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Helen Caldicott

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Dr. Helen Caldicott (born 1938) has been one of the world's leading anti-nuclear advocates. Born in Melbourne, Australia, Caldicott gained medical degree in 1961 from the University of Adelaide Medical School. In the 1977 she joined the staff of the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston and was a teacher at the Harvard Medical School in pediatrics from 1977 to 1978.

In the 1980 she left her medical career in order to concentrate on calling the world's attention to the "insanity" of the world's increasing supply of nuclear weapons and national stockpiles. She made a name for herself, particularly during the 1980s, when she was featured in the Canadian Oscar-winning documentary If You Love This Planet.

Caldicott claimed that the Hershey Foods Corporation produced chocolate carrying strontium-90 because of the proximity of the Three Mile Island disaster to Hershey's Philadelphia factory. According to Caldicott, strontium-90 that fell on the Pennsylvania grass found its way into the milk of the local dairy cow. Hershey have not responded to this claim.

In 1990, Caldicott decided to contest the seat of Division of Richmond (a traditional National Party seat in northern New South Wales) in the federal election at the time that Charles Blunt was the leader of the conservative National Party of Australia, and represented the division. Caldicott's entry in the race allowed the Labor candidate, Neville Newell, to win the seat despite polling only 27% of the primary vote.

This was an example of the operation of preferential voting in Australia in operation. Caldicott also had a good chance of winning the seat outright - if all of Gibbs' preferences had gone to her as directed, she would drawn ahead of Newell and won on his preferences. In that Division, 73,794 were enrolled and 70,571 (95.6%) voted

More recently she has claimed that the Cold War never ended, but rather that the United States merely found new enemies. In 2002 she founded the Nuclear Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C.. She splits her time between the United States and Australia and continues to speak about the urgency of ending the nuclear age.

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