of any defense or protection, the power of the new awareness and your role in the unfolding drama.

There is a phenomenon I’d like to tell you about.

In it may lie our only hope of a future for our species.

Here is the story of the Hundredth Monkey:

The Japanese monkey, Macaca fuscata, has been observed in the wild for a period of over 30 years.

In 1952, on the island of Koshima scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The monkeys liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt unpleasant.

An 18-month-old female named Imo found she could solve the problem in a nearby stream. She taught this trick to her mother. Her playmates also learned this new way and they taught their mothers, too.

This cultural innovation was gradually picked up by various monkeys before the eyes of the scientists.

Between 1952 and 1958, all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes to make them more palatable.

Only the adults who imitated their children learned this social improvement. Other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes.

Then something startling took place. In the autumn of 1958, a certain number of Koshima monkeys were washing sweet potatoes — the exact number is not known.

Let us suppose that when the sun rose one morning there were 99 monkeys on Koshima Island who had learned to wash their sweet potatoes.

Let’s further suppose that later that morning, the hundredth monkey learned to wash potatoes.

THEN IT HAPPENED!

By that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes before eating them.

The added energy of this hundredth monkey somehow created an ideological breakthrough!

But notice.

A most surprising thing observed by these scientists was that the habit of washing sweet potatoes then jumped over the sea —

Colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys at Takasakiyama began washing their sweet potatoes!*

(*Lifetide by Lyall Watson, pp. 147-148. Bantam Books 1980. This book gives other fascinating details.)

Thus, when a certain critical number achieves an awareness, this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind.

Although the exact number may very, the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon means that when only a limited number of people know of a new way, it may remain the consciousness property of these people.

But there is a point at which if only one more person tunes-in to a new awareness, a field is strengthened so that this awareness is picked up by almost everyone!

Your awareness is needed in saving the world from nuclear war.

You may be the “Hundredth Monkey” . . . .

You may furnish the added consciousness energy to create the shared awareness of the urgent necessity to rapidly achieve a nuclear-free world.

“If I knew then what I know now, I never would have helped to develop the bomb,” spoke George Kistiakowsky, an advisor to President Eisenhower who worked on the Manhattan Project.

Let’s look at the almost incredible nuclear monster we have created in the last forty years on planet Earth . . . .

Herbert Scoville, Jr., former deputy for research of the Central Intelligence Agency warns,

The unfortunate situation is that today we are moving—sliding downhill—toward the probability or the likelihood that a nuclear conflict will actually break out—and that somebody will use one of these nuclear weapons in a conflict or perhaps even by accident.

The only result of a substantial nuclear exchange would be a hollow victory in which the “winners’ would be no better off than the losers.

An all-out nuclear war could make our planet uninhabitable for a million years!

A nuclear war can end the way we live.

It cannot be won — it can only be lost.

Winning equals losing.

The word “war” is too mild to apply to this nuclear craziness.

Carl Sagan at the Conference on the Long-Term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War stated:

We have an excellent chance that if Nation A attacks Nation B with an effective first strike, counter-force only, then Nation A has thereby committed suicide, even if Nation B has not lifted a finger to retaliate.*

(*The Cold and the Dark by Paul R. Ehrlich, Carl Sagan, Donald Kennedy, Walter Orr Roberts, p. 33. W. W. Norton and Co., 1984.)

Suppose you and your family are rafting down an unexplored river.

Most of your attention is on steering the raft away from the rocks and keeping it off the banks so that it will not get damaged or stranded.

Several miles downstream unknown to you lies a huge waterfall that will fling you and your family on the rocks below.

It is easy to miss the significance of certain signals that are coming to you.

You have noticed a distant, rumbling background sound. But what does it mean? You can see a mist in the air ahead of you. There’s nothing alarming that seems to call for your immediate attention.

And, besides, you are so busy guiding the raft and keeping it off the rocks that you don’t want to think or anything else right now.

Maybe the rumbling will go away . . . .

But the distant rumbling is getting louder.

We can ignore it — or we can use our intelligent minds to inform us of the dangers we must avoid.

What are the signs and the scientific data that are so easy for us to ignore — but which are giving us a clear warning of a certain catastrophe that lies ahead if we remain on our present course?*

(*In 1954, actors John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead and producer Dick Powell filmed “The Conqueror” on the sandy dunes outside St. George, Utah. We had previously conducted a number of atomic bomb tests in Nevada about 150 miles away. For three months, the filmmakers were breathing the dust laced with radioactive plutonium fallout. Twenty-five years later John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead and Dick Powell had all died of cancer. Of the “220 people in the cast and crew, ninety-one had contracted cancer by late 1980, and half of the cancer victims had died of the disease.” From Killing Our Own by Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, p. 81, Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1982. Also see The Day We Bombed Utah: America’s Most Lethal Secret by John G. Fuller, New American Library, 1984. This book documents the way the government has repeatedly lied to us and withheld documents — even in court proceedings under oath.)

In 1970, a pediatrician in Grand Junction, Colorado, noticed an increase in cleft palate, cleft lip and other birth defects.

The homes of these people had been built with waste rock and sand from a uranium refining operation!

The University of Colorado Medical Center obtained federal funds to investigate this.

But these funds were cut off a year later.

Why?

Navajo Indians who went down into uranium mines in Arizona have died — and are right now dying — of lung cancer, previously rare among Navajos.

In a recent study, Dr. Gerald Buker pointed out that the risk factor of lung cancer among Navajo uranium miners increases by at least 85%!

Robert Minogue and Karl Goller of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission jointly wrote on September 11, 1978:

The evidence mounts that, within the range of exposure levels encountered by radiation workers, there is no threshold, i.e., a level which can be assumed as safe in an absolute sense . . . . any amount of radiation has a finite probability of inducing a health effect, e.g., cancer.*

(*Shut Down, p. 72. The Book Publishing Co., 156 Drakes Lane, Summertown, TN 38483. 1979. In the nuclear honeymoon decades of the forties and fifties, the harmful effects of nuclear radiation on human health were underestimated by as much as ten thousand times! Ibid, p. 167.)

Nuclear submarine workers at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, are developing cancer at a rate that is double the expected incidence.

Dr. Helen Caldicott, author of Nuclear Madness, was invited to speak to a meeting of these workers, but only four men appeared.

They told her that the Navy had threatened them with the loss of their jobs if they came to hear her talk.

