Why Doctors Are Right to Oppose Testing

The Soviets have said that they will end their one-year ban on testing nuclear arms this week unless the United States agrees to follow suit. Among the American groups that have urged our government to join in a moratorium is Physicians for Social Responsibility, which has been criticized by some for taking a stand on a test ban because the issue is outside its members’ area of competence.

This is not the first time that American physicians concerned with the dangers of the nuclear-arms race have been criticized for speaking out. In 1980, shortly after the first large public meeting on the medical consequences of nuclear war, a political scientist told me that we doctors were doing the nation a disservice. By describing the unprecedented scope of death and suffering--crush injuries, radiation illness, burns, infections, cancers--that would result from a nuclear war, and emphasizing the impotence of the medical community to respond, American physicians were putting “pressure” on our government. We risked “tipping the balance,” he said, because similar pressure was not being exerted by Soviet doctors on their government.

Last fall, after the Nobel peace prize was awarded to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, we were again criticized--this time for working with the Soviet co-president of IPPNW, Yevgeny Chazov, when it was reported that he had participated in the isolation of the great Soviet physicist and Nobel Peace laureate Andrei Sakharov.

In my view the criticisms are valid but beside the point. None are relevant to the fundamental question of what is best for America.

We American doctors, speaking through anti-nuclear groups and professional organizations, including the American Medical Assn., have depicted for our fellow citizens the medical realities of nuclear war. When that message was first widely disseminated, some leaders were talking about winning a nuclear war. Our goal was well summarized in an AMA report that stressed the necessity of informing the President and Congress of “the medical consequences of nuclear war, and that no adequate medical response is possible.” Thus we physicians did intend to exert “pressure,” in the tradition of our democracy. And, to the extent that we succeeded in educating those who believed that we could survive a nuclear war, we contributed to national security.

Do Soviet physicians speak to their fellow citizens publicly on the subject? I believe that they do, but this puts no pressure on their government. Rather, I assume that it goes the other way: Because the Soviet government wishes to end the nuclear-arms race, it encourages its physicians to speak out.

However, that in no way signals new freedoms in the Soviet Union. For example, while 60,000 Soviet doctors are in IPPNW, others with similar views on the nuclear-arms race--like Joseph Brodsky, who is also a physician but in an organization not approved by the government--have been imprisoned for speaking out on the same topic. In other words, those who adhere to the party line are free to speak; those who do not, speak at their peril, although their basic message--the nuclear-arms race must be stopped--is no different.

Should continued abridgement of human rights in the Soviet Union alter the American goal of ending the nuclear-arms race? Since it is in the interest of the United States and the world to encourage nuclear peace, I believe that it should not. However, American physicians are well positioned to tell Soviet colleagues in IPPNW and Soviet leaders that a change in their approach to human rights could help their (and our) cause. For example, the release of Sakharov, the most visible of those whose rights have been stripped away, and Brodsky, whose imprisonment seems a particular affront to the goals of IPPNW, might allay the skepticism that many Americans now feel about any agreement with the Soviets.

It is true that the technical aspects of a test ban have no medical components. Why, then, does a group of doctors take a public stand on the issue? As concerned citizens, many physicians have informed themselves about it. They have learned that in the absence of testing, new nuclear arms cannot be built. They also have learned that existing technology made it very difficult for the Soviets to test surreptitiously, even when we depended exclusively on our satellites and our other technology outside the Soviet Union for surveillance. The recent Soviet acceptance of a monitoring station on their soil run by the American Natural Resources Defense Council may reduce further the remote possibility of clandestine testing.

President Reagan and other leaders have said that nuclear arms must never be used, that they exist only to deter others from using theirs. These devices now exceed 50,000 in total number. The Soviet Union and the United States, with 11% of the world’s population, have 97% of them. Today’s nuclear arsenal has 2,700 times the destructive power of all the explosives used in World War II. It is many times greater than required for deterrence. Nobody has persuasively argued that building more will lead to more security. Rather, many experts say that more capacity increases the possibility of their use.

The primary question for all Americans must, of course, be: What is in our best interest? Physicians (and others) have asked whether we might be worse off today if there had ever been, in the past 40 years, a bilateral decision to stop testing and building nuclear arms. On the contrary, I have heard experts say that we would have been well served by such an agreement. Thus, if the Soviets feel that a ban on testing is in their interest--as now seems the case--and we know that it is in ours, why not seize it?