Anti-War Group Founded by Soviet, U.S. Doctors Gets Nobel Peace Prize

The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, founded by an American and a Soviet to avert a holocaust, won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced today.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee invited the American and Soviet co-founders of the group to accept the award in Oslo on Dec. 10.

American Dr. Bernard Lown and Soviet Dr. Yevgeny Chazov, both in Geneva today for the fifth anniversary of the founding the group, said that they were “delighted and overjoyed” that their anti-nuclear movement had won the prestigious prize.

“But an even greater prize for us and for humanity as a whole would be if everybody stopped nuclear explosions,” Lown and Chazov said in a statement.

Campaign to Get Money

They said the prize money, a record $225,000, will be used to further their organization’s campaign against nuclear testing.

Lown, a professor of cardiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, said he “welcomes and fully endorses” Moscow’s current unilateral freeze on nuclear testing announced two months ago by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Chazov, a cardiologist who was the personal physician to the last three Soviet leaders, said the work of the group “should catalyze indifferent people to support us, and our action is a medical prescription for a freeze on nuclear testing.”

Nobel committee Chairman Egil Aarvik said the physicians group, comprising more than 145,000 doctors in 41 countries, “has done a very important job in spreading factual information and knowledge about the catastrophic effects of a nuclear war.

Increases Public Pressure

“This contributes to increasing public pressure on the nuclear arms race,” Aarvik said in reading the awards citation.

Asked how the Nobel Committee, known for making controversial choices in the past, could select a group that has been portrayed in the official Soviet media as endorsing Kremlin policy, Aarvik said:

“How could it be otherwise in the Soviet Union? When you ask somebody in Russia to comment on this award, they will not say anything other than that the physicians are following their line of peace policy.

“We are not looking at the Soviet outlook but considering only what the physicians say they will do and what they have done.”

After an exchange of letters, Lown and Chazov founded their anti-nuclear movement in Geneva in December, 1980. Their viewpoint was that the world doctors stand helpless in the face of an atomic holocaust and that their only option was to help prevent nuclear war from breaking out.

Called for Cooperation

At their fifth annual convention in Budapest on July 1, the physicians called on President Reagan and Gorbachev to cooperate “to end forever what is clearly an unprecedented threat to the public health”--the threat of a nuclear war.

“There are enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world hundreds of times and there is no example in history when arms stockpiles have not been used,” said Lown, active in nuclear disarmament movement in the United States since the 1960s.

The Nobel committee chose the Boston-based organization from among a record 99 nominees--65 individuals, including Reagan, and 34 organizations. It was the 12th time an organization won the prize.

The Peace Prize is the first Nobel award to be given this year. The five prizes in the sciences and literature will be announced in Stockholm next week.

The Peace Prize, established in the 1895 will of Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, has often stirred controversy.

In the last two years, the Committee has been widely praised for its successive awards to Lech Walesa, founder of the Polish trade union Solidarity, and South African anti-apartheid crusader Bishop Desmond Tutu.