Are jobs more important than life itself?

In November, 1980, a group of physicians and scientists held a symposium at the University of California in Berkeley. At this symposium Dr. Kosta Tsipis, Professor of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stated,

. . . our earth is surrounded by a thin layer or ozone. Ozone is a particular isotope of oxygen that has the lovely property of absorbing much of the ultraviolet rays of the sun. The ultraviolet rays of the sun are the ones that cause skin burns. When you go to the beach and you get sunburned, that’s what does it. In addition, the ultraviolet rays of the sun blind eyes that are exposed to them for any period of time. The very fact that we can exist on this earth—that there is a fauna, animals with eyes on this earth—is based on the existence of the ozone layer that filters out most of the ultraviolet rays of the sun and therefore allows us to survive.

What happens when a nuclear weapon explodes is that a very large number of nitrogen oxides are generated by the radiation that flies out from the explosion. As a matter of fact, a one- megaton weapon will generate 10 molecules of nitrogen oxides. These molecules are lifted up together with the fireball, and reach (for a one-megaton weapon) the altitude of say 50, 60, 70 thousand feet, where the ozone is. At that point, these molecules will start eating up the ozone— literally—taking it away from circulation . . . for long periods of time. It is a very complex photochemical process, but we know that it occurs . . . . The National Academy of Sciences felt quite sure to state that if you have exploded . . . in a very short period of time 50% of the weapons that will be available in the arsenals of the Soviet Union and the United States by 1985, this simultaneous explosion will create enough nitrogen oxides to take out 50 to 70% of the ozone layer above the northern hemisphere and 30 to 40% of the ozone layer in the southern hemisphere, because we assume that all of these explosions will take place in the northern hemisphere . . . .

The latest word out of the scientific laboratories is that a 20% depletion of the ozone layer will allow enough ultraviolet light to come to earth that it will blind all unprotected eyes. Now, we can all wear glasses, but the animals and the birds will not wear glasses, and they will all be blinded and they will all eventually die. And this is the largest-scale ecological catastrophe that one can imagine—that all the fauna on the earth will be blinded and eventually die.

I can think of nothing else that is a more massive ecological dislocation — to use a mild word. The entire ecosystem will collapse. Because if we don’t have insects, for example, to pollinate the flowers, we won’t have fruit . . . . The whole thing collapses, and that is what will happen, most probably, if only 50% of the weapons in the arsenals of the two superpowers in 1985 were to be exploded within a few days in a nuclear war.

If you’re within a few miles of a nuclear detonation, you’ll be incinerated on the spot!

And if you survive the blast, what does the future promise?

The silent but deadly radiation, either directly or from fallout, in a dose of 400 rems could kill you within two weeks.

Your hair would fall out, your skin would be covered with large ulcers, you would vomit and experience diarrhea and you would die of infection or massive bleeding as your white blood cells and platelets stopped working.

If you have less exposure to this deadly radioactivity, you may develop leukemia in five years.

Hiroshima survivors were thirty times more likely to have this fatal disease than the unexpected population!*

(*Between 1945 and 1963 several hundred thousand soldiers were marched through areas where the Nevada atomic weapons tests were conducted. The rate of leukemia among these men had been 400 times the national average! Shut Down, p. 165, The Book Publishing Co., 1979.)

A smaller amount of exposure sets you up for cancer in twelve or more years.

Even a tiny invisible particle of plutonium is so radioactive that it can cause cancer or alter your genes so that your children may be deformed at birth!

Plutonium has been called “thalidomide forever.”

(*Dr. John Gofman is the co-discoverer of uranium-233 and a leading medical researcher. In his 908-page book Radiation and Human Health (Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1981) he tells exactly how radiation produces cancer, leukemia and birth defects. This book enables you to estimate diminished life-expectancy from various radiation exposures. It evaluates the genetic consequences to future generations of our current radiation exposures.)

Uranium, mined from the earth, is converted by a processing facility or a nuclear power plant into plutonium, strontium-90 and many other dangerous radioactive poisons.

Plutonium is used in making high-yield nuclear bombs. It has a half-life of 24,400 years and is poisonous for at least a half-million years.

Dr. Helen Caldicott writes:

As a physician, I contend that nuclear technology threatens life on our planet with extinction. If present trends continue, the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink will soon be contaminated with enough radioactive pollutants to pose a potential health hazard far greater than any plague humanity has ever experienced. Unknowingly exposed to these radioactive poisons, some of us may be developing cancer right now. Others may be passing damaged genes, the basic chemical units which transmit hereditary characteristics, to future generations. And more of us will inevitably be affected unless we bring about a drastic reversal of our government’s pronuclear policies.*

(*Nuclear Madness by Dr. Helen Caldicott, p. 1. Bantam Books, 1980. Copyright 1978, 1980 by Helen M. Caldicott.)

We are about to drown in nuclear sewage. We now have about one hundred million gallons of dangerous radioactive effluents that no one knows what to do with. And it’s globally increasing at a catastrophic rate.

There is no way to safely dispose of this extremely dangerous, corrosive, radioactive garbage in leakproof containers that will be continuously protected by competent guards free from war, earthquakes, floods and tornadoes for hundreds of thousands of years!

What right have we to burden future generations with this ever-increasing threat to their well-being?

We conducted over 70 nuclear bomb tests around the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1963.

Each mushroom cloud scattered trillions of plutonium atoms throughout the world!*

(*By 1970 natives of the Marshall Islands were suffering from increased incidence of cancer, retarded growth and miscarriages.)

Let’s suppose just one particle of plutonium landed in a forest near you.

It could rest on a limb of a tree, be stirred up in the air and inhaled by a bird.

This single plutonium particle could create a radiation-induced disease in the bird, who would die prematurely.

Suppose the dead bird decomposes in a field and when driving by, you breathe dust that contains this invisible bit of plutonium.

This particle of human-made plutonium could ruin the genetic regulating mechanism in one of your cells that prevents wild cancerous growths.

Your body could then begin producing cancer cells . . . .

It’s a matter of probability and risk — not certainty.

And this same deadly plutonium atom could escape from your remains and be recycled with bad news consequences for the next half-million years!

“All of us, particularly the inhabitants of the northern hemisphere, carry some plutonium in our lungs and other organs,” according to Dr. John T. Edsell, Professor of Biochemistry at Harvard.*

(*Dr. John Gofman estimates that, because of the damage to part of their clearance mechanism, the lungs of cigarette smokers “might be a hundred times more sensitive to the effects of plutonium.”)

