Ted Turner 's 1998 World Citizenship Award Acceptance Speech:
"We Should Get Rid of Nuclear Weapons"

The 1998 World Citizenship Award was presented to Ted Turner by David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation for Turner's outstanding and inspiring actions as a world citizen. In 1987 Ted Turner received the NAPF Distinguished Peace Leader Award.

Below is Turner's acceptance speech on November 6, 1998 for the World Citizenship Award at the award dinner held in Santa Barbara, California, following Turner's one billion dollar contribution to the UN.

"This is really a fantastic honor, and I'm really touched. I've known David Krieger and this organization for a long time, back when I really started becoming a do-gooder. I use the phrase with pride, better a "do-gooder" than a "do-badder," right? It helps to maintain a sense of humor about it, particularly with all the problems that there are, many of which were not even mentioned by our two previous speakers, and which I will try to mention the whole litany of before I leave --if I start now I think I can cover about half of them before the time's over, just describing them with one line.

My Personal Development
First, I want to go back and tell you how and why I developed the way I did, and why I was interested in this organization from its very beginning. CNN began in 1980. Prior to CNN, I was a good person, basically. I wasn't a saint. I was a little bit wild, but basically pretty responsible, hardworking. I was racing sailboats and really having quite a good time. I was trying to be a pretty good father and a pretty good businessman. I paid my taxes, and I made some contributions. I had volunteered my time to raise money for a number of charities, like most young businesspeople.

But I didn't really have much in the way of influence. All the money that we had up until 1980 went into Braves games and reruns of Andy Griffith and trying to license a few movies. Then when I decided to start CNN because nobody else did it. I thought of it many years before I finally did it, but nobody else stepped forward. NBC, ABC, and CBS, who had the infrastructure to do it, didn't want to go over and help the cable industry. Either that or they just didn't have very much vision, probably a combination of the two. They didn’t do it, so I just saw a gaping hole there that there was a need for a 24-hour news service. Even though I had not worked one day in my life as a journalist, I figured I'd just do it.

I hired some journalists to run it and set it up, but I set the policy. I did want the policy to be very fair internationally. If we were going to get the Israeli position, I wanted the Palestinian position, as well. I wanted us to show what was happening as much as we could behind the Iron Curtain, and present opposing viewpoints, diverging viewpoints. Then, hopefully, in a well-educated democracy like our country, the people would make the right decisions of what to believe in, rather than turning to the editorial pages or listening to Walter Cronkite, whom I happen to love. But he always used to present everything with his opinions. I can remember him coming on one night after the President had made the State of the Union speech, and he said, "Now what did the President really mean when he made this speech?" I was disgusted, because who is anybody to come on -- the President didn't invite him to do that -- and tell us what the President meant? Who's he? He was just an employee of CBS.

So I felt insulted by that and told our people that we were not going to do that. We were not going to editorialize and second-guess with our newsreaders. Most of these news people are just sitting there and reading the teleprompter, anyway. They don't have a clue what the hell is going on. They don't know better than you. Who are they to tell you what you should believe?

But even more than that, I figured that I'd better find out what the big problems are in the nation and the world. I didn't have to worry about Atlanta because we were not going to be a local news organization. So I started studying. I started reading vociferously and asking people and trying to learn as much as I could about the problems.

Recognizing World Problems
Clearly, the greatest problem was the same one that David saw. That was the danger of the Cold War and nuclear annihilation, which we were just one button away from. By 1980 when we started, Reagan was President, and he was already pretty old. My concern was that I knew he had this little box by his bed with a red button on it. I wasn't worried about Alzheimers, but I was worried about stroke. I could just see him taking his slippers off to go to bed and having a stroke and hitting his head on the red button. That's a real nightmare! We wake up in the morning, and there's nothing. I just decided, like David did, that was just too much power to be in any one place.

But then I went beyond that, and I realized that the human population was growing and that development was gobbling up the environment. The planet wasn't getting any bigger, but the human race was by leaps and bounds. The growing population was probably the next biggest problem. The third one was what was happening to the environment by the ever-increasing number of human beings and the improving technology.

For instance, when I was born in 1938, there were just a little over two billion people on the planet. Next year there'll be six billion, and by the time I'm 80, there'll be probably about eight billion. So the population of humans in one lifetime in 80 years will have quadrupled. Not only that, the amount that we use, particularly in the rich world, where about a fifth of the people live -- Western Europe, Japan, the United States -- has increased dramatically. We're utilizing four times as much water as we were 60 years ago, four times as much energy. When I was born there was no air conditioning, hardly any automobiles, and no televisions.

