Protecting The World From Nuclear War

Ask Dr. B. Lachlan Forrow, coordinator of teaching programs for the Division of Medical Ethics at the Medical School, if nuclear weapons can be eliminated by the year 2000.

"What were the chances of the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989? Who would have believed that Nelson Mandela would be freed and elected president of South Africa?" Forrow responds. "Anything is possible."

And Forrow, who was recently selected as the new chair of the board of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW),says his organization is working towards the complete abolition of all nuclear weapons by that deadline.

Forrow, a 1983 graduate of the Medical School, has been a member of IPPNW since its creation in 1981 and will serve his term as chair for two years.

The organization, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, has three ultimate goals: "to prevent all wars, to promote nonviolent conflict resolution, and to minimize the effects of war and preparations for war on health, development, and the environment."

"Nuclear weapons threaten to endanger human life and civilization," says Forrow, also an instructor in medicine at the Medical School who practices at the Beth Israel Hospital. "It is unrealistic to think that if they exist that they won't be used."

IPPNW is composed of 83 member countries, boasting a membership of 200,000 doctors worldwide.

Doctors have a natural interest in preventing nuclear war, says Dr. Victor W. Sidel, a 1957 Medical School graduate and professor of social medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "Our job as physicians is not only to treat illness but also to prevent trauma."

"We're doctors, and when it comes to lives, we don't care about political ideologies. If Russian children are threatened by nuclear explosions, I care," says Forrow. "The hospitals, bloodbanks would be destroyed [in a nuclear war]. Doctors can't do anything in that situation."

The IPPNW's executive committee met last month in Moscow with high level officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the senior science adviser to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Sidel says.

Sidel says that access to top U.S. government officials is better under the Clinton administration than it was during the Reagan and Bush years.

Many politicians in different countries recognize that the abolition of nuclear weapons is the only safe approach to international security, Forrow says.

"We need to ask what the international security structure is now and create a more secure structure that excludes nuclear war fare," he says.

Forrow's two part plan calls first for the elimination of all nuclear weapons, and then strict control over the ingredients necessary to make them.

IPPNW founder Dr. Bernard Lown emphasizes that grassroots enthusiasm was critical in establishing the organization. Lown, professor of cardiology emeritus at the School of public Health and director of the Lown Cardiovascular Center, says the association could not have been created if medical students had not volunteered to help him 12 years ago.

Lown says such grassroots participation will be necessary to shift the world perspective on nuclear weapons. "World citizens will help shape an international civil society," he says. "People's movements will tell governments how to behave on the issue of nuclear war."

Harvard has a special responsibility to campaign against nuclear weapons, Forrow says. He cites former Harvard President James B. Conant '13, who acted as science adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt '04 and oversaw the construction and deployment of the atomic bomb during World War II.

"Conant made a distinction between wartime and peacetime," says Forrow. "He said the bomb was made in wartime to end war, but that in peacetime, we could turn back the clock."