Hello and welcome. I am Dr George Lundberg and this is At Large at Medscape.
I recognize that today's effort may be too little too late, but I want to try anyway. It has been established by expert consensus for many decades that there is no adequate medical response to nuclear war. All relevant organized medical and public health bodies have condemned the idea. And as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Bill Foege noted so many years ago [in a personal communication], the notion of using nuclear weapons in war should be considered such an unthinkable idea that it is alien to planet Earth. The key work in this whole field was historically led by Nobel Peace Prize awardee and Harvard cardiologist Bernie Lown.
Bluster, bullying, punitive sanctions, embargoes, the deterrent effect of a balanced ability to annihilate each other, posturing, fear, restraint, morality, and common sense have, in fact, prevented the use (but not the building, improving, expanding, spreading, even stockpiling) of nuclear weaponry thus far, since 1945.
Thank you, decision makers.
But how about the future? It seems quite shaky to me, what with current leadership in some nuclear countries. I mean, no knowledgeable person ever accused Mikhail Gorbachev of being crazy, loony, or "not all there." And the date of onset of the clinical significance of Ronald Reagan's well-documented Alzheimer's is a subject of some dispute.[1]
After 1983, the JAMA began the tradition of publishing an annual Hiroshima theme issue dedicated to the prevention of nuclear war. My editorial in August 1985 was "Prescriptions for Peace in a Nuclear Age."[2] It was based on a presentation made at a colloquium of editors of international medical journals at the 5th Congress of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War on June 30, 1985, in Budapest.
This, in part, is what it said: "Harvard Public Health School Dean Howard Hiatt offered prescriptions for prevention of the final epidemic; that, of course, being nuclear war. He proposed that there be a substantial shift of funding from the nuclear arms race to the health needs of developing countries, especially those of children, as a deterrent."
In the January 27, 1984, JAMA international theme issue, Kansas City cardiologist E. Grey Dimond stated in his editorial, "A Fundamental Unit of Peace,"[3] that the 10,000 Chinese scholars in our American universities at that time served as virtual guarantors of peace with China.
He further suggested[4] that the USA and the USSR should include in their weapon limitation agreements obligatory academic exchanges of 250,000 university students from each side, integrated into each other's societies as agents of security for both sides. This Dimond proposal could help to prevent nuclear war because people are unlikely to bomb their own children.
In 1985[2] I added four other prescriptions. There should be:
Extensive international travel at all times because people are unlikely to bomb their own friends;
Widespread intermarriage across countries because people are unlikely to bomb their own families and progeny;
Further development of the global economy because people are unlikely to bomb their own companies (ie, money or even real estate towers);
Extensive scientific and cultural exchanges because people are unlikely to bomb their colleagues.
To be effective, proposed solutions need to take into account that even "fail-safe" systems fail—if designed and run by humans—in the long run, sooner or later. Because of the continued instability of human beings, prevention efforts must be sweeping, bold, idealistic, visionary, and based upon the fundamentals of human behavior.
Am I stating that we (the US) and many countries in the United Nations should do a complete "about-face" with the handling of North Korea and even Iran? Yes, I am.
There is no adequate medical response to nuclear war. Prevention is the only answer.
That's my opinion. I am Dr George Lundberg, at large at Medscape.
Medscape Internal Medicine © 2017 WebMD, LLC
Any views expressed above are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of WebMD or Medscape.
Cite this: There Is No Medical Response to Nuclear War - Medscape - Oct 12, 2017.
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