No Time to Grow Complacent : Activism: The Cold War may appear to be over, say the members of Physicians for Social Responsibility, but the threats of nuclear war and environmental destruction are still very real.

The Berlin Wall has fallen. Glasnost reigns. Gorbachev has won a Nobel Peace Prize.

The Cold War, as we have known it for more than four decades, appears to be over. And with its demise, many Americans also see an end to the ultimate nightmare--nuclear destruction from a U.S.-Soviet showdown.

But for anti-nuclear activists like Dr. Robert Wesley of Irvine, the nightmare has merely changed its shape, becoming more subtle, more complex, more insidious.

“This (end of nuclear threat) may be the perception, but not the reality,” said Wesley, a member of the Orange County chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), long a prominent organization in the anti-nuclear movement. “You may have some treaties signed, Bush and Gorbachev shaking hands and smiling, but the fact remains that the nuclear weaponry being retired is minuscule while new and deadlier weapons are still being developed.”

And, added the 41-year-old cardiologist and member of the national PSR’s house of delegates, “Even if the threat of a Soviet-U.S. war now appears unlikely, you have the Iraqi-Gulf crisis as proof that conventional wars could escalate into nuclear confrontations.”

Consequently, Wesley and other PSR officials are concerned not only about declining membership in the Washington, D.C.-based PSR, but about a growing feeling of complacency from the threat of nuclear war.

Physicians for Social Responsibility had a membership of 55,000 in the mid-1980s. It was a powerful organization, joining forces with its parent body, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, in actively fighting for nuclear disarmament.

But membership has dwindled to 40,000. Membership in Los Angeles County, one of PSR’s largest chapters, has dropped from 2,400 to 2,000. The Orange County chapter is down from 250 to 180 members.

So PSR, whose 125 chapters range in size from a handful of members in North Dakota to thousand-plus groups in the New York City, Boston, San Francisco and Seattle areas, is attempting to revive its membership rolls and broaden its appeal.

And not just through anti-nuclear activism.

Last Saturday, for example, the Los Angeles chapter joined UCLA Extension and the Beyond War Foundation in sponsoring an environmental symposium, “Healing the Planet,” at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

On Nov. 8, at UC Irvine’s University Club, the Orange County chapter will hold its first awards banquet, hoping to woo new members, increase exposure and raise money. Media/sports mogul Ted Turner will be honored for his efforts as a longtime global peace advocate. Next spring, the Orange County chapter will co-sponsor a UC Irvine conference on the environment.

“We are no less concerned with nuclearism. But we are equally concerned with all forms of global destruction, including the slower devastation of our environment,” said Dr. Arthur Strauss of Irvine, another longtime PSR member.

More than ever, added the 38-year-old pediatrician, “the health, the very survival of society and this planet, are endangered. This is no time for organizations like ours to go out of business.”

Physicians for Social Responsibility got into business in 1961. Two years later, it was among the peace groups that basked in a singular triumph--the U.S.-Soviet signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty that halted atmospheric testing.

But after that milestone, PSR membership dropped until the late 1970s when the organization, galvanized by a mercurial new leader, Helen Caldicott, regrouped and mounted new campaigns to stop the arms race, ban all nuclear testing and promote massive cuts in military spending.

“People were scared again (in the early 1980s). We had the Three-Mile Island accident. And our leaders were following an incredible premise: that a nuclear war was survivable,” recalled member Dr. Fred Galluccio, 38, a Newport Beach-based family-practice physician.

“Of course, that was tragic nonsense,” he added. “No one would survive such a holocaust today.”

The success of PSR was instrumental in the formation of similar anti-nuclear “social responsibility” groups in other professional fields, such as those for educators and for architects.

And in 1980, PSR became the U.S. affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the global group founded by American and Soviet physicians that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.

For some PSR members, including Wesley, the group’s activism has helped enhance the medical profession’s image to skeptics who saw doctors as being too absorbed in their own financial status or professional turf to care about social advocacy.

“We know some citizens feel this way about doctors, but that’s a bad rap,” Wesley said. Physicians for Social Responsibility “shows that doctors are concerned with ethical and moral issues. We have the same sense of social idealism.”

Wesley, who took part in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s and ‘70s and now works with the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Long Beach, added: “From a medical point of view, the destruction of our society is, after all, the ultimate epidemic.”

But PSR is finding that recognition for battling this epidemic does not come easily. Perhaps it is because, although it is an organization of activists, it is not militant.

“We’re listed in the white pages for people seeking information (about the organization), but most people who call us think we’re some kind of physician-referral service,” Arthur Strauss said.

Strauss, among those arrested for trespassing during a 1986 protest at the Nevada nuclear test site near Las Vegas--the charges were dismissed--said PSR does not conduct marches, sit-ins or other militant protests. “Some members have done that on an individual basis, (but) not as a chapter,” he said.

More typical of a PSR demonstration are events such as the one that occurred in October, when members gathered outside the White House to present a petition to President Bush urging him to avoid using nuclear or chemical weapons in the Gulf crisis.

The efforts of PSR, members say, are principally educational--seminars, research reports, legislative testimony, international exchanges.

Last year at UC Irvine, for example, the chapter co-sponsored a conference for high school students on the economic impacts in a post-Cold War world. The topic of next spring’s campus conference, again for high school students, will be “Environmental Revitalization: An Issue in National and Global Security.”

As many PSR members see it, these other social concerns, including health care, substance abuse, homelessness and the educational system, are at least economically connected to the PSR’s original concerns with nuclearism and defense spending.

“On one hand, we still spend incredibly enormous sums on the whole military defense system, even on something as doubtful as the B-2 Stealth (bomber), while these urgent social programs go begging for fiscal support,” said Strauss. “It is so monumentally ludicrous.”

But PSR members say they are not about to abandon the cause that first brought them together.

It is not just the unfinished business of seeking full bans on nuclear testing and the dismantling of nuclear arsenals, but protection from contamination and accidents from existing nuclear facilities.

Further, they say, it is being the voice that will prevent the public from becoming complacent about the threat of nuclear war.

“People are once again going through a time of denial (about the threat),” said Galluccio, who took part in a PSR exchange trip in 1985 to several countries, including the Soviet Union and Japan.

That fall, his delegation visited Hiroshima, saw the memorial and museum there and met with survivors of the August, 1945, bombing.

“You can’t forget what you see, hear and feel. Even now, even with the city rebuilt, it is an absolutely horrendous and depressing experience to be there,” said Galluccio.

And to those who believe the nuclear threat has passed into history, along with the end of the Cold War, Galluccio offered this observation:

“Compared with the nuclear weapons we possess today, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima 45 years ago was only a matchstick.”