The Anti-Nukes Live : Physicians for Social Responsibility Rebuilding, Taking On Environmental Woes

The Berlin Wall has fallen. Glasnost reigns. Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev is a Nobel Peace Prize hero.

Indeed, many Americans regard the Cold War, as we have known it for more than four decades, as over. And with its demise, that ultimate nightmare--a nuclear wipeout from a Soviet-U.S. showdown--seems no longer a reality.

Not so, argue disarmament activists such as Dr. Robert Wesley of Irvine. The nightmare, he says, has merely changed its shape, become subtler and more complex, more insidious.

“This (end of nuclear threat) may be the perception but not the reality. You may have some treaties signed, (President) 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,” said Wesley, a member of the Orange County chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), long a prominent organization in the anti-nuclear movement.

And, added the 41-year-old cardiologist who is a 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.”

Nevertheless, Wesley and other PSR officials concede that this aura of nuclear peace has lulled many to drop out of the activist ranks of the anti-nuclear movement.

The Washington-based Physicians for Social Responsibility, which is composed mostly of physicians but includes others in the health professions, is itself a dramatic example of membership drain.

PSR membership nationally dropped from 55,000 in the mid-1980s--when PSR and its parent body, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, were at the height of their recognition--to 40,000.

At the same time, in Los Angeles County, whose chapter is still one of PSR’s largest, the decline was from 2,400 to 2,000. The Orange County chapter declined from 250 to 180 members.

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

Last Saturday, 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-ever awards banquet--the recipient will be a longtime global peace advocate, media/sports mogul Ted Turner--to woo new members, raise money and spread the word of its existence.

And next spring, the Orange County chapter will co-sponsor a UCI conference on the environment, an issue that many PSR chapters have adopted as one on par with the dangers of nuclear weapons and the military syndrome.

“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.”

The PSR has always had its ups and downs.

In 1963, two years after the national organization was founded, 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 PSR, galvanized by a mercurial new leader, Helen Caldicott, regrouped and mounted new campaigns to stop the arms race, ban all nuclear testing and seek massive cuts in military spending.

“People were scared again (in the early 1980s). We had the Three-Mile Island (nuclear power plant) accident. And our leaders were following an incredible premise: that a nuclear war was survivable,” recalled Orange County chapter 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 forming 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, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.

To some PSR members, the successes of the 1980s did much to dispel any notions that the medical profession--usually viewed as a highly conservative lot--cannot also be deeply committed to social advocacy.

It is a view that stems from images of doctors as more concerned with protecting their professional turf or financial status than taking activist roles in areas of social problems.

“We know some citizens feel this way about doctors, but that’s a bad rap,” said Wesley, who maintains that PSR activities have more than countered that unflattering public perception.

“(PSR) shows that doctors are concerned with ethical and moral issues. We have the same sense of social idealism,” said Wesley, who took part in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s and ‘70s.

“From a medical point of view, the destruction of our society is, after all, the ultimate epidemic,” added Wesley, who is with the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Long Beach.

Once, when the Orange County chapter ran an ad in an Irvine weekly newspaper publicizing its anti-nuclear and global peace stances and providing a clip-out coupon for requesting information, it did receive a few nasty remarks scribbled on some mailed coupons.

“You know, like ‘Go back to Russia’ and that sort of thing,” recalled Strauss, who is on the staff of Memorial Miller Children’s Hospital in Long Beach. “But it was overall an ideological reaction, we believe, not specifically against doctors.”

Otherwise, Strauss added, the local PSR these days seems a rather obscure organization. “We’re listed in the white pages for people seeking information. But most people who call us think we’re some kind of physician-referral service.”

In fact, PSR members contend that their activist involvement has not brought them any significantly adverse reactions from patients.

“Even if my patients know about my (social-issue) beliefs, it doesn’t seem to present any problems. I mean, I’m pretty open about it and I haven’t lost anyone that I know of,” said Galluccio, who has a private practice based in Newport Beach.

But then, officially, PSR activism does not include protest marches and sit-ins or other high-profile staples associated with the more militant.

“Some members have done that on an individual basis, not as a chapter,” explained Strauss, who was among those arrested for trespassing--the charges were later dismissed--during a 1986 protest at the Nevada test site near Las Vegas.

Official PSR demonstrations are aimed at being more scholarly, like the recent PSR gathering outside the White House. The group, which included Wesley, met to present a petition to President Bush urging avoidance of nuclear or chemical weapons in the Persian Gulf crisis.

The mission of PSR, members say, is principally educational--such as seminars, research reports, legislative testimony, international exchanges--that rely on the expertise of PSR members.

And the organization is expanding its programming into areas beyond nuclearism.

Last year at UCI, 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, which include such issues as health care, substance abuse, homelessness and the educational system, are more connected to the PSR’s original concerns with nuclearism and defense spending than most realize.

It is a matter of money.

“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,” Strauss said. “It is so monumentally ludricrous.”

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 dismantling of nuclear arsenals, but also protection from contamination and accidents from existing nuclear facilities.

And it is also, they say, being the voice of reality during yet another lapse in the public perception of the nuclear threat.

“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 PSR delegation visited Hiroshima, saw the memorial and museum there and met with survivors of the 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,” Galluccio declared.

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

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