The Savannah River nuclear plant, according to Dr. Carl Johnson of the Medical School of the University of Colorado, may have already polluted 1,000 square miles of Georgia and South Carolina with plutonium.*

(*”And as late as 1979, radioiodine was measured in vegetation in nearby Columbia, Georgia, at a concentration that corresponds to a human thyroid dose of 24,000 millirems per year — 320 times the amount permitted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). High levels of tritium, which the plant releases routinely, have also been detected in the Savannah River and in local milk and vegetation . . . . Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, former director of the Health Physics Laboratory at Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee, notes that in 1969 the flesh of a deer taken from the plant site was discovered to have the equivalent of the 2,250 millirems per year of cesium, or 90 times the EPA limit for a human.” “Nuclear County,” by Zachary Sklar, Geo, Vol. 3, p. 32, August 1981.)

A 1975 study found that more than 10,000 pounds of this deadly chemical are thinly dispersed in the earth’s atmosphere.

Your precious body is probably already carrying this hidden handmaiden of genetic ruin and death.*

(*Radioactive atoms are already in our food chain. The United States Department of Agriculture in Food, The Yearbook of Agriculture 1959, p. 118, reported that strontium-90 from the United States and Russian atomic bomb tests had scattered radioactive strontium- 90 over the entire earth. It was first detected in animal bones, dairy products and soil in 1953. It is now in the bodies of all human beings regardless of their age or where they live. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. XVII, No. 3, p. 44, March 1962, stated that children growing up in the United States have about 6 to 8 times more strontium-90 in their bones than their parents.)

Let’s make sure that we don’t get additional doses!!#!

We’ve already trapped ourselves in a small degree of irreversible nuclear damage.

To avoid further harm to ourselves and our children, the people of the world must somehow avoid further nuclear insanity.*

(*A leakage on September 11, 1957, and again on May 11, 1969, in the AEC Rocky Flats plutonium plant released plutonium near Denver, Colorado. There has been a 24% increase in cancer in men and a 10% increase in women in the portion of the Denver metropolitan area nearest to the Rocky Flats plutonium processing plant.)

One million tons of TNT is known as a megaton. A grand total of over three megatons of nonnuclear explosives were used in World War II from 1941 to 1945.

Today, nuclear bombs up to 20 megatons each are poised for action.

Only one of these could destroy a large city and make the land dangerous for eons!

Dr. Bernard Feld, professor, MIT, and the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said,

Sometimes later in this decade, military plans which are being seriously discussed now by the military establishments on both sides would lead to . . . an immediate exchange . . . in a nuclear war of something between 10,000 and 20,000 megatons each.

The fallout in the United States would be total. That is to say, there would be no areas, really, that could escape. There would be lethal fallout covering the entire United States and essentially the entire Soviet Union. Worldwide this would lead to something . . . somewhere in the region of, let’s say, 20 radiation units per capita everywhere on earth.

And this I would regard as a situation which we would all have to consider to be absolutely intolerable.

And, therefore, it seems to me that we have no choice in the direction in which we have to move. The problem that faces us is not whether nuclear disarmament is feasible, but how we can go about convincing our leaders. And, presumably, they will be convinced when all the people, or at least a majority of the people, of our countries are convinced of the unacceptability of the current course of events in which missile is piled on top of missile, in which weapon is piled on top of weapon, and in which doctrines concerning their use are being proliferated not only in the insane superpowers but in other so-called civilized countries as well.

How are we going to convince ourselves that this is an intolerable direction, stop where we are, turn it around and eventually reduce these stockpiles . . . ?

David Hoffman points out, “In a nuclear war, the best defense is not to have an offense.”*

(*David Hoffman is the co-founder of “Interhelp,” a think tank focusing on practical ways to get us out of our nuclear predicament.)

War no longer functions for settling disputes between nations.

War itself must be abolished in the twentieth century — just as slavery was eliminated during the nineteenth century.

Our survival demands new ways for operating our civilization!

A single conventional bomb can blow up the reactor rods that fuel a power plant.

If Europe had nuclear power plants during World War II, our bombs could have devastated the continent and made it uninhabitable for thousands of years by radioactive pollution of the air, food and water.*

(*A 1964 Atomic Energy Commission study showed that a serious nuclear accident could kill 45,000 people, injure 100,000 and contaminate “an area the size of Pennsylvania.”)

Any nuclear reactors anywhere make us vulnerable to aggression and fanaticism by politicians and terrorists — even if they don’t have access to nuclear bombs.

When we even maintain a supply of nuclear bombs as a “deterrent,” we are dangerously perpetuating the illusion that our safety and security lie in nuclear materials.

Such a consciousness makes inevitable the competitive stockpiling and future use of these materials.

And the passions of many military and political leaders and terrorists are such that sooner or later they will unleash every bit of destructiveness they can get their hands on!

A nuclear war could blow enough fine dust into our stratosphere to filter out sunlight and create a nuclear winter that could freeze out most human and animal life on the planet.

Here is a report of the conference “The World After a Nuclear War” in Washington, D.C., November, 1983:

Well over a hundred scientists working independently in countries such as the United States, Germany and the Soviet Union presented a grim consensus that was summed up by Stanford University Ecologist, Paul Ehrlich, “The two to three billion who are at least able to stand up after the last weapon goes off are going to be—at least in the Northern Hemisphere—starving to death in a dark, smoggy world.” The World Health Organization has concluded that a major nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union could leave 1.1 billion dead from immediate nuclear effects of the blast, fireball and radiation. Another 1.1 billion would be injured. Since medical facilities would be almost wiped out, most of the injured will die. The ultimate toll within a few months is estimated by this study to be more than 2 billion people or roughly half the world’s population.

But will the survivors be much better off? Ehrlich points out that even at noon, the earth will be almost dark because of the millions of tons of dirt and debris that the nuclear explosions will throw into the sky. He points out that rampaging forest and city fires may burn 50% to 60% of the United States and send huge amounts of smoke into the sky. It will take many months to settle back to earth. Scientists estimate that temperatures in the plains of North America and the steppes of Central Asia may drop as much as 40C (72F) — it could literally freeze in July.

