Radiation Nation by Natasha Zaretsky

Author:Natasha Zaretsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

FIGURE 4.2.  Physicians Marching for Disarmament, New York City, June 1992. Copyright held by Physicians for Social Responsibility. Courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

This proto-ecological vision, based on a circulation between somatic and planetary injury, was widely shared among physicians. Throughout the early 1980s, the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the National Medical Association all passed resolutions urging physicians to become involved in the campaign to prevent nuclear war. Articles on the health consequences of such a war appeared regularly in medical and scientific journals, and the nation’s leading medical schools offered courses on the topic. Meanwhile, PSR chapters spread quickly throughout the country. As Harvard cardiologist James Muller observed, “This is not just some fringe group, it’s now the mainstream.”37 Glen Geelhoed, a physician who worked with the American Red Cross, explained that he would not have joined PSR “if it were a ‘kook’ movement for fear of injury to my career.” In his words, he had “no truck with idealism.”38

Where PSR broke with traditional organizations, however, was on the crucial question of politics. PSR leaders like H. Jack Geiger and Bernard Lown believed that physicians were obligated to do more than detail the medical effects of a nuclear attack. They were also obligated to speak out against federal civil defense planning for nuclear war, which the organization condemned on psychological grounds as delusional, on strategic grounds as provocative, and on ethical grounds as a “travesty of morality.”39 In the closing minutes of The Last Epidemic, Geiger, who at the time was a professor of community medicine at the City University of New York, receives loud applause when he tells his audience, “any physician who even takes part in so called emergency medical disaster planning specifically to meet the problem of nuclear attack … is committing a profoundly unethical act.”40

PSR’s opposition to civil defense reflected a new ecological awareness of the planet’s fragility and inescapability. The organization rejected the efficacy of both shelters and relocation, the two prongs of Reagan’s civil defense plan. During the World War II–era bombings of Hamburg and Leipzig, they recalled, those who had remained in shelters had died from intense heat and carbon monoxide poisoning. Something similar would happen in the event of a nuclear attack, PSR predicted: the firestorms would turn shelters into crematoria.41 The organization also took aim at crisis relocation plans. In a booklet published in 1982, PSR asked what relocation would mean from an epidemiological perspective: “Crisis relocation,” it wrote, “serves merely … to substitute immediate death in the cities for a more protracted but nonetheless certain death in relocated areas.”42 Like the radiation threat at Three Mile Island, nuclear war had the capacity to render meaningless the boundaries between soldiers and civilians, between illness and health, between danger and safety, between war and peace.

But for PSR activists, the problem was not limited to any one particular civil defense plan or another. They found delusional the very concept of survivability embedded in all civil defense planning for nuclear war.

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