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Ted Turner
Former Vice Chairman, AOL Time Warner, Inc.; Founder, CNN
It's a pleasure to be back in San Francisco; I've raced here, and been here many, many times, and they've always been extremely pleasant. I've known of this organization for quite a while. Your fame is quite large; it's a wonderful organization and it's a great honor and privilege for me to have been invited to address you and to receive the medal, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
There are a lot of threats that we face, but before I get to that I'd like to give you a little background on how I became interested in international affairs. As a small boy I was interested in just about everything: the natural world, history, art, science - I had lots of curiosity. I read a lot, I liked sports, too - I really liked just about everything. Life was extremely interesting and exciting and a lot of fun and I was fascinated by about everything including, as I grew older, girls - much to my parents' happiness. My dad fought in World War II. I remember when he left in 1941, and I remember when he came back when the war was over. During World War II the focus was international. America was not isolationist at that time. Of course, World War II wasn't over very long before the Cold War started and then the Korean War; so I followed that. History interested me, too, particularly as I grew a little bit older, say ten years old approximately. So international affairs interested me. About that time the United Nations had been founded, as you, know in 1945.
And as the Cold War progressed and as I grew older, I followed with great interest the events that occurred with the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis later. I reached the conclusion, after studying the history of the latter half of the 20th century - in which the Cold War was the dominant event that occurred and lasted for close to 50 years - that we came so close to annihilating ourselves during the nuclear arms race that if we had not had the United Nations as a place - because it wasn't much more than a place to let off steam, at the time - because Russia and China each had vetoes and the United States had a veto; and whenever something was going to pass that we didn't like, we vetoed it, and when we were trying to pass something they didn't like, they vetoed it.
But I guess we all remember one of the most poignant moments, I think, when Khrushchev got so mad when he was addressing the UN General Assembly that he took off his shoe and pounded it on the podium - not too classy, I have to say, but… He was a proletarian or whatever they called them, a farmer I think by trade, nothing wrong with that - but by God when he was hitting the podium with his shoe he wasn't pushing the button to launch the nuclear weapons. As I became a man, without the United Nations we wouldn't be here. So I had a great deal of love and admiration - even though the UN was unable to do very much because of the Cold War. Very little occurred except that we somehow avoided World War III.
Once again, having studied the situation, I truly believe that a full-scale nuclear exchange of the arsenals of what is now Russia and the United States - there are thousands of weapons that would be launched and they would all go off in the same day, within a few hours of each other - would probably be the end of, it would certainly be very close to the end of - humanity. Those people, if any did survive, would have radiation poisoning and they'd be so deformed that they might as well be gone. The elephants are already endangered, and the chimpanzees and the gorillas - it would be the end of most of the higher forms of life, as we know them. To say that it would be the greatest tragedy in the history of the world - it would be the end of the world, basically.
By this time I was racing sailboats. This is where I became an internationalist, a true internationalist. I tried to make the Olympics in yachting; I never did make it, but I did go to a lot of the pre-Olympic events, and I raced all over the world. I remember when I saw my first two Russians at a sailing event. It was in Montreal, Canada, and they were down at the end and they were wearing red sweat suits, both of them, the two guys sitting on the boat; and they couldn't speak a word of English and of course I couldn't speak a word of Russian. But we raced against each other for a week, and while I hardly ever spoke to them I at least saw them and they looked like human beings you know, you actually see them and they look like people - why would we want to drop a nuclear weapon on these people?
I knew, I'd seen over and over again the pictures of Hiroshima and in those days they had aboveground testing. You know with Bikini Island, and those damn, big ol' mushroom clouds, blow the whole island away, watch all these houses that they had being blown away. It just looked like you've got to hate somebody or dislike them an awful lot to drop something like that on them. I became a person who was against bombing. And on top of that, by now all these programs like "The World at War" about World War II had come out and they showed how Berlin looked after the war, the whole place was bombed-out, starving children without decent clothes or anything; and the same with Russia, all these burned down villages; and all the dead people at Auschwitz - it really turned me off, I want to tell you. I just said, Why would anybody do this? Can't we figure out a way? Particularly as during this period of time we made a lot scientific and medical progress, a lot of progress. We were eliminating smallpox and pretty well getting a handle on polio. We were making a lot of progress with problems that we had, and there were things to be proud of. We went to the moon and all kinds of things like that; it just seemed like there had to be a better way.
The UN stood for that better way. I remember seeing a film of Harry Truman when they were organizing the UN, and he was at the podium talking about it when they were signing the declaration, the papers, and he stood at the podium and he said, "We've got to find a way to end war." He was president of the United States. It was very clear, this was in the late '40s or early '50s, that he really didn't know how to end war at that time. And he was president of the United States. He didn't know. He was just hoping that the UN would be able to figure out how to do it because we couldn't go though another World War II with nuclear weapons.
What if we'd had nuclear weapons at the beginning of World War II instead of at the end? What if the Japanese had had them and the Germans had them and the Russians had them and we had them? What would World War II have looked like? We might not be here now. There might not have been an armistice, an end to World War II, because we would have all been dead.
