m

me [rete atran rn]

Physicians appeal:
‘Stop the testing’

By CLAIRE DaSYLVA

: (Special to the Tribune)
_ MONTREAL — Launching his organ-
WZation’s campaign for a nuclear weapons
test ban, one of the world’s most famous
doctors called on the nuclear powers to
Start at the beginning and stop the testing.”

US. physician Dr. Bernard Lown, co-
President of International Physicians for
the Prevention of Nuclear War, the 1985
Tecipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, was in

Ontreal to open the organization’s 8th
World Congress held June 2-5 under the
motto “Healing Our Planet: A Global
Prescription.”

Combining an humanitarian and logi-
cal approach, this peace group has madea
Tare and profound impression on the press
and public.

“If doctors cannot succeed in educating
the people on the nuclear danger, who will
do it?” asked Mikhail Kuzin of the Soviet
Union, IPPNW’s other co-president.

“There is no medical response to a
nuclear war. The only remedy is preven-
tion,” stressed the president of the Mont-
Teal congress, Dr. Paul Capon. This is the

bottom line with the physicians’ organiza-
tions as it enters it major campaign for the
coming year-International Test Ban
Campaign: Ceasefire 88 — what its con-
vention declaration terms “a moral
imperative for the nuclear age.”

It is no coincidence that the 1989 con-
gress will take place in Hiroshima. “It is
the first time that we give a moral dimen-
sion to our actions,” explained Dr. Lown.
“The recently completed Moscow summit
has helped increase trust by reducing
adversarial attitudes based on stereotypes
and enemy images. We strongly believe
that this progress should be promptly car-
ried further toward an end to all nuclear
weapons testing.”

Reflecting the impact of the meeting
were the messages and resolutions passed.
Representatives of the federal, provincial
and city governments and officials from
both the U.S. and Soviet consulates
brought greetings to the 2,000 doctors
from 70 countries.

““As I said on many occasions, nuclear
war can never be won and must never be
fought,” read the message of U.S. Presi-
dent Reagan.

Soviet leader Gorbachev’s greeting
said: “The international reputation enjoyed
by your organizations lies in the fact that
its purpose and practical deeds are con-
sonant with the vital aspirations of
humanity longing to be relieved of the
monstrous burden of nuclear arms and
desirous to build a world of security, non-
violence and justice.”

Greetings also came from U.S. presi-
dential candidates Michael Dukakis and
Jesse Jackson, and the chair of the com-
mittee on foreign relations of the U.S.
Senate.

In addition, messages were received
from Israel, Finland, New Zealand, Costa
Rica, Portugal, Argentina, Malaysia, Mex-
ico and the GDR, as well as from the
Pan-American office of the World Health
Organization.

Coming from the United Nations,
where he was attending the Third Special
Session on Disarmament, Vladimir Pet-
rovsky, deputy foreign minister of the
USSR, stressed the vital role of public
opinion in ending the nuclear arms race.

Many impassioned speeches came from
the floor. New Democratic Party leader
Ed Broadbent told the audience the “cold
war view of the world lies in ruins”. He
reaffirmed his party’s opposition to Star
Wars and the purchase of nuclear-
powered submarines by the Canadian
government. He said an NDP government
would orient Canada’s defence policy
away from nuclear war strategies rooted in
the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruc-
tion.

Later Stephen Lewis, Canadian ambas-
sador to the UN, agreed with Broadbent’s
statement and, in an oblique criticism of
the Canadian government, questioned the
Tories’ defence policy..

Chair of the convention was Mary
Wynne-Ashford, president of the Cana-
dian chapter of IPPNW, which has 4,000
members out of 40,000 doctors in the
county. Internationally, the organization
has 200,000 members in 61 countries. It
has enjoyed rapid growth recently, partic-
ularly in the developing world. “This has
been due to the realization that with the
advent of nuclear war there is an erosion
of resources and intractable poverty,”
explained Dr. Lown.

“We have not indulged in verbal pieties -
in our efforts to expand the scope of East-
West co-operation,” said Dr. Lown.
IPPNW’s program of citizen diplomacy is
becoming institutionalized. Soviet-Amer-
ican as well as Soviet-Canadian physician
exchange is now active in a broad front.

This was obvious throughout the con-
gress and at the benefit concert given by
artists from the three countries on June 3.
Over 9,000 filled the Montreal Forum to
hear Crosby, Stills and Nash, Bruce
Cockburn and Michel Rivard and Aqua-
rium of the Soviet Union. In a moving
grand finale, they were joined by 75 child-
ren for the song “‘Teach the Children.”

“My 11-year-old daughter is afraid of
nuclear war. I am too. I want a decent
life”, Cockburn told the crowd. “It is my
wish that this congress become the begin-
ning of a peace mass movement.”

Canadian doctors join Geasefire initiative

From its founding in 1980, International
Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear
War (IPPNW) has created a dramatic
awareness of the dangers of nuclear war
with its innovative medical approach, based
on the simple idea that there can be “‘no
adequate medical response to a nuclear
war — the only cure is prevention.”