With our atmosphere enshrouded in nuclear dust carried up into the stratosphere, sunlight would not sustain photosynthesis, according to Joseph Berry, noted plant physiologist, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Several atmospheric chemists pointed out that in some regions the light would fall to as little as 5% to 10% of the former levels. Carl Sagan said that if a little less than half of our nuclear materials are exploded (5,000 megatons), the midwest would drop 15 to 20 below zero Fahrenheit for months.*

(*Science News, November, 1983. For complete information on this conference, see The Cold and the Dark by Paul R. Ehrlich, Carl Sagan, Donald Kennedy, Walter Orr Roberts. W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1984.)

Have you ever felt overconfident?

Have you ever felt like taking a chance just to see how it comes out?

Have you ever felt so angry that you were determined to hurt someone even if you hurt yourself, too?

Have you ever felt so depressed, so discouraged, that you just didn’t give a damn?

Have you ever felt like kicking over a game you couldn’t win?*

(*People close to Nixon in his last days in office reportedly deactivated the signal mechanism that our President can use to hurl our nuclear holocaust at Russia and destroy the world.)

The United States and Russia have enough military hardware to destroy every city on earth seven times!

And other nations are scrambling to acquire this dreadful suicidal power!*

(*The U.S., Russia, France, Great Britain, Italy and West Germany are selling nuclear and conventional arms to other countries at the rate of over $350 million per day! It’s sad to note that our economies and our diplomacy are developing a dependency on our roles as merchants of death.)

Why do we have to live under these perilous conditions?

Eventually, every large or small country on this planet could have a supply of deadly nuclear bombs.

Nuclear bombs are not that difficult to make . . . .

Eight thousand pounds of plutonium and uranium are now missing from U.S. facilities, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission!

The insane arms race is almost out of control.

Nuclear war by design or by accident is possible and imminent!

IT COULD HAPPEN ANY MINUTE!

“Nuclear war,” according to Roger Fisher, Professor of Law at Harvard, “is not a solution. It is worse than any problem it might ‘solve.'”

An all-out nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia could kill hundreds of millions of people and subject the survivors to radiation sicknesses — and cause countless mutations of the genetic blueprints of our species.*

(*If our nuclear insanity continues, our descendants may be so mutated that they cannot even be classified as members of our species, Homo sapiens.)

“Nuclear weapons aren’t weapons — they’re an obscenity,” said Dr. Marvin Goldberger, President, California Institute of Technology.

According to Dr. Herbert L. Abrams of the Harvard Medical School, the corpses produced by a nuclear war between Russia and the United States if laid end to end would reach from the earth to the moon.

Could any worthwhile human desire however right, good or needed be actually achieved by this sacrifice of the human race?

Rear Admiral Gene R. LaRocque, United States Navy (retired), suggests that a nuclear war may be started by mechanical mishaps and electronic and personnel errors:

. . . one of our strategic submarines, the George Washington, ran right into a Japanese ship just a few months ago and sank it! That’s one of our best missile submarines! . . . We’ve lost two of our nuclear attack submarines that sank in the ocean and we don’t know why to this day — the Scorpion and the Thresher. And earlier this year one of our missiles was accidentally fired from Arkansas because a mechanic dropped a wrench . . . .

We’ve had several incidents where nuclear weapons have literally fallen out of airplanes, literally just fallen through the bomb bays. Probably the most interesting one is the one that fell out of a strategic bomber in the Carolinas some years ago . . . . landed in Carolina in a swamp, and they looked all over for that nuclear weapon. We haven’t found it yet . . . .*

(*The Defense Department bought the land, put a fence around it, and now it’s a nuclear safety area! From a talk given on October 31, 1981 at a Los Angeles symposium organized by Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Council for a Livable World.)

Daniel Ellsberg, who was an assistant to former Secretary of Defense McNamara, reminds us of an accident in 1961 when an Air Force plane carrying a 24-megaton bomb crashed in North Carolina.

On crash impact five of the six interlocking safety mechanisms on the bomb failed!

Only one switch kept the bomb from unleashing the equivalent of 1,000 Nagasaki-type explosions!*

(*From Survival newsletter, Sept.-Nov. 1981, published by Southern California Alliance for Survival.)

We’ve been lucky so far!

A Russian airplane carrying a nuclear weapon crashed in the Sea of Japan.

U.S. submarines carrying nuclear missiles have collided with Russian ships.

By mistake, we dropped on Spain four plutonium bombs which fortunately did not explode.

Oops — so sorry!

The failure of a 46 computer part has produced a false signal that Russian missiles were on the way.

On November 9, 1979, a reportedly fail-safe computer responded to a war games tape by turning on all American early warning systems around the world!

On June 3 and again on June 6, 1980, computer errors in our warning system began a rapid chain of events that could have ruined the planet.

You and I may have been only minutes from nuclear death when these technical errors were spotted!!!*

(*Military folks will protest that, while true, the above are unfair statements. They haven’t blown us apart yet, have they?)

What if an error is not detected within minutes?

Up until the last half of this century, civil defense was usually protective against ordinary bombs.

With less than thirty minutes warning of a missile attack, we can forget it!

The fire storm of a nuclear missile will turn most underground shelters into crematoriums, anyway.

TODAY PROTECTIVE MEASURES ARE INEFFECTIVE, AND ULTIMATELY FUTILE.

Nuclear bombs are so hopelessly devastating that at the November, 1980 Conference of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Dr. H. Jack Geiger said,

It is my belief that any physician who even takes part in so-called emergency medical disaster planning—specifically to meet the problem of nuclear attack—is committing a profoundly unethical act. He is deluding himself or herself, colleagues, and by implication the public at large, into the false belief that mechanisms of survival in any meaningful social sense are possible.

Albert Einstein warned: “We must never relax our efforts to arouse in the people of the world, and especially in their governments, an awareness of the unprecedented disaster which they are absolutely certain to bring on themselves unless there is a fundamental change in their attitudes toward one another as well as in their concept of the future.

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking.”

Nothing is worth playing Russian roulette with the journey of Homo sapiens.

As you and I live out our lives and set up the way for future generations, let us resolve to avoid nuclear destruction.

Why let ourselves be wiped out by not responding to the clear signs of future catastrophe?*

(*See The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell. Alfred A Knopf, Inc., 1982. It places the issue in a large perspective with a brilliant analysis of the forces at play. The Fate of the Earth is an important guide at this crucial time.)

