Senate Eager to Approve Verifiable Pact, Gore Says

Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.) told an international congress of physicians here Friday that the U.S. Senate would “welcome the chance to ratify a good, comprehensive and verifiable (arms control) treaty next year.” He also offered his prescription for preventing nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Gore, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, addressed the opening session of the 7th World Congress of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The group was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1985.

About 2,000 physicians from 50 countries are expected to attend the congress, which is to continue for four days, as well as 500 Soviet physicians. The organization has 150,000 members worldwide.

Gore, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that one of the main points in his program to prevent nuclear war is a verifiable arms control agreement that would make it impossible for either side to secretly mass forces near East-West borders. He said this would reduce the fear of a conventional attack.

The reduction of fear, Gore said, is a key element in producing a stable peace.

He said that American fear of a Soviet strike has led to President Reagan’s proposed space-based missile defense system called the Strategic Defense Initiative, which in turn, he said, has inspired fear among the Soviets.

“We must be doctors to each other’s fears,” he said, “and seek to dispel them by removing any rational basis for them.”

Gore said the Soviets would be doing themselves a favor by dismantling the controversial radar complex at Krasnoyarsk in the central Soviet Union, which he said is in violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the two countries.

Gore also said that Soviet respect for human rights, as outlined in the Helsinki accords of 1975, would create the kind of atmosphere that could lead to further arms cuts.

He added pointedly: “Of what use is this agreement, if those who embrace it are treated as turncoats, criminals and even mistreated falsely as psychiatric cases?”

Directed at Chazov

Among others, this remark was directed at Dr. Yevgeny Chazov, the Soviet minister of health and a co-founder of the physicians’ organization with Dr. Bernard Lown, the American heart specialist.

The organization’s Nobel Prize was sharply criticized in some circles because Chazov, as a senior Soviet health official, was considered to be responsible for committing Soviet dissidents to mental hospitals as psychiatric cases.

Chazov, in his speech, warned against nuclear war, saying he had seen the victims of last year’s disaster at the Chernobyl atomic power plant in the Ukraine.

“It is terrifying to imagine millions of people dying like that,” he said.

Dr. Armand Hammer, the chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp., was presented the medical group’s first Humanitarian Award.

In his acceptance remarks, Hammer predicted that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev will meet President Reagan in Washington later this year and will address a joint session of the U.S. Congress.

Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the former ambassador to the United States who is a senior Soviet foreign policy specialist, read a speech by Gorbachev welcoming the delegates to Moscow.