One of the group’s founders, Dr. Helen

aldicott, presented that message elo-
quently in the Canadian film, If you Love
this Planet. The co-founders of IPPNW, an
American and a Soviet, won the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1985 for the group’s world-
changing work,
_ And now IPPNW has launched a new
Initiative, aimed at achieving a complete
ban on all nuclear weapons testing and

stopping the arms race in its tracks.”

Called Ceasefire °88, the international
campaign has been underway in various
countries, including Sweden and Belgium as
well as the Federal Republic of Germany
and the German Democratic Republic,
since the beginning of the year. Now, fol-
lowing the IPPNW convention in Montreal
last week, the 4,000 members of the organi-
zation’s chapter in Canada will be adding
their voices — and their pens — to the
international campaign which is also being
taken up in over 50 countries.

_ This is part of an intensified interna-
tional effort to bring ina total test ban,” said
Dr. Elinor Powell, a diabetes specialist from
Victoria and the co-ordinator of the cam-
paign in this country.

“We want to stop the arms race in its
tracks ... which would then lead to a com-
plete freeze on production and deployment
and the removal of all nuclear warheads so
that we would eventually get a total aboli-
tion of nuclear weapons — the ultimate
aim of our organization,” she said.

Dr. Powell told reporters in Vancouver
June 8 that the Canadian chapter would be
mobilizing its member doctors across the
country to put pressure on any country
embarking on nuclear tests.

All testing activity will be monitored by
the national seismic observatory in Sweden
and information will be relayed instantly to

DR. BOHDAN WASILEWSKI

IPPNW’s Boston office which will then pass
it on to member organizations. “Each coun-
try will get the message about the test and
can begin immediately writing letters and
telegrams to ambassadors, to the local
media and to the heads of state of the testing
countries,” said Dr. Powell. :

The initiative is a first-ever letter-writing
campaign by IPPNW, she added, but it has
already been very effective in countries such
as Sweden and the GDR.

Dr. Powell was accompanied at the Van-
couver news conference by Dr. Susan Hol-
lan, a vice-president of IPPNW and the
director of the National Institute of Hema-
tology in Hungary, and Dr. Bohdan Wasi-
lewski, a child psychiatrist from Warsaw,
Poland.

The three physicians emphasized the cru-
cial importance of a test ban to the disar-
mament process. ;

“The recent summit meeting was a breeze
of peace,” Dr. Hollan told reporters. “It
showed people that there is a better atmos-
phere for co-operation, that there are more
common things that concern us. And that is
why the test ban is so crucial.

She cited the steps taken by the Soviets
following the signing of the treaty scrapping
medium-range missiles to earmark five bil-
lion roubles of the money saved to the coun-
try’s health services.

DR. ELINOR POWELL

“It shows how much better our resources
can be spent if we can stop the arms race,”
she said.

Although the partial test ban treaty,
signed in 1963 by U.S. President John
Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Krus-
chev — which banned space, atmospheric
and underwater tests — was to have been
the first step towards an eventual complete
test ban, there has been little progress made
towards a treaty outlawing all tests.

Significantly, it was after a meeting with
IPPNW doctors in July, 1985, that Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev announced the
unilateral moratorium on testing that began
on August 6, 1985 — the 40th anniversary
of the bombing of Hiroshima. The morato-
rium was extended in the hope of obtaining
reciprocal action from the U.S. but Soviet
tests were finally resumed after 19 months
of silence on the Soviet test range brought
no response from the Reagan administra-
tion.

At the time, Dr. Powell noted, “there was
no real sense in the west of the importance
of that moratorium.

“But now, the atmosphere is ever so
much more hopeful,” she added, citing the
signing of the INF treaty and even Reagan’s
message to the IPPNW congress in which
the U.S. president effectively disavowed the
administration’s earlier policy in acknowl-

IN

DR. SUSAN HOLLAN

edging that a “‘nuclear war cannot be won.” - .

“The first barriers have come down but
we still have a long journey to travel,” she
said, noting that nuclear tests are being car-
ried on today at the rate of one every nine
days — with the main objective of develop-
ing new weapons.

That continued escalation of the arms
race — and the waste of resources, with
each test costing $20-$70 million — will
also be highlighted in various actions
planned around the world on Aug. 5, the
25th anniversary of the signing of the partial
test ban treaty.

Although the Ceasefire ’88 campaign has
only just been. launched in Canada, the
impact of the international campaign has
already had been felt in Ottawa. Both Dr.
Powell and Dr. Hollan noted that the fed-
eral government had put its support for a
test ban on record in the disarmament bul-
letin.

“There is a resolution now before the
United Nations calling for an international
conference as the next step in drawing up a
test ban treaty,” said Dr. Powell. “We sug-
gest that the Canadian government should
press for such a conference and urge other
nations to do likewise.

“Stopping nuclear testing is positive, ~
achievable — and it is central to preventing
nuclear war,” she said.

Pacific Tribune, June 15, 1988 « 3

TRIBUNE PHOTOS — SEAN GRIFFIN