Ivana Hughes

And it was even before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In 1961, he gave a very famous speech at the United Nations General Assembly, in which he stated something to the effect of...

must abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us.

So this is quite simply something we've known for a long time.

And this was, Kennedy understood this before we understood nuclear winter, before we understood ozone layer destruction, maybe around the time we were figuring out electromagnetic pulse and so on.

So he understood this at the very deep level

The part where he really put in his energy was the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty.

And that was negotiated with Khrushchev the following year in 1963.

That was a tremendous achievement and a really, really important achievement.

Going back to our discussion of radiation, you know, I often sometimes when I sit in a room full of people talking,

or stand or whatever and speak about this, I sometimes say, you know, there are people in this room who are alive today because of that atmospheric test ban treaty.

Because had we continued to test to the degree and the levels that we were doing, we would have just sickened more and more and more people.

In our own country and around the world, one thing I'll just add is that I didn't say earlier, because I was talking about the isotopes.

I never told you about plutonium.

There are actually different isotopes of plutonium, and some of them have half-lives of plutonium.

Thousands of years.

There's an isotope of plutonium with a 24 and a half thousand year half lifetime.

That means that thing's going to be in the environment for, you know, a couple of hundred thousand years.

So this is again back to that issue of transcending time and space.

This is not something that just has an immediate effect.