So we have a lot more people using a lot more stuff. We're just sucking the world dry like you would with a couple of straws in a chocolate soda. We're just sucking it dry. We're leaving nothing for the other little critters. We're right in the midst of one of the five periods of extinction. We're losing hundreds of species every day. We're headed for a train wreck. One out of four human beings is literally starving to death. We have new and old diseases stalking all over the world. Any living thing that gets out of control as far as its numbers are concerned is always brought back into line by nature by two things: by starvation and by disease, and that's what humanity is facing.

The Edge of Greatness
I don't know how many of you have ever seen Road Warrior. It's a Warner Brothers movie. It's in my library. It was about these real brutish guys. Civilization has broken down. They're out in the desert driving around fighting over the last few gallons of gasoline and the last tins of food. Where conditions get too difficult, like in Somalia, where the circumstances are really abominable, civilization does break down. You go back to gangs. It's like L.A. You've got the gangs, overcrowding. That's a terrible scenario to see for the human race, because while we’re poised on the edge of disaster on the one hand, we're also on the edge of greatness.

If we just had another hundred years!
Things have happened so fast, we really haven’t had a chance. It's not all our fault, because really all we are is monkeys without tails. Father, I hate to tell you that. We are. Gorillas don't have tails, either. Sometimes we act worse than moneys, too. I never saw a monkey do a genocide on six million other monkeys. You never saw monkeys with nuclear weapons.

Robert Muller worked at the UN for years. I love what he said: If there were people on another planet that looked down at the earth and saw the human race and what they were doing on this planet, they would give us an "F" for planetary management if we were getting a grade.

That doesn't mean it has to be that way, because we have all the technology. We have CNN, we have instantaneous global communications. Within 24 hours of Princess Diana dying, 98 percent of the people on this planet knew that she had died. A hundred years ago it would have taken months for people to find out, and a lot of people never would have known. So we don't really have any excuse other than we are a little bit lazy and a little bit stuck in our ways. We kind of take the easy way out.

Nuclear Weapons Solve Nothing
But with these circumstances, it's too important. That's why I come out here and support David, because he's out here, working to rid the world of nuclear weapons. We're all Don Quixote tilting at windmills. We should get rid of nuclear weapons. That's an easy thing to do, too. We could just go to the UN. The United States is the one that doesn't want to get rid of nuclear weapons. You know why we don't want to get rid of them? Because somehow they think we're going to be able to use nuclear weapons to save ourselves from the starving masses of the Third World when they come to our doorstep. But they aren't going to come in an army! They're coming across the Mexican border right now. They'll walk in one or two at a time. They'll come on steamships. They'll come from Saudi Arabia when they run out of oil over there, they're not going to have water. Right now a gallon of water costs more than a gallon of oil. Nobody drinks tap water anymore. Even the water's not fit to drink most places. That's a problem in the world. One out of four people doesn't have access to clean drinking water.

Nuclear weapons will not protect us from that. Only a more equitable world will protect us from where the real threat is. The real threat is no longer an army marching on us. It's people infiltrating us who are starving. And what are you going to do, shoot them when they come? You can't shoot them. We been doing enough shooting over the past two thousand years, and what has that gotten us? You don't really do much to change somebody's mind by shooting them. It's certainly not the civilized way to do things.

So basically we need a whole new economic system right now. The G.P. means the higher the crime rate, the more money is generated by building new prisons and hiring more policeman. The higher crime rate and the more drugs, that puts more money in circulation, too. But when you chop down the forest, they don't debit it. There's no debit for destruction of the environment. We're cookin' the books. We've got cooked books. We need a new auditor for keeping score of how we're doing! We think we're doing' great, and we're doing lousy! It's kind of like the Braves versus the Padres. We thought we were real good until we faced them in the playoffs, and God knows we didn't even get to see the Yankees. The Padres got smashed by them. We think we're great, but we're not so good. We're leaving a lot on the table.

But we are capable. The guy that runs the Turner Foundation, which I give $25 million a year away for environmental and population causes -- that's my private foundation, I give $100 million away to the UN Foundation, which is a public foundation -- used to run Greenpeace, and he's wonderful. He stays hopeful. He says, "The situation is hopeless, but I might be wrong." I kind of liken it to a baseball game. It's the seventh inning, and humanity is down by five runs. We're down by five, but we still have six at bats. We can still turn it around. The odds are against it, but we can still do it.

Let's Get to Work and Turn It Around!
Now, the way that we're going to have to do it is get off our duffs and really go to work. We have to put our money and our souls and our hearts and into our actions. There were some good things happen in this election. We can turn it around, and we will turn it around if we start acting like intelligent, well-educated, civilized, kind-hearted human beings. Thank you very much."