A Doctor Who Prescribes World Nuclear Antidotes

Dr. Herbert Abrams talks about nuclear war not only as a radiologist who might have to treat the wounds it would inflict, but also as a man whose organization won a 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for trying to keep such a war from happening. There will be no way to try the superpowers for malpractice for using nuclear weapons, says Abrams, so the best insurance is a world fully informed of the consequences of nuclear war and working to reduce its likelihood.

The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, a body Abrams helped establish, outlines nuclear risks in forums and publications around the world. Closer to home, Abrams, a physician who has written many of the textbooks about diagnosing heart disease, lectures to Stanford University undergraduates about accidental nuclear war--and about the danger of annihilation inherent in a world where weapons could be stolen by terrorists or decisions blurred by a disabled President.

Despite the progress toward arms reduction in the last Reagan years, Abrams is worried about continuing that progress under George Bush, concerned that Bush went out of the mainstream and veered toward the right during his presidential campaign. And “the agenda of the radical right demands some kind of obeisance in the international arena.”

Bush has a window of opportunity that may not come again soon, Abrams suggests, recalling a dinner conversation he had with Andrei Sakharov at the dissident physicist’s Moscow apartment. Sakharov spoke of a rigid system in which “no amount of good will or intelligent planning or glasnost or perestroika or democratization” can necessarily achieve within an acceptable time frame what the Soviet people want to see.

“Sakharov is not sanguine about the chances of (Soviet President Mikhail S.) Gorbachev staying in power,” Abrams said, adding that if tangible change is to occur in the arms-control arena, it therefore must happen in the next three to five years.

“I think it’s an enormous opportunity to move ahead aggressively in arms-control agreements that are really savage cuts,” Abrams added, “and I’m not sure that George Bush has the stamina and the durability to accept the radical right’s critique that he would be compromising our security. Instead of having 20 times overkill, we’ll have only 12 or 11 or 10. I think it’s an opportunity which we’ve really got to grasp.”

Abrams speaks of such concerns in the low-key manner of an instructor who might be telling a medical student how to take an X-ray. How can he be so understated in talking of nuclear war? The subject, after all, is about the possible deaths of millions of people. It is also about the number of military people with drug or alcohol problems who have had their fingers near the nuclear trigger.

“It’s an area in which I think hyperbole can really obscure some of the seriousness of the problems,” said the 68-year-old physician during a recent interview in his basement office at Stanford’s School of Medicine. “I think the facts speak for themselves.” Besides, he added, “I’ve got an actor in my family” already. His brother, Mason Adams, is the dry voice in dozens of commercials and the man who played managing editor Charley Hume to Ed Asner’s Lou Grant.

Abrams remembers the time when, for him, concern turned into activism during Jimmy Carter’s presidency: “In the early 1960s, a lot of us were concerned about testing in the atmosphere; radiologists had to be concerned about that,” Abrams recalled. “Then the partial test ban came and I was frankly fully involved running a department of radiology, participating in the activities of a medical school,” first at Stanford and later at Harvard. But with increasing tensions in the Persian Gulf, the unthinkable--that is, use of nuclear weapons--moved into the category of the thinkable. And Abrams became involved.

“Carter’s approach to this was that we might have to use any weapon that was available to us in order to make certain the free flow of oil,” to ensure protection of American interests. Drawn by Carter’s policies to study the issue, Abrams discovered that “virtually every President from Eisenhower on considered the use of nuclear weapons . . . . It began to dawn on me that these weapons of annihilation were being considered for use in the settlement of disputes between nations when I had honestly not thought that that was ever in the cards.”

One of Abrams’ early contributions was a report on the medical problems of survivors of nuclear war, published in November, 1981, in the New England Journal of Medicine. Among survivors, millions would have trauma or burns. A third of those would have radiation sickness as well. The radiation to which they had been subjected would increase susceptibility to infection, as would subsequent hardships. Food and drinkable water would be in increasingly short supply. On top of all that, fewer than 80,000 doctors might be left alive to treat the injured.

Abrams thinks Physicians for Social Responsibility, which holds its national meeting March 10 and 11 in Palo Alto, has played a major role in telling the public “what medicine could and could not do if there was a massive exchange.” People have begun to understand that talk about survival or a winnable nuclear war really has no relationship to reality, he adds.

Physicists, educators, engineers and business people all played a role, but Abrams thinks doctors were central. “Physicians are a conservative bunch. This was a conservation of health and life issue.”

The chance to be a bridge between those doctors and arms controllers brought Abrams back in 1985 to Stanford--where he’d done his medical residence and taught for 16 years--after almost two decades at Harvard. Today, he is not only a professor of radiology but also a member-in-residence of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Arms Control. The center examines arms control with experts from several disciplines, including politics, history and science. Abrams felt he could bring together “the physicians, who are suspicious of the arms controllers as people who want to manage the stockpiles, and the arms controllers who wonder about these kooky doctors invading their territory.”

As early as the late 1970s, Abrams and several medical colleagues had revitalized a U.S. group known as Physicians for Social Responsibility. By 1981 they had met with doctors from the Soviet Union, Japan, Canada and various Western European nations. Among the key leaders were U.S. doctors Bernard Lown, James Muller, Eric Chivian and Abrams, plus Evgueni Chazov of the Soviet Union.

The American participants always made clear to their Soviet counterparts that “the organization would be professional, medical and scientific and that the moment it was used as a propaganda vehicle for the Soviet Union or for the United States or for anyone, that our interest in it would terminate.

“There may have been a few individuals who looked at the Soviet Union through rose-colored classes,” Abrams said. But most had no illusions. The real question “is whether we were able--working through individuals who at that time, in the Brezhnev era, were obviously acceptable to the leadership--were we able to get access to Soviet society in any way, shape or form? The answer is yes, we were able to. Were they free to criticize their own government the way we are here? No, not at all.

“But so long as they accepted our agenda, whether that coincided with theirs, that was fine with us . . . so long as they understood that a sense of alarm and concern had to be conveyed broadly through the world.”