Chernobyl and the Star Wars defence program - 14 September 1990

It occurs to me that for a month now I have talked about one thing, Kuwait, and what followed on Saddam Hussein’s invasion of it.

Kuwait, a country that most of us two months ago could probably have said very little about. When it lurched into the headlines and became a fixture on the box I thought of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the long ago, talking about a faraway country that similarly seized our attention in 1938.

A remote country he called it, implying in the most delicate way that it was not the sort of nation over which Britons would go to war, Czechoslovakia. He was right about its remoteness, it was a small, not a powerful country and though we were to hear a lot about it from then on, we had only the dimmest picture of it. What we knew we heard over the radio.

Today practically nowhere on the globe is remote, we see the pictures before we can pronounce the name. I’ve just seen a doomsday programme on Chernobyl. One of the chilling assets of glasnost is that the Russians finally allowed an American reporter to go through there with the American doctor who went in immediately after the catastrophe and who ever since has been advising Moscow and ministering to the afflicted and the alarming numbers of children who might have been afflicted.

It’s struck me now, as it vaguely occurred to me at the time, that perhaps the most significant event since the Second World War was Chernobyl. The effect of its radiation damaged crops and herds in Wales, fruit and vegetables in Northern Italy, and forced the Scandinavians to destroy most of the reindeer that provided their livelihood.

I wondered then, and I’m even more curious now, how Chernobyl affected Mr Gorbachev and President Reagan. How much that demonstration of the immense lethal spread of radiation gave second thoughts to the two leaders and led them to decide that there really was no future for the human race in the prospect not of an all-out, nuclear war, but of one big accident.

I have not checked with anybody at the Pentagon, or even with anybody in either the Reagan or Bush administrations but I do know that several influential congressmen who had voted for continuing Star Wars research were jolted into the thought that even a successful Star Wars defence would trigger a huge disaster.

Success even among Star Wars most enthusiastic advocates meant that the stratosphere shield would stop 98% of the enemies missiles getting through. But then you had scientists, old Arthur C Clarke off there in Sri Lanka for one, pointing out that if only 2% of the warheads came through, there would be enough radiation to paralyse many countries, if not a continent.

Some day I’d like to know if the men at the top in the United States and the Soviet Union came to that dread conclusion. If they did, it would explain more than an unexplained surge of goodwill or Mr Gorbachev’s need to feed his peoples why we emerged suddenly into the new era of goodwill and partnership.

It would also explain why in the past year or so the leaders and the military men in both nations have seen as the real threat to all of us the acquisition of nuclear weapons by some nameless madman or dictator who today many people think has a name.

Well, my original point in remarking on our preoccupation with Saddam Hussein, the American military presence, the heartening unanimity of the United Nations and the rest of it, was to suggest that, to put it simply, life goes on in the United States as elsewhere and now I dare to say is the time to go back to interrupted business.

The first item will surprise, maybe shock, some people, but I’ve had letters from listeners who feel they have been tantalised beyond bearing. What was that you were going to tell us about? Wait for it – the cockroach.

I hinted in a previous talk that the cockroach may be the answer to industrial productivity. Could – if the professor I had in mind successfully completes his research – could dramatically affect the mass production industries and the economies of the United States, Japan, western Europe.

Well the professor’s name is Dr Robert Full a biologist, and his speciality is the mechanics of locomotion in animals and humans. He came to see early on in his research that the same principles of energy govern humans as animals, whether they have two legs or as many as the centipede.

He clocked his animals on a treadmill and measured the force of their muscles as they walked, ran, or crawled and he discovered that most muscle energy in all of us, and all of them, is spent not on moving but on resisting, battling the pull of gravity – so it’s to stay on the ground.

Of all the creatures he studied he found that the most successful in staying on the ground at speed was the cockroach. It covers a distance of 50 body lengths in one second which is the equivalent of a six-foot man keeping up a speed of 200 miles an hour.

They – the cockroaches – can lope along at say, only 50 miles an hour on all six legs but when they’re going for the Olympic record they tear along on only two legs.

Now, where does the lesson for industry come in? Dr Full recently lectured to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and having confirmed that most of today’s robots – mobile robots used for assembling industrial parts – have only two legs since they were created to mimic humans, why not, he suggested, go to the cockroach thou sluggard and build robots with six legs which would use far less energy and bounce along at speed instead of clunking along like a human with advanced arthritis. It is true, his audience now realised that when we came to build mechanical stand-ins for humans, we automatically used humans as the model.

Well I’m told that the mechanical engineers were mightily impressed by Dr Full and who knows, one day when six-legged robots whiz around and assemble a motor car, a tank, a refrigerator, in five minutes instead of a week or whatever it takes, the name of Dr Robert Full may take its place alongside Marconi, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison.

Talking about scientific research, I came on a very disturbing piece about a trend in American medical research that until now has gone generally unnoticed during the ten years or so it’s been developing. It is nothing less than the flight of American clinical research – the trying-out of new drugs and procedures on groups of patients – the flight from America to Europe, Japan, and surprise, South America.

Time was – and we’ve always assumed the time was any time since the Second World War – that Americans loved what are called patient trials and were best at it. Just look, Americans would routinely say, at the great stack of Nobel Prizes that Americans have collected since the '50s.

Well now, many American doctors busy researching new drugs have grown impatient with the drastic cuts ordered in government research during the Reagan years, impatient with the over-zealous regulation of research by the government and universities, which requires rounds of committee meetings and forms filled out in triplicate. Also, private medicine is too strapped by the purchase of high technology machines to put much money into research.

So the proof is now abundant in many fields, in cardiology, blood chemistry, psychiatry, alcoholism, child medicine, and on and on – a doctor in Michigan interested in a device to clean out clogged coronary arteries went off to test it in Germany. A Nobel Prize winner in New Orleans took his research on endocrine drugs to France. A psychiatrist here up in the Bronx who’s studying alcohol metabolism in women found it practically impossible to round up enough women patients here and he went off, with an Italian collaborator, to Italy.

These were thought to be random examples of impatient doctors who happened to find conditions for patient trials easier, less hampered by bureaucracy abroad. But a doctor who is, so to speak, a researcher on research has recently tracked through ten years of distinguished foreign medical journals which once carried a conspicuous load of American papers and he found that over the past decade, the foreign papers have doubled and trebled as the papers from American sources have gone down and down.

This drastic change, this flight of basic research has not yet hit the public via the networks, when it does and Americans discover that people abroad are being successfully treated with drugs they can’t get here there’ll be, no doubt about it, a popular outcry.

And now from Japan – where else – comes a bit of ingenious technology that will surely be a blessing to mankind and womankind. Mitsubishi has put out a wizard of a video cassette recorder which automatically cuts out, without a breath of a pause, the commercials, the ads on any programme or movie that you care to tape.

It started in the spring and throughout the summer Japanese movie buffs, gadget freaks and plain citizens bought them and applauded them as a giant step in the march of civilisation. Alas, the outraged sleeping giants of the big Japanese television network and the advertising agencies who sell time arose and turned into hackers – they mixed broadcast signals with electronic gremlins that scramble the image.

At the moment, the New York Times reports gravely, Mitsubishi is weighing whether it is more important to make viewers happy or maintain harmony in the world of Japanese business. Guess who will win.

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