Talk given at the end of the Great Circle Tour of 2023. How the Golden Rule, a 30 ft ketch rigged sailboat, was found and restored by Veterans For Peace to continue its original goal of energizing public opinion to action to check the insanity of nuclear weapons. Credited with halting their atmospheric testing by raising public awareness, the little sail boat that could, now in its second life had just completed an 11,000 mile journey to challenge nuclear militarism, reckless normalization of nuclear war and the 24/7 radiation contamination of our environment by nuclear power with its waste; a big mission for a 30 foot boat. Captain Kiko who sailed the Golden Rule from Hawaii back to the U.S. ahead of the tour tells the history of how it and the original crew set sail in 1958 to the Marshall Islands, intent on stopping ongoing atomic bomb tests and in the process inspired the political movement that ended atmospheric testing against the demands of the Generals, Industrialists and military scientists. This Midwest to East Coast to Great Lakes journey stopped in many cities and even Cuba to engage in the work of Peace through education and community building. Both counter the propaganda that erases the historical facts of atmospheric testing: during hundreds of tests, radioactive Cesium 137 and Strontium 90 fell on ALL of the continental United States and continues today to move through the food chain. In 1958, St. Louis, Mo was a hot spot where mothers, concerned about Strontium 90 contaminating milk they were feeding their infants, started the Baby Tooth Survey that helped convince President John F Kennedy to halt atmospheric testing. But by that time the legacy of the Pacific atmospheric tests had poisoned the Marshal Islanders and their homes forever. The U.S. Military continued to study the effects the radiation exposure had on them because according to one American scientist: "They were more like us than rats". Racism was prevalent then and remains so in almost all things nuclear.
Golden Rule Project https://vfpgoldenruleproject.org/ NEIS neis.org
The Voyage of the Golden Rule: An Experiment with Truth Cmdr. Albert Bigelow
Dr. Reynolds The Phoenix of Hiroshima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_of_Hiroshima
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