Carl Sagan, professor of astronomy at Cornell University and creator of the “Cosmos” series, said:

What a waste it would be after 4 billion tortuous years of evolution if the dominant organism contrived its own self-destruction. We are the first species to have devised the means. There is no issue more important than the avoidance of nuclear war. It is incredible for any thinking person not to be concerned with this issue. No species is guaranteed tenured life on this planet. We are privileged to be alive and to think. We have the privilege to affect the future.

Since nuclear missiles fly both ways, neither the United States nor Russia can make itself more secure by making the other less secure.

Nuclear weapons can no longer provide us with security.

Our choice is clear:

A non-nuclear future or none at all!!!

Our life on the planet is more important than money or military power!

Do we have to be such fanatics that we destroy the world by squabbling over conflicting ideas?

Is a “cerebral itch” more important than life itself?

Is human destiny a hectic trip from Adam to Atom?

All around us we’re getting messages loud and clear:

The danger of the annihilation of human civilization should not be made the subject of theoretical arguments, but be used as a basis for creating a common awareness of the alarming situation the world is facing today and of the need for exercising the political will to search for acceptable solutions.

Report of the Secretary-General Of the United Nations*

(*”General and Complete Disarmament, Comprehensive Study on Nuclear Weapons,” (A/35/392, page 151, September 12, 1980.)

And again:

The overwhelming priority to do away with nuclear arms has not penetrated the collective consciousness or conscience of the general public . . . . Nuclear arms must not just be limited, they must be eliminated.

Rev. Maurice McCrackin, Community Church of Cincinnati

Rear Admiral LaRocque warns us:

It’s very important for all of us today to realize that the Soviet Union is not the enemy. Nuclear war is the enemy. We’re going to have to learn to live with the Russians or we and the Russians are going to die at about the same time.

So urgent is the situation that we must shortcut through our usual ways of thinking.

Humanity and world peace must be given priority above everything else.

As individuals we must act affirmatively and stop supporting the drift toward nuclear holocaust.

Dale Bridenbaugh, Richard Hubbard and Gregory Minor took their stand and resigned from highly paying positions as nuclear engineers at General Electric on February 2, 1976.

They told the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy:

When we first joined the General Electric Nuclear Energy Division, we were very excited about the idea of this new technology—atomic power—and the promise of a virtually limitless source of safe, clean and economic energy for this and future generations. But now . . . the promise is till unfulfilled. The nuclear industry has developed to become an industry of narrow specialists, each promoting and refining a fragment of the technology, with little comprehension of the total impact on our world system . . . . We [resigned] because we could no longer justify devoting our life energies to the continued development and expansion of nuclear fission power — a system we believe to be so dangerous that it now threatens the very existence of life on this planet.

The problem of nuclear poisoning of the planet can only be solved by educating the people on earth about the nuclear facts of life.

The people of the Soviet Union, the United States and all other countries can be made aware of the nuclear peril —

When the people of this earth know the facts, they will not want to live poised on the brink of nuclear annihilation!

(“Mankind must put an end to war to war will put an end to mankind.” John F. Kennedy.)

“The war planning process of the past has become totally obsolete. ATTACK IS NOW SUICIDE,” said Thomas J. Watson, Jr., former Ambassador to the Soviet Union and President of IBM. Watson warns us against:

“. . . the illusion that we cannot sign treaties with the Russians because they systematically violate them.

Let us be clear about this: there are major differences between our two countries. Soviet values are diametrically opposed to ours. Contention between us on a global scale is a fact of life. Suspicion is the keynote of our relations.

But having said that, let me add this: on the evidence, the Soviets do keep agreements provided each side has an interest in the other’s keeping the agreement, and provided each side can verify compliance for itself.”*

(*Keynote address at Harvard’s 330th commencement on June 4, 1981.)

In 1958 a Russian nuclear installation exploded at Kyshtym. Radioactive clouds devastated the countryside for hundreds of miles. This area of the Ural Mountains is now a wasteland that cannot be safely inhabited for millennia.

It’s interesting to note the U.S. Government hid this CIA report for almost 20 years.

It only came to light in 1977 under the Freedom of Information Act.

In 1981 George Kennan, former Ambassador to Moscow, and one of our foremost authorities on Russia, called for immediate, across-the-board 50% reductions in all kinds of nuclear arms as a first step by both sides. He pointed out:

We have gone on piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of destructiveness upon old ones, helplessly, almost involuntarily, like victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings heading for the sea.

And the result is that today we have achieved—we and the Russians together—in the creation of these devices and their means of delivery, levels of redundancy of such grotesque dimensions as to defy rational understanding. What a confession of intellectual poverty it would be, what a bankruptcy of intelligent statesmanship, if we had to admit that such blind, senseless acts of destruction were the best we could do!

Dr. Jim Muller of the Harvard Medical School reports that:

In March, 1981 at a conference held by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Dr. Yevgeni I. Chazov, Deputy Minister of Health of the U.S.S.R. and cardiologist to Chairman Brezhnev and other Kremlin leaders, revealed that he had spent 35 minutes on national Soviet television discussing the medical consequences of nuclear war. The conference itself was covered in detail by Pravda, with a circulation of over 10 million, Izvestia, over 8 million, and so on. Statements about the impossibility of surviving nuclear war and appeals to world leaders to prevent it were printed intact.*

(*In June, 1982, Dr. Muller, with Dr. Bernard Lown and Dr. John Pastore, appeared on Soviet television with Dr. Chazov and two other Russian physicians. Dr. Chazov said, “We have come here openly and honestly to tell the people about our movement, whose main objective is the preservation of life on earth.” They discussed such topics as the effects of a one-megaton bomb on a city, medical care for the victims and the long-term effects of radiation fallout. The one-hour telecast was seen by an estimated 100 million Russians and it was not censored.)

Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served as a five-star general in World War II and who also served as President of the United States, could speak as “. . . one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war — as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly built over thousands of years . . . .”

In 1953, Eisenhower said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed — those who are cold and not clothed.

“This world in arms is not spending money alone — it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

By 1959, this general and statesman said,

“I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than are governments.

“INDEED, I THINK THAT PEOPLE WANT PEACE SO MUCH THAT ONE OF THESE DAYS GOVERNMENTS HAD BETTER GET OUT OF THEIR WAY AND LET THEM HAVE IT.”

