(CUP) MUTATED, RADIOAC- TIVE SEA-LIFE, incurable dis- eases, global poverty, and land rendered uninhabitable for the next 500,000 years — if death is the ultimate security, the arms race is providing humanity with guaran- teed protection.

‘Nuclear Addiction: Dr. Rosalie Bertell Speaks on the Cost of Deterence’ is director Terri Nash’s newest release, followed by her Academy Award-winning, contro- versial film, If You Love This Planet. Nash’s film is part of the national Film Board’s Studio D (women’s section) series, Speaking Our Peace.

‘Nulclear Addiction’ profiles Dr. Rosalie Bertell — epidemiologist, Roman Catholic nun, peace acti- vist, internationally reknown enviromental/health expert, and recent winner of the “Alternate Nobel Prize” — in much the same way dr. Helen Caldicott was fea- tured in ‘If You Love This Planet.’

With a format almost identical to her earlier film, Nash juxtaposes Bertell’s calm, yet disturbing ad- dress to an audience at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, with frightening newsreel footage of everything from Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims to the manufac- turing of plutonium warheads.

Since the fateful discovery of atomic energy over 40 years ago, over 1,200 nuclear bombs have been detonated on the planet, begins Bertell. “How far does the radia- tion go when they set off a bomb,” she asks.

At first, Bertell says she was told that radiation from a nuclear blast travels half-way around the earth. “Then I found out it goes two anda half times around the planet.

“We’ve already polluted our own earth to a serious degree,” she warns her audience.

Between 600 and 800 underground/ water tests have been conducted by France and the U:S., in Polyne- sia, the Marshall and Bikini Is- lands, and Nevada. And, Bertell says, although solid radioactive particles are trapped by under- ground testing, most of the radio- active gases are released into the air.

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Bertell says the damage done by below-surface bomb tests is just beginning to become apparent. In under-water tests, the explosions blast apart coral reefs. Dynoflagel- late organisms, which grow only on broken coral, are bombarded with radioactivity. As most species of fish rely on these organisms asa food source, radioactivity eventu- ally enters the entire food chain.

“This is only a secondary effect,” she says.

Nuclear blasts conducted in the ocean, says Bertell, raise the water temperature to 50,000 degrees cel- sius. As the boiling water circu- lates through ocean currents, cli- mate changes ranging from flood to drought occur in South America and Southeast Asia.

“This is not to mention the damage done to uranium miners,” says Bertell. In the US, over 1,100 workers have died from radiation- caused lung cancer, with 100 sim- ilar victims in Canada.

As well, Bertell points out that there is 100 million tonnes of nuclear waste in Colorado, and close to one million at Elliot Lake, Ontario.

“What is the cost of deterrence,” she asks, linking information she presents inot context of the arms race,

“Only counting cancers, diseases, stillbirths, congenital deformities and spontaneous abortion, there have been 16 to 17 million deaths since 1946,” she says.

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“These are the fist casualties of World War 3,” says Bertell in her book, ‘No Immediate Danger: Prog- nosis for a Radioactive Earth.’

“This is the pre-war period. There are people you don’t here about. These are the women who hold babies with no arms, legs, or faces, and hide them from their fathers,” she says.

Bertell says the world nuclear arsenal has increased from around 100 weapons in 1950 to about 40,000 in 1983.

“I would propose that we area sick generation, an addicted genera- tion,” says Bertell. She draws a simple, yet brilliant analogy be- tween addiction and the nuclear

If the breadwinner in a family is addicted to drugs or alcohol, she says, (s)he will go to any length to support his/habit. As a result, the needs of the rest of the family are subsumed by the addict’s increas- ingly desperate need to keep up their particular supply the child-

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Placing the analogy in the global

ren in the family go without proper context, we continue to suffer from

clothing, food; and medical atten- tion, as the one whom they depend on for the necessities of life squan- ders away all the money.

our own insatiable addicts in the nuclear age. “We are so uptight about our security that we will des- troy our very life-support system to.

November 28, 1986 =