Nobel Peace Prize Won by Anti-War Physicians : Global Organization Founded by U.S. and Soviet Doctors

The 1985 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, an anti-war organization of 145,000 medical personnel in 41 countries that was founded by American and Soviet doctors.

The Nobel Committee said it hoped its choice would encourage progress in U.S.-Soviet arms reduction talks.

Committee members said they attached “particular importance to the fact that the organization was formed as a result of a joint initiative by Soviet and American physicians.”

“If this award has any message, it is for the two superpowers to come up with results of their (arms) negotiations,” said Egil Aarvik, the 72-year-old chairman of the five-member selection panel.

Two of the six co-founders of the doctors’ anti-nuclear group, Dr. Bernard Lown of Harvard University and Dr. Yevgeny I. Chazov of the Soviet Union’s Cardiological Institute, who serve as co-presidents of the group, hugged and kissed each other at a news conference in Geneva, where a messenger brought news their organization had won the gold medal.

Lown, 64, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health in Cambridge, Mass., and Chazov, 56, were in the Swiss city for a seminar. They had scheduled their news conference to discuss the effect of nuclear war on the world’s climate.

‘Delighted and Overjoyed’

“We are obviously delighted and overjoyed,” said Lown, “but we would treasure a ban on all nuclear testing much more than the money.

“We are racing to the brink and we have to stop,” Lown added. “At this rate, you will not see the year 2000 and, indeed, it is a miracle that we are alive today.”

Chazov said, “I feel that no single person can do something worthwhile. Only a big movement, a large organization, can move things ahead.”

In its citation, the Nobel committee said an exchange of letters between the two doctors led to a 1980 meeting in Geneva, which in turn led to creation of their organization.

“It is the committee’s opinion that this organization has performed a considerable service to mankind,” said the citation, crediting the group with “creating an awareness of the catastrophic consequences of atomic warfare.”

“Such an awakening of public opinion as is now apparent both in the East and in the West, in the North and in the South, can give the present arms limitation negotiations new perspectives and a new seriousness,” it added.

Award Will Further Campaign

Lown and Chazov said the prize money will be used to further the campaign against nuclear testing waged by their organization, headquartered in Brookline, Mass.

Chazov is among Russia’s most prominent physicians. His patients included the late Soviet leaders Leonid I. Brezhnev, Yuri V. Andropov and Konstantin U. Chernenko.

He is a member of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee and is a deputy minister of health. He is also a member of the Soviet Academy of Science and other scientific organizations. He has been designated a Hero of Socialist Labor and is a 1982 winner of the Lenin Prize.

The physicians’ group has received strong support in the official Soviet press.

American diplomats in Moscow described the Soviet branch as “a propaganda outfit.” Asked to comment on this, Dr. John Pastore, secretary of the organization, said in Boston: “We do not respond to accusations by the CIA or any other political or quasi-political group. We do not exist to defend ourselves against criticism but to spread the message that the nuclear arms race must stop.”

Pastore said President Reagan has told the group he agrees with many of it goals. “President Reagan has written us on several occasions that he believes that nuclear war cannot be won . . . (and) that nuclear weapons should be eliminated from the face of the earth.”

Talks ‘a Masquerade’

Lown condemned past U.S.-Soviet arms negotiations as “a masquerade” and contested the U.S. arguments that a ban on underground nuclear test explosions could not be verified. “Nuclear explosions can be verified,” he said.

Lown said he “welcomes and fully endorses” Moscow’s unilateral freeze on nuclear testing announced by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in August.

Chazov said the physician’s organization worked to show the world “what our planet would be like after a nuclear war.”

Lown said the group had an annual budget of about $1 million and might use the 1.8 million Swedish kronor (about $225,000) which comes with the Peace Prize to send doctors around the world to speak about the need for an end to the nuclear threat to mankind.

One argument advanced by the physicians’ organization is that prospects of treating vast numbers of injured in a nuclear attack are far worse than many official accounts might indicate.

Lown said it was hoped the award might also get the group’s leaders their first meeting with either President Reagan or Gorbachev.

He said the doctors’ group had “become a political force in today’s world.” He called for politics “neither left-wing nor right-wing, East or West.”

Politics for Survival

“We need a politics of human survival, and this is what we doctors speak for,” he said.

The doctors’ alliance was chosen from a record field of 60 individual and 39 organizational candidates for the award. Reagan was among those nominated.

It was the 15th time since the award was established in 1901 that the prize went to an organization rather than to an individual.

Norwegian Prime Minister Kaare Willoch issued a statement calling the award “well deserved encouragement in this important work of spreading information . . . about nuclear weapons and their disastrous inconceivable consequences.”

Nominated for Three Years

Norway’s national news agency, Norsk Telegrambyraa, said the group had been nominated for the last three years. The awards committee never gives such details.

Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the Nobel Peace Prize to honor the person or group doing the most for “fraternity between peoples,” for cutting the size of armies or for holding or promoting peace conferences.

Last year’s winner was black Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.

Other Nobel prizes to be announced next week in Stockholm will honor achievements in medicine, economics, physics and chemistry. The Nobel literature prize is expected to be announced within two weeks.

The Peace Prize winners receive the award in Oslo and winners of the other Nobel prizes receive their awards in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.

The committee invited Lown and Chazov to Olso to receive the award.