The Council for a Livable World has pointed out that military expenditures of themselves are destructive to human life — even if the weapons they stockpile are never used.*

(*The Council for a Livable World was founded in 1962 by the eminent nuclear physicist Dr. Leo Szilard to combat the menace of nuclear war and strengthen national security through rational arms control.)

The people of Earth are now spending one million dollars per minute on armaments!

Once we stop preparing to blast each other apart, we will find that we can easily solve all the world’s hunger, water and shelter problems.*

(*More than $18 billion in arms sales were made to Third World countries in 1980 — up from $8 billion in 1975. Let them eat — guns?!?)

What can you and I do about the biggest problem our world has ever faced?

In case you are feeling that there is nothing you can do about the increasing nuclear menace that hangs over our heads, remember the story of the Hundredth Monkey.

You may be the Hundredth Monkey!

Your own awareness and action can be the added energy needed to make the difference between life and death for you, your family — and all of us.

Dr. Caldicott reminds us,

The power of an aroused public is unbeatable. Vietnam and Watergate proved that. It must be demonstrated again. It is not yet too late, for while there is life there is hope. There is no cause for pessimism, for already I have seen great obstacles surmounted. Nor need we be afraid, for I have seen democracy work.*

(*Nuclear Madness by Dr. Helen Caldicott, p. 93. Bantam Books, 1980. Copyright 1978, 1980 by Helen M. Caldicott.)

MASS ACTION IS EFFECTIVE.

Eighty thousand people in June, 1977 marched in Australia demanding that uranium be left in the ground where it belongs.

This protest was successful!

In Germany, after experiencing nuclear protests, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt said, “One cannot simply force nuclear energy down people’s throats.”

A Time magazine poll showed that 76% of the voters in the U.S. support a nuclear freeze.

Statewide votes in Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, California, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia have called for immediate negotiations for a verifiable freeze in the production, testing and deployment of all nuclear weapons, missiles and delivery systems.

In Massachusetts voters backed a proposal that would require a referendum before any nuclear waste site or power plant can be established.

The United Nations organization with its worldwide offices will help if requested:

Once there is an initiative from a region, the countries and regional organizations concerned should be able, upon their request and in the manner they wish, to draw to the fullest extent on the resources and possibilities of the United Nations system.*

(*Report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, “General and Complete Disarmament, Study on All the Aspects of Regional Disarmament.” [Page 64, A/35/416, October 8, 1980])

Here’s some good news.

In June, 1981 a Gallup poll asked Americans, “Do you think that the United States should or should not meet with the Soviet Union this year to try to reach agreement on nuclear disarmament?”

Eighty percent said we should meet, thirteen percent said we should not, with seven percent undecided.*

(*Nuclear War: What’s in It For You? by Ground Zero is an excellent book that will increase your nuclear awareness. Pocket Books.)

In addition to mass action, we must alter the separating mental habits that created the nuclear problem from the start.

Let’s examine the change in consciousness that must take place for four billion of us to get along together on planet Earth.

How we think and feel has got us into this nuclear problem,

The way to our survival lies in altering how we think and feel.

We must use the power of our collective consciousness as we learn to focus on peace — and human togetherness.

The men and women of the nuclear nations must be willing to give up their PLUTONIUM SECURITY BLANKETS.

Instead we must REALLY be willing to REALLY listen so we can REALLY understand what’s REALLY bothering us.

We must get behind emotional rigidity, intellectual jargon and logic-tight compartments of the mind.

We must realize that there are no simple right answers.

We must stop risking the survival of our planet by demanding that we always get our way. If we always get our way, there is no real negotiation.

Together we must develop effective understandings based on both sides working together to create mutually acceptable solutions that we can all live with.

It’s our separate-self mental habits that are the cause of our survival predicament.

The bomb is not the real problem — it’s only an effect of our attitudes.

Our mental habits of understanding events in an “us-vs.-them” perception rather than an “us-and-them” insight are creating a devastating mental, emotional and moral separateness in our minds.

If the human race can’t learn to get along with itself, it will soon exterminate itself.

A group of our top scientists working in the Manhattan Project during World War II developed the atomic bomb from textbook theory to Hiroshima in only four years!

What would happen if an equally dedicated group backed by our nation’s resources worked together to create a world consciousness of our common humanity and a unity of our human hearts and minds that would make all armaments useless?

Any problem created by the human mind can be solved by the human mind.

What’s stopping us?

If you had a highly contagious, often fatal, disease, you would care enough about other people to try to avoid transmitting it.

Could the expectations and demands that make you feel hatred, alienation and a “me-vs.-them” separateness be considered a disease?

Such emotion-backed demands are more deadly to the survival of the human race than all contagious diseases added together!!!

Remember this the next time your mind makes you experience hatred and hard-heartedness.

If we want humankind to survive into the next century, we can no longer afford to transmit the deadly disease of hatred, non-caring and forcefully getting one’s was that lead to murder, assassination and ultimately to nuclear destruction.

Increasingly our minds have put great energy into three forms of separateness that make us create thoughts and actions that result in a lethal threat to our continued life on planet Earth!*

(*See No Boundary by Ken Wilber. Center Publications, 1979. This is a discussion of how our minds create division and separateness.)

First, your mind is divided against itself.

You have become self-conscious, self-downing, self-critical, and in too many ways have lost your deeper levels of appreciating yourself.

Have you sometimes noticed that when you’re feeling most separate from someone else, behind it all your mind is just not feeling good about you?

Secondly, your mind has become divided against your own body.

Your thinking has obstructed the free flow of your feelings. Your mental activity constantly crowds out your experiencing the aliveness of your body.

You have neglected your body and instead put your energy into activities involving pride, prestige and that ever-seductive “success” that have not brought you happiness or peace of mind.

Thirdly, just as your mind has become divided against itself and against the body which houses it, it has also increasingly alienated itself from your four billion cousins that are here and now sharing the planet with you.

You have lost the bond with Mother Earth herself and all her creatures — and forgotten how we all depend on each other.

In too many situations we automatically experience people as “them” — not “us.”

These jungle-type habits of mind are dangerous to our species.

In the millions of years in which our ancestors were surviving in the jungles, it was important for their minds to create an instant “self-vs.-other” perception.

For animals eat other animals and no species can survive if all of its members are eaten up.

This instant perception of “otherness” is basic to survival for animals in the jungle.

We can learn a more effective way to make our lives work.

