Doctors of the world unite!
Hehir, J. Bryan
Church/worldwatch Doctors of the world unite! J. Bryan Hehir IN THE EARLY stages of the SALT II debate, columnist George F. Will wrote: "It is said that since the summer of 1945, the world has...
...This ominous background makes all the more interesting the appearance of a new organization, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which held its first international conference at Airlie, Virginia, from March 20-23...
...Such weapons are part of the wallpaper of the age, unnoticed, and, to almost everybody, uninteresting...
...The first is psychological: the physicians cut through the sanitized statistics and language of strategic theorists and contrast them, in frightening detail, with descriptions of what the human body is like after a nuclear attack...
...Medical specificity makes three contributions to the public understanding of the arms race...
...By concretizing the meaning of a nuclear exchange, the physicians make a psychological point with political consequences...
...In a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr...
...The organization bears the names of some of the leading figures in U.S...
...Soviet and American physicians are in serious dialogue at a moment when discussions in other areas are in abeyance...
...Their approach is precise and appropriately clinical...
...At the heart of the nuclear debate today is an old issue with new life: whether nuclear weapons exist exclusively for deterrence or whether they have other rationally justifiable uses...
...The danger is a product of new weapons systems (ever larger and more accurate) combined with the now revived idea of the rational possibility of limited nuclear war...
...They cannot be dismissed since they speak about an aspect of the nuclear debate where the strategists and the statesmen are laymen...
...They are careful to have background material on the arms race, but they focus precisely and powerfully on its potential medical consequences...
...Detente has come upon bad times politically, but the physicians appear convinced that war and politics are too important for health to be left to shifting political winds...
...If the group wishes to be taken seriously, let it throw the Soviets out...
...Rosenfeld is, by any standard, a long way from the hard right of American politics...
...If each physician spent only ten minutes on the diagnosis and treatment of each victim and worked for twenty hours a day, it would take fourteen days for every injured person to be seen for the first time.'' These calculations were updated in great detail during the conference by a powerful blend of scientific studies, films, and slide shows, ranging from films taken at Hiroshima and Nagasaki hours after the cities were bombed to calculations of how many severe burns could be treated if an American city suffered a nuclear attack today...
...On this very point, however, the conference came under fire...
...From this question comes the debate about extended deterrence and limited nuclear strikes...
...Bernard Lown of Harvard and Dr...
...physicians to join with their Soviet counterparts: "They should never have accepted Soviet doctors as 'non-political' soulmates...
...his advice, therefore, is significant as an indication (Continued on page 286)on page 286...
...They do not intend to engage the entire range of war and peace issues, nor even to dispute the arcane details of the strategic debate...
...Their approach is based on the conviction that nuclear war is the number-one health hazard today (it was compared to the Black Plague), and the only remedy is preventive medicine...
...Lown and his American colleagues recalled the conclusions of studies done in 1962: "They estimated that the blast, fire storms, and acute ionizing radiation from detonation of only two nuclear weapons would kill 1,052,000 people out of a Greater Boston population of three million...
...The significance of the observation lies in the contrast it highlights between our psychic accommodation to the danger of nuclear weapons, and the escalating political possibility of their use in this century...
...This invites all the shameless fraud of which Soviets are capable...
...When exposed to the data presented at the conference, it is not difficult to understand the determination of the doctors to continue dialogue in spite of an unfavorable political climate...
...The physicians are specifically determined to discredit any idea in the public mind that the medical effects of a nuclear exchange could be treated...
...and Soviet medicine, as well as physicians from Japan who have participated in the studies of long-term consequences affecting the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...The psychological contribution is matched by a political one...
...The co-chairmen, Dr...
...The doctors refuse to be counted among those who are trying to convince the public that limited and nuclear are compatible adjectives for discussing warfare today...
...They have done theii homework assiduously, as the calibei of the papers at the conference proved, and they have concluded that "limited nuclear war'' from a medical viewpoint is an absurdity...
...J. Bryan Hehir IN THE EARLY stages of the SALT II debate, columnist George F. Will wrote: "It is said that since the summer of 1945, the world has lived' in the shadow of the bomb.' But the shadow is, of course, metaphorical, and the assumption that mankind has been weighed down by thoughts of nuclear weapons is false...
...The strength of the physicians' case lies in its specificity...
...Eugene Chazov of the Soviet Academy of Science, have both worked on the joint U.S.-USSR studies on cardiology initiated in the heydays of detente...
...Of those surviving the immediate explosion, approximately one million would die from the injuries that they received...
...Stephen S. Rosenfeld of the Washington Post judged it a tactical mistake for U.S...
Vol. 108 • May 1981 • No. 9
