PRESS RELEASE
The New Economy and Nuclear Power
Sept. 25, 2015 (EIRNS)—Gabrielle Peut, member of the Executive Committee, Citizens Electoral Council of Australia, delivered this presentation yesterday, during the panel discussion, "Women and the Evolving Economy: New Opportunities and Challenges," at the Eurasian Women’s Forum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
I am proud to be here today, representing not only my own country and organisation, the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia, but also the international Schiller Institute, with which my organisation has been affiliated for 23 years. The founder of the Schiller Institute is a woman with great passion for the economic development of the world, and especially of Eurasia—Helga Zepp-LaRouche of Germany. During the past two decades she became known as "the Silk Road lady", because of her tireless campaigning for a new, just world economic order: for peace through real economic development; for the principles of physical economy developed by the American economist Lyndon LaRouche; for great infrastructure projects like the Eurasian Land-Bridge—now coming to life through China’s Silk Road Economic Belt and the Eurasian Economic Union; and for shifting to a new paradigm, in which every man, and every woman, can realize his or her full creative potential.
It is also an honor for me to participate in this Forum because it is being held in St. Petersburg in the year of the 70th anniversary of victory over fascism in the Great Patriotic War and World War II, a victory in which the heroes and heroines of the Siege of Leningrad played such a crucial part.
During that war, Academician Vladimir Vernadsky, in such essays as "Some Words about the noösphere" (1943) wrote that the human species is entering a new period of its history, which he called the noösphere. In Vernadsky’s words, "The main geological force that creates the noösphere is the growth of scientific knowledge." It is noteworthy that Vernadsky’s own breakthroughs in scientific knowledge were inspired by, among others, his friend Marie Curie, the first of several women who were pioneers in nuclear science during the 20th century.
But the full potential of the noösphere, including nuclear power, is yet to be realised. Indeed, the hope embodied in the plans of BRICS countries like China, India, and Russia, to mine helium-3 on the Moon to be used as a source of fuel for controlled thermonuclear fusion power during the next 10,000 years, is right now overshadowed by a very different thermonuclear prospect: the danger of a world war.
I have brought with me (in several languages, including English and Russian) a statement by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, titled "Urgent Appeal for Action to Heads of Government: The UN General Assembly As a Last Chance for the World!" which is addressed to the leaders who are gathering in New York City during the next few days. In it, she wrote: "NATO’s confrontation with Russia and China is ongoing, and set to escalate, so that a global thermonuclear war is almost inevitable, unless we dramatically change our political course", adding the source of the war danger lies in the "impending financial crash of Wall Street and the City of London and not in anything that Russia or China has done." Referring to the heart-wrenching refugee crisis in Europe, the result of wars in Southwest Asia and North Africa that were based on lies, she said that
"every single one of the tens of thousands of people who have already drowned in the Mediterranean and every single one of the millions who have been uprooted and are now refugees, represents a thundering indictment of those responsible for these war crimes and crimes against humanity."
Will humanity, collectively, be "able to divert from a course that is threatening to lead to our own destruction"? The Appeal briefly sets forth the solution—"a totally new paradigm, which must restore mankind’s identity as a creative species". This means that governments must agree to take emergency measures such as Glass-Steagall banking separation, to protect the real economy from the effects of financial meltdown; to put the global financial system through orderly bankruptcy reorganization, and to institute credit systems to restore capital-intensive production in the real economy. "Only if the casino economy is shut down", wrote Zepp-LaRouche, "that is, the virtual and toxic part of the banking sector cancelled and the section of the banking system serving the real economy protected, can there be a recovery of the physical economy, thereby halting the dynamic toward war."
The new economy will succeed, only if it is based on the most advanced scientific discoveries, such as making nuclear fission power a stepping stone to controlled thermonuclear fusion power. A fusion-based economy will revolutionize all economic processes, opening the door to new methods of materials- processing, isotope technologies, and serious work on protecting the Earth against natural disasters and galactic threats such as comets and asteroids. The "International Crash Program for a Fusion Economy", circulated internationally by the Schiller Institute starting in 2013, describes some of these new and future technologies.
In the short term, the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia advocates the exploitation of Australia’s immense resources of uranium and thorium, for use in clean, safe, fourth-generation nuclear reactors in Australia and round the world.
The question "Who will pay for such development?" which causes much anxiety within governments today, can be answered by rejecting the failed monetarist doctrines of "free trade and liberalization", and adopting public credit and national bank policies in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton in the early United States, the 19th-century National Economy school of Friedrich List and others in Europe, including Russia, and our own Australian national bank, the explicitly Hamiltonian Commonwealth Bank, during its hey-day in the early and mid-20th century.
If we fight for this change, there is every reason for optimism, even in these dangerous times.