We are still creating a “jungle” of our civilized lives by continuing the operation of our “us-vs.-them” mental habits.

We’re all in this together!

“Love alone,” wrote Teilhard de Chardin, “is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.”

UNDERSTANDING, COOPERATION AND LOVE ARE THE KEYS TO HUMAN SURVIVAL!

The problem I find in trying to go from the separate-self to the consciousness of my unified-self is that my ego operates under the illusory programming that in order to like or love you, I must like or love everything you do or say.

I identify you with your thoughts or your actions.

I lose sight of the fact that your thoughts and actions just reflect your life experiences and your training.

I may crystallize my mind against what you do or say and fail to notice your good intentions . . . which usually are just like mine!

Even if you drop a bomb on me your purpose is to settle arguments — and create peace!

These are good intentions — just like mine!

You just need a more effective way to realize your positive intentions!

A stereo set is not the record it plays.

If a record is scratchy, we don’t throw out the stereo set. All we have to do is change the record.

We don’t have to reject a human being because we don’t like his or her programming.

We can just make it clear that we like the person — but we don’t like a particular action.

And our thoughts and actions can change because they’re not us — in our essence.

I have the direct experience that in my essence I am something apart from the mental habits that spin out my personality and the current soap opera of my life.

Thus I can dislike a person’s behavior and still feel that this is a human being who like me is just trying to make life work using the programming we picked up when we were young.

Your thoughts and actions are only a set of mental habits in a state of flux as you evolve from stage to stage of your life’s growth.

All of us have done mean, sloppy and uncaring things that we wish we hadn’t done.

I always hope that you won’t identify me with the things that I’ve done that were unskillful responses to life situations.

The mind can be trained to nurture a “me-and-you” consciousness in which patience and understanding will compassionately harmonize the flow of our activities so that we all want to help each other work things out.

We can develop an awareness that things aren’t problem-free for me until they’re problem-free for you!

This applies equally to relationships between individuals or between countries.

When I create my experience of you I may forget that you are not your thoughts or actions.

I don’t know you from inside — as I experience myself.

I may forget that in every important way you are like me.

You have a human heart that feels pain and warmth, sadness and happiness.

In your essence and in your intentions you are basically good — just like me!

And my ego is often too ready to treat as important all the differences that my mind notices: lifestyle, skin color, social status, educational background, our differing ideas and opinions and on and on.

When I continually magnify these outward signs, I create the experience that you are really different from me.

It’s time we begin to realize that you and I are far more alike than we are different.

We are all fellow beings traveling the road of life together.

We don’t live in isolation.

We are all interconnected.

We all live in one world.

We are affected by a lack of harmony of any type anywhere on the planet — even if we’re not consciously aware of it.

We are not separate.

What we say and do can affect the well-being of all of us.

We know that our health may be affected if we live among diseased people.

What we are beginning to learn is that our peace of mind may be affected if we live among disturbed people.

Our happiness may be affected if we live among unhappy people.

Our love may be affected if we live among clashing, unloving people.

And even the future of our species is in doubt with various nations stockpiling nuclear devices designed to destroy each other.

Center dot: firepower of WW II.
The rest: Today’s nuclear arsenal.

The nuclear nations today have created more than 50,000 nuclear devices — in an expression of the consciousness of the separate-self.

These dangerous toys enable some children of Earth pompously playing the roles of military and political leaders, to kill fellow humans in other nations.*

(*See Missile Envy by Helen Caldicott, William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1984.)

We pay a horrendous price for this separate-self — this “me-vs.-you” jungle-type consciousness.

No matter what illusions may dominate our minds, nuclear devices are suicidal for our species.

Any perception that our lives are an “us-vs.-them” matter is an illusion and can only create alienation, unhappiness — and perhaps death.

If our species is to survive, it must replace the illusions of separateness with the emotional experiences of acceptance, cooperation and togetherness.

Instead of “you vs. me” it must become “you and me” — on this planet together.

However much our ideas and ideologies may clash, we must remember that nothing is more important for survival and for happiness in life than feelings of understanding and commonness of human purpose.

All of the nations of earth are acting like spoiled children who are fighting over marbles.

Children forget that their happiness comes not from possession of the marbles, but from the fun of playing together — and from creating the great adventure of life together.

We can learn to keep our squabbles within bounds.

We must learn to disagree without throwing each other out of our hearts — and thus create rocklike hatreds.

We can become skillful at changing the desire systems in our minds.

Whatever we expect to get by creating hatred and separateness even if “justified” is always purchased at far too great a price.

Human love—our heart-to-heart love—is more valuable than anything else.

If we have this, we have enough.

Without this love in our hearts, nothing else will be enough!

Kierkegaard said, “. . . to love human beings is still the only thing worth living

for — without that love, you really do not live.”

Let’s not ruin our future because of anything that happened in the past.

Let us challenge our present approaches and rethink old assumptions.

Would you want your children to die because your mind is not flexible enough to forgive?*

(*Bernard Benson in The Peace Book [Bantam Books, 1982] gives a sensitive new angle by letting a child ask the pertinent questions and give practical solutions. Philip Noel Baker[Co-chairman of the World Disarmament Campaign and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize] said, “Everyone who wants to live should read this book.” It has been translated to Russian and the author was interviewed by children on TV in Moscow.)

From the point of view of our complex desire systems, life will always seem “imperfect.”

WE WIN SOME AND WE LOSE SOME.

Can we expand our hearts so that we do not hate even the proponents of nuclear power?

Can we learn to feel love and compassion for the people involved in perpetuating nuclear technology even when they’re unable or unwilling to understand the reasons for our concern?

Always remember that feelings of anger and hatred and separateness are our only problem.

Let’s not try to save the world by increasing the problem!

The next step in our growth as individuals and as a species requires that our minds experience the planetary urgency of letting go of separating mental habits and demands that close our hearts to other people.

We are challenged by our destiny to increase our ability to create with many people the enjoyable experiences of acceptance and cooperation.

Individual and species survival means increasing our tolerance, our patience and our own understanding so that we do not continue to drive ourselves crazy when people or situations are not the way we want them to be.

We can no longer afford to create separateness and alienation if we want to get the most from our lives.

We can still want what we want. We can think it’s only fair or right to get it.

We can still put gentle energy into trying to change things.

But we must learn not to throw people out of our hearts.

We tear each other apart too easily . . . .

