Medical Leaders Plead For Nuclear Restraint

By William J. Cromie

Gazette Staff

A group of international medical leaders has asked the governments of India and Pakistan not to attack each other with nuclear weapons.

The group includes Bernard Lown, professor of cardiology emeritus at the School of Public Health and co-founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, an organization that won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.

"A nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan would be an unmitigated catastrophe, not only for the people of India and Pakistan but for all humankind," the group wrote in an editorial in yesterday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

The other editorialists are Eugene Chazov of the Cardiology Research Institute in Moscow; William Foege of Emory University in Atlanta; Saeed-Ul-Majeed, president of the Pakistan Medical Association; and R. Jayachandra Reddy, president of the Indian Medical Association. Chazov, also co-founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, accepted the 1985 peace prize with Lown.

The group expresses fear that a military or political confrontation will result in one or the other nation using its nuclear weapons.

"Given a crisis, there is a compelling incentive for a first strike in order to destroy the nuclear stockpile of the other nation," they wrote. "Pakistan and India, sharing a border, have inadequate time for crucial decision-making and, with human reaction time being too slow. . . , these life-and-death judgments will increasingly be relegated to automated computer systems. Ultimately, the bomb takes command of a country's destiny."

Calling nuclear war "an accident waiting to happen," the medical leaders urge India and Pakistan to build trust in each other and pledge not to use their nuclear weapons first.

The authors note that a bomb smaller than those tested in India and Pakistan killed and maimed 100,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

Lown and his colleagues point out that "Pakistan and India have demonstrated the power to extend the lives of their people. In both Pakistan and India, citizens no longer fear smallpox. Both are eliminating polio. . . [and] providing health benefits unknown to [their] predecessors. Both now have the capacity to neutralize all these gains by promoting a public-health disaster that would shorten lives and destroy the rich future that is possible."