Word: lownes
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...There is no such thing as limited nuclear war," Dr. Bernard Lown, professor of Cardiology at the School of Public Health, says. An IPPNW founder and the organization's president, Lown adds, "Nuclear war can only be an enormous collective act of suicide...
There is no way any country could cope with the aftermath of a nuclear exchange, even if it could be left "limited," Lown says. In normal conditions, 20 to 30 burn victims would saturate Boston's health care facilities. Even the 200 intensive burn care beds in the United States couldn't support a fraction of Boston's burned, assuming that there was any way for rescue workers to enter the radioactive ruins to get them into the hospitals in the first place. "People would be left to die," he states...
...Lown, who founded the national group, Physicians for Social Responsibility in the early '60s, explains that his concern in the past few years with the intensification of the arms race led him and three other doctors, Dr. Herbert L. Abrams, chairman of the Radiology Department and the Medical School. Dr. James E. Muller, assistant professor of Medicine, and Dr. Eric Chivian '64, an MIT staff pyschiatrist, to found an organization which would united doctors from around the world to prevent "the end of civilization...
...arms race has grown too large for an anti-nuclear movement in one country alone to succeed, Lown insists, saying. "We have to get the Russians involved. We need medical journals, medical societies, and key doctors involved." Professional ties between the Soviet Union and the U.S. in the field of cardiology facilitated the IPPNW's goal of organizing doctors with similar nuclear fears in the two countries. Dr. Eugene I. Chazov, director general of the National Cardiological Research Center and Leonid Brezhnev's personal physician--a "critically important physician in the Soviet regime"--possessed enough influence in the USSR...
...dangerous right now for a number of changing conditions. The first is the sheer multiplication in the number of weapons. The world now has a growing stockpile of 50,000 nuclear weapons with a combined 15 million tons of TNT--"one million times greater than the bombs at Hiroshima," Lown emphasizes, adding that technological advances in the accuracy of nuclear weapons have been responsible for dangerous changes in government policy. Increases in targeting accuracy lead to policies of pre-emption, Lown says, citing as an example for President Jimmy Carter's Presidential Directive 59, which effectively recognized the policy...