We’re all like kids, taking our disagreements and our differences too seriously!

When will we learn that it is only our emotion-backed demands that make us create the internal experience of unhappiness?

Our egos and rational minds are so good at making us feel and think that the problem of human separateness lies in the outside world — and not inside ourselves!

With practice, this mental skill of inner flexibility will make us even more effective and powerful.

It takes a strong person to be able to lovingly but directly communicate what he or she wants to someone who disagrees — and acts hostile.

You will increase your skill in helping the world when you learn to be mentally flexible.

This means being able to constantly blend back into creating an experience of life as a whole with appreciation, cooperativeness and love for the people around you — even when they oppose you.

We haven’t yet become effective at operating our minds and our emotions to create that subtle blend of both head and heart that lets us use our treasure chest of inner wisdom.

This wisdom is kept tightly locked up when our egos and minds run off the tapes that continually create the illusion of separateness.

Only by opening our minds and hearts will we find the rich, intuitive wisdom that always lies within every human being — even if it isn’t used.

The conflicting energies in our world are so great today that perhaps we need the “millionth monkey” to project the energy of wholeness and cooperation — of friendship and love, of sharing life on this planet together.

WHATEVER THAT CRITICAL NUMBER IS, YOU ARE NEEDED TO SAVE OUR CIVILIZATION.

You are essential!!!

It may be that without you, it will not happen and our species will hurtle itself into partial or complete destruction.

How do we play the game of saving the world?

To begin with, you probably can’t help others understand unless you have a grasp of the scope of the nuclear wipeout we all face.

One of the most readable and fascinating books on this subject is Killing Our Own by Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon. This book tells about the countless human deaths already caused by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, the Nevada bomb tests, the tests in the Pacific Islands, uranium mining, exposure in nuclear industries, and the near meltdown of the Three-Mile Island nuclear power plant.

Above all, be creative — and energetic.

Since the future of both you and your family is at stake, turn on the immense resources of your mind.

Find the ways in which you can flow your energy into increasing worldwide awareness that the nuclear bomb mentality must be eliminated.

The strength of our species lies not in sharp fangs or piercing claws.

It lies in our ability to use our minds to cooperate with each other as we play the games of life.

The same powerful minds that created nuclear bombs and intercontinental missiles can also learn how to create human unity and cooperativeness.

We can save the world from people-made disaster — when we set the goal high and add our determination and our persistence.

Appoint yourself as a roving Ambassador of the State of Loving and Caring.

Will you accept your share of the responsibility for creating the Hundredth Monkey energy that will change the consciousness of the entire planet?

We can tilt the scales to eliminate the awesome threat of nuclear catastrophe and environmental ruin.

Be informed, hopeful and energetic.

Be vigilant with your thoughts of peace and love.

Sense your power to lift the mood of despair.

Let your enthusiasm seep in and penetrate the collective consciousness!

Meet with people, talk with people, share with people.

Find and support organizations that channel our energy into survival.

Write to your senators and representatives and other politicians.

Let them know what you want them to do.*

(*John Kenneth Galbraith of Harvard University, at the October 31, 1981 symposium of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, told the 2,700 participants, “Nothing is more needed in Washington than a rebuke to those who are not pressing actively and energetically for arms control.” You can get the voting records of congressmen on specific issues by writing the U.S. Senate, Capitol Building, Washington, D.C. 20510 and the U.S. House of Representatives, Capitol Building, Washington, D.C. 20515.)

Most of the things you are now doing in your life will become meaningless or nonexistent if we are hit by nuclear catastrophe!

Take a new look at your priorities . . . .

This does not necessarily mean leaving your work or your present lifestyle.

It means giving an increasing energy and priority to expanding your own awareness, to communicating with other people who are now asleep, and to withdrawing energy from all thoughts and actions which create human alienation, separateness, destruction and death.*

(*Green ribbons were worn as a reminder of the children being killed in Atlanta. Yellow ribbons were worn as a reminder that our citizens were being held as hostages in Iran. There is a worldwide energy to wear blue ribbons symbolizing that everyone on earth is a hostage to the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. You may wish to buy a roll of ” blue ribbon and a package of safety pins and pass out these symbols of protest to your friends — and wear one yourself. Thousands of people in Europe are wearing leaves as Friends of the Peace Book by Bernard Benson.)

Do not wait until others around you are opening their hearts.

Instead, begin doing things now that are so desperately needed for the conscious unfolding of your life — and the survival of our species.

Your dedication to saving our lives and the planet Earth will bring your own life to a level of satisfaction and well-being that you may never otherwise achieve.

You will become increasingly happier as you learn to love more.

And you will begin to discover the miracle of your full potential as a human being.

Your life will gain meaning and purpose.

Your energy can tip the scales when you add it to thousands of others’ — merging, slowly raising our collective consciousness to the point of power when it makes the all-important difference!

This survival energy spreads far beyond those involved and touches every life on Earth!

The change in you is already taking place!

YOU NOW KNOW THE IMMENSITY OF THE DANGERS, THE FUTILITY OF “SAFETY” MEASURES, AND THE NEED FOR ACTION RIGHT NOW USING THE POWER OF OUR NEW AWARENESS.

The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon points out our responsibility and our power.

It is up to every one of us to change the myths that say we have to depend on nuclear energy for power and defense.

We can no longer believe that the safeguards are adequate — or that we are helpless to change the national policies of the governments of our world.

We will replace the myths with knowledge.

Our persistence will relentlessly channel our positive thoughts toward peace and a harmonizing world.

And that starts right here—in my heart and yours—right now!

In this short book I can only give you a glimpse of the miracle of life you can experience . . . .

This rapture of life is your birthright to create and enjoy.

This book can only hope to inspire you to take the next steps in your own development — for your sake and the survival of our species.

This is the most pressing problem we face today.

Everything else in our civilization is of secondary significance.

It is worthy of your full attention as an intelligent, caring, wise and wonderful person.

We can begin to lose the game of life when we play nuclear war games.

Like children our egos and minds create the illusion that the ideas in our heads and our desires for “marbles” are more important than feelings of human togetherness in our hearts.

We cannot afford to play such enthusiastic games with loaded nuclear pistols any more!

THE MARBLES JUST AREN’T WORTH IT!

AUTHOR’S END NOTE

MANY THANKS TO

Britta Zetterberg and Penny Keyes for their wealth of helpful suggestions for improving this book.