We have been so lucky that we've gotten this far without an accident. Now, people will tell you that these weapons are safe. Bullshit. They are not safe. They are not safe. They are extremely dangerous. I just did a program two weeks ago, "Avoiding Armageddon." We worked on it for two-and-a-half years because I know, and have known all along, that particularly since the Cold War ended 12 years ago (this is a public policy group, you're very well-informed; I had dinner with a number of you tonight, I think you're as well-informed as any group in America) these weapons are still on hair-trigger alert in the United States and in Russia. There are thousands of them on hair-trigger alert, and the president will have between three and five minutes - President Putin or President Bush - to make a decision. If he's waking up at three o'clock in the morning in deep sleep and we have information that the Russians have launched their nuclear weapons, he has three or four minutes to respond, doesn't even have time to have a cup of coffee with Sam Nunn.
Boy, wouldn't you like him to have a cup of coffee to think about it a little? Maybe call somebody and check and make sure. Because let me tell you, these nuclear weapons do not have fail-safe buttons on them. There's no way to explode them; there's no way to recall them. In Dr. Strangelove, if you'll recall, with the B-52s, they could call them back. They didn't get everybody back because the one guy's little radio went on the blink. That's bad, he didn't get the word that they were supposed to turn around and come back - but the missiles don't come back. Once they're launched, they go to their target and there's not any way to bring them back. Even though Russia is now a capitalistic - kind of half way - capitalistic, Christian, democratic country; it's not a godless, lying, communist, slave state anymore. I've been there many times - and it's really quite a nice place, and the people don't hate us. They really kind of like us. They don't know us very well, but - and they like to drink. That's the thing I could never understand. How could we, who like to drink so much, hate a country that likes to drink as much as we do? That's one thing, and that's not all they like. They like ballet. They love the ballet. They love the ballet more than people in San Francisco do. How could you ever think about having nuclear weapons pointed at a nation of ballet lovers? It just doesn't make sense.
It's been a tough few days for me. I'm very much against nuclear proliferation. North Korea announced today that they've got at least one bomb and they're going to prove it in the next week or two. I guess they are going to have a nuclear test. Hopefully they are not going to drop it on Seoul. They're pretty loony, they might. That's new news for those of you that missed it on the way here tonight because you didn't get home to see the television.
What else was there? There was some other bad news, too. Maybe it was the war; that was bad news for me. I don't like wars. I know I guess we had to do this. We haven't found any weapons of mass destruction yet and they didn't use them. We said we had absolute proof that they had them. I want to see them. I want to see what we went to war for. I don't like Saddam Hussein, either. He's down there where that 22,000-pound bomb got him, I think, ha ha - but we'll never know for sure, probably, because it blew him to smithereens and there's not enough to find. He's probably gone. Otherwise, he may show up - some of those Iraqi leaders are showing up. They're surrendering; there's no place else for them to go.
At any rate, to me war is a sign that somewhere the system broke down. One of the things that gave me the most hope in my study of history is that, during the 20th century, two of the greatest men that ever lived, in my opinion - Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. - showed us a new way to do things. Mahatma Gandhi got the British to leave India. It took him 40 years to do, but they left peacefully. And he did it through non-violent protest. Martin Luther King really learned that from Gandhi. He was a student and disciple of Gandhi. He said so all the time. He had pictures of him in his house and so forth. And he did the same thing. Those were the first time in the history of the world where two gigantic movements like that tried a non-violent peaceful approach to achieving their goals. And Martin said, "We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means." I believe that's the best way to have peace.
Everybody from Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Adolf Hitler - they wanted to have peace, but they wanted war first. They wanted to crush the other side. Crush them and enslave them and maybe even send them to gas chambers, or hang them all, or cut off their thumbs. Anybody here want to cut off anybody's thumb? That's not a good thing to do. Or chop off their hands? I mean, you need your hands anyway. In fact, I'm telling you right now, if humanity makes it for another 5,000 years, we're going to have three hands: the ones who survive will have the hand in the middle to hold the cell phone while you drive with the other two. See, I'm always thinking ahead. It's going to look kind of strange with this little hand in here, but think how handy it'll be if you use it for shaving while you're reading the paper! The little hand right here in the middle.
You gotta keep your sense of humor. This is a rough week for me and I'm doing okay. You can't get discouraged.
I underwrote Captain Cousteau for about 15 years and I was down with him on the Amazon in the early '80s right after Reagan called the Russians the "evil empire." If you go into a bar and call someone evil they'll punch you right in the nose. The best way to start a fight in the world is to use derogatory language. That's why whenever we say that this is the "axis of evil" - Iran was kind of trying to come around and be a little better, then we call them, what was it, the epitome of, the triangle of evil? I don't even call Rupert Murdoch evil. He's bad, bad. But I don't want to make him so mad that he puts a contract on me. I don't want to die right now. I want to hang around long enough to see if we are going to make it or not. The chance is about 50-50.
Cousteau said to me when I was discouraged, he said, "Ted, even if we knew we were going to lose, what else could we do but our darn level best to try and save humanity?" And whenever I get discouraged - and I do come close to getting discouraged, and I've been pretty discouraged the last couple weeks, too, but you can't give up in life; winners never quit, quitters never win, and besides we can't afford to lose this one - if we can make it, I really believe that if humanity can make it through the next 50 years - I mean we're so close. We have global communications. In 1900 only about 20 percent of the people in the world were literate. Now, quite a bit over 50 percent are. That's really good. So half of the people in the world are educated. And half the women in the world don't have equal rights with men yet, but half of them do. In 1900 probably less than 10 percent of them had equal rights with men. So there are a lot of things we can be proud of.
There are a lot of things that are very dangerous, and the most dangerous one is the nuclear arsenal. We have to get rid of these weapons before something goes wrong and they get rid of us.