Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: health

  • World Medical Association Condemns Nuclear Weapons

    The World Medical Association, at its 50th WMA General Assembly, held in Ottawa, Canada, unanimously adopted the following Declaration on Nuclear Weapons:

    Preamble

    In October 1990, the World Medical Association (WMA) adopted a WMA Declaration on Chemical and Biological Weapons (Document 17.Y) in which it condemned and asked asked all governments to refrain from the development and use of these weapons, and urged national medical associations to join the WMA in actively supporting the Declaration. In adopting the Declaration, the WMA acknowledged the dangers and health hazards of the use of these weapons, including the indiscriminate and long lasting effects on civilian populations and on the environment, and argued that existing health care services, technology and manpower may be helpless to relieve the suffering caused by the weapons.

    The effects of nuclear weapons may be even more catastrophic, more indiscriminate, and longer lasting than chemical and biological weapons. These effects, based on studies of the affected populations and on studies of the consequences of radioactive fallout from nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere, have been widely documented over the years.

    At least 40% of the population of Hiroshima and 26% of the population of Nagasaki were killed in the nuclear attacks on these two cities. Modern nuclear weapons are much more destructive and the casualties today would be much higher.

    Apart from the immediately lethal effects of blast, heat and radiation, many of the “survivors” would perish from the latent effects of ionising radiation, (leukaemia, cancer and genetic effects) as well as infectious diseases like cholera, tuberculosis and dysentery, arising from the breakdown in local services.

    Sunlight-absorbing particulate matter, generated by fires following a massive nuclear attack involving many weapons exploding at different sites, would reduce the penetration of sunlight to the earth’s surface and change the physical properties of the earth’s atmosphere, leading to prolonged periods of darkness and devastating effects on agricultural production.

    The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed many health professionals, destroyed all hospitals and infrastructure, such as electricity and water supply, and made it impossible for medical services to function at a time when they were most needed.

    The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its recent advisory opinion on the legal status of nuclear weapons, has declared that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is contrary to the United Nations Charter and to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law.

    The ICJ, in view of the current state of international law, however, could not conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defence in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.

    The WMA Declarations of Geneva (Document 17.A), of Helsinki (Document 17.C) and of Tokyo (Document 17.F) make clear the duties, responsibilities and sacred mission of the medical profession to preserve and safeguard the health of the patient and to consecrate itself to the service of humanity.

    Recommendations

    The WMA considers that, with its unique position of influence in society, it has a duty to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons. In accord with this duty, the WMA:

    i) condemns the development, testing, production, deployment, threat and use of nuclear weapons; ii) requests all governments to refrain from the development, testing, production, deployment, threat and use of nuclear weapons, and to work in good faith towards the elimination of nuclear weapons;

    iii) requests all national medical associations to join the WMA in supporting this Declaration and to press their respective governments to work towards the elimination of nuclear weapons.

  • JAMA Study Calls for Medical Organizations to Unite in Campaign for Nuclear Abolition

    BOSTON, Aug. 4 /PRNewswire/ — Since Hiroshima, physicians have frequently warned of the horrifying burn, blast, and radiation casualties a nuclear war would produce. Even in the post-Cold War era, the world faces the continuing risks of proliferation, terrorism, and deliberate or accidental nuclear war. An organized, global campaign led by medical organizations in support of a verifiable and enforceable Nuclear Weapons Convention would make a significant contribution to safeguarding health in 21st century, according to a study published in the August 5 Journal of the American Medical Association.

    “With a united, global voice, we in medicine must call for the zero tolerance of nuclear weapons — no different from the world’s zero tolerance of chemical and biological weapons,” says Lachlan Forrow, MD, principal author of the JAMA article, “Medicine and Nuclear War: From Hiroshima to Mutual Assured Destruction to Abolition 2000,” and internist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

    The study, co-authored by Victor Sidel, MD, co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and former president of the American Public Health Association (APHA), of the Department of Epidemiology and Social Medicine, Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, traces the history of nuclear weapons, from a medical perspective, since the blast at Hiroshima in 1945 and reviews the current status of nuclear arsenals and the dangers they pose worldwide. According to the JAMA authors, today’s dangers include the 35,000 warheads that remain in superpower nuclear arsenals, many of them still on hair trigger alert.

    For more than 50 years, physicians have played important roles in public policy related to nuclear weapons, first as partners in the government’s civil defense planning in the late 1940s and the 1950s. A decade later, in the 1960s, physicians organized to help end atmospheric nuclear testing and, in the 1980s, doctors would again unite, helping to end the superpowers’ plans to fight a nuclear war.

    The authors report that as early as 1946, just one year after the attack on Hiroshima, a high-level U.S. Government committee was urging a United-Nation-enforced global ban on all nuclear weapons. When their efforts failed, the superpowers, led by the United States, entered an era in which having “more” and “better” nuclear weapons was thought to be the best safeguard against nuclear disaster. Dangers of radiation from nuclear weapons was routinely minimized, according to Dr. Forrow, with U.S. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project testifying before the U.S. Congress that radiation poisoning, was “a very pleasant way to die.”

    In 1962, there was an abrupt change in the medical profession’s role in the fight against nuclear weapons. An issue of the New England Journal of Medicine was dedicated to articles on the medical consequences of nuclear war and a new force emerged. Physicians for Social Responsibility was born and began documenting in graphic detail the dire health effects of nuclear explosions. The NEJM articles and an accompanying editorial concluded that physicians, because of their special knowledge of the real medical effects of nuclear weapons also had a special responsibility to prevent their use.

    Countless medical studies have documented the toll of nuclear weapons production and testing. According to the authors, the U.S. National Cancer Institute estimated recently that the release of I-131 in fallout from U.S. nuclear test explosions was responsible for nearly 50,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer among Americans. In a separate study by the IPPNW, the physician organization estimated that the Strontium-90, Cesium-137, Carbon-14, and Plutonium-239 released worldwide in all such explosions would be responsible for 430,000 cancer deaths by the year 2000.

    In an NEJM article earlier this year, Forrow and his medical colleagues warned that the risk of an “accidental,” nuclear attack has increased recently and called for immediate de-alerting steps to be rapidly followed by a signed global agreement by the Year 2000 committing the world to the elimination of all nuclear weapons within a specified timeframe.

    Known as Abolition 2000, the initiative has been endorsed by leading U.S. medical organizations, including the American College of Physicians, the American Public Health Association and Physicians for Social Responsibility, as well as International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and over 1000 other nongovernmental agencies in 75 countries. Over 80 percent of Americans support the abolition of all nuclear weapons even though the U.S. government has yet to seriously question its own commitment to maintaining a nuclear arsenal, says Forrow.

    “As physicians we have an opportunity and a responsibility to make our own commitment to the abolition of nuclear weapons a living example of the power of our convictions,” says Forrow. “We must do this for ourselves, our families, and the generations that will follow, for as Albert Schweitzer once said, ‘Example is not the main thing in influencing others; it is the only thing.’”
    This study was supported by the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship.