PROLOGUE
Back to the Future
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
HOW CLOSE WE CAME TO EXTINCTION!—and it is forgotten now. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki more than a hundred thousand human beings were killed in a split second, yet the devastation led not to a halt but to a nuclear arms race. Within a few decades, two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, had amassed a nuclear arsenal equivalent to four tons of dynamite for every man, woman, and child on earth. The weapons were held in high readiness for instant launch. Each superpower was belligerent, self-righteous; each claimed the high moral ground. At the same time, caricatures of the enemy, viewed from Washington and Moscow, were evil mirror images, unpredictable and full of malign intent.
This book exposes the hidden machinery of history. Monumental events, barely visible to the public eye at the time, shifted the trajectory away from nuclear war. Major actors in the unfolding drama were not statesmen but outsiders, medical doctors who were more comfortable wielding a stethoscope at a patient’s bedside than jousting on the political stage against mushroom clouds.
This is the story of an organization with a mouthful of a name, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). In a crisis, this organization moved with speed and precision to avert catastrophe. Within five years of its founding, IPPNW received worldwide recognition: a Nobel Peace Prize. In those five years, IPPNW recruited 135,000 doctors in more than forty national affiliates to penetrate the fog of denial about the consequences of nuclear war. The doctors made millions of people aware of a frightening reality: medicine had nothing to offer in case of such a war; there was no place to hide from the deadly reach of radioactive fallout. The involvement of multitudes in the antinuclear movement compelled governments to begin serious negotiations.
The doctors bucked expert opinion to launch a dialogue with Communist colleagues in the USSR. To some within the government and media, this was an act of traitorous collaboration with those who threatened the very survival of the United States. Yet peace is not sustained by talking only with friends. One must communicate with an enemy.
At the heart of these cascading events is a human narrative: my chance encounter with a Soviet physician, Eugene Chazov. He was the leading cardiologist in the Soviet Union, the physician to those in power in the Kremlin.
Without the friendship we formed, IPPNW would have been inconceivable. Chazov’s participation stamped the doctors’ movement with the imprimatur of East-West cooperation. The alliance we formed catapulted me, an American political outsider, into a new position. Suddenly I was like a character in a Le Carré spy tract, one person removed from the chairman of the Communist Party of the USSR, the very individual stoking the fire on the Communist side of the Cold War.
I wish this book were a scholarly chronicle of times past, but in fact, the relevance of the story I must tell is likely to grow. With the end of the Cold War, the nuclear genie was not rebottled but merely hidden from view. The United States, arguably the most powerful military nation in the bloody war-ridden history of humankind, has held on to its brimming nuclear arsenal. The lesson is clear: if the secure need such weapons, the weak can’t do without them. Thus is global proliferation spawned.
The climate grows worse. Rogue failed states crave to go nuclear; stateless terrorists are ready to enter the fray. With the atomic secret out in the open, with radioactive nuclides ubiquitous and inadequately guarded, constructing a genocidal nuclear device is no longer a dream for lunatics. Today’s suicide bombers will strap themselves with nuclear devices tomorrow.
This book is a reminder of a saving grace of the perilous nuclear confrontation, relevant to the present geopolitical quagmire. Even during the darkest days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was known as an “evil empire,” the United States reasoned, debated, negotiated, reached accords, and tried to understand what made the USSR tick.
The present American government has forgotten this vital lesson. Official policy, according to the mantra of our day, is “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.” This caveat is repeated with fervor, as though it proclaimed the essence of American moral probity. But smiting moths with sledgehammers begets collateral damage that in turn begets vengeful recruits for the terrorist. In a war without an end in sight, American society is bound to lose. Democratic institutions are fragile against the demands of unending war.
Events that took place behind the scenes a quarter of a century ago need to be understood. The critical questions from that period have not vanished, and figure heavily in today’s events.
Why did we have a Cold War? Who profited from its continuation? Why the demonizing of an entire nation? Why the Faustian bargain with military technology? Why the irrational accumulation of genocidal weapons capable of destroying the world many times over? Why the failure to eliminate nuclear overkill? The enemy that our nuclear weapons were intended to deter has left the stage of history. So why is the United States modernizing its nuclear weapons and thereby promoting global proliferation?
This book probes the past to find answers. Historical amnesia is a prelude to repeated victimization. Had we in the late 1950s and early 1960s been familiar with the history of Vietnam, we would have avoided a tragic odyssey. Had we examined the consequences of the Vietnam War, we would have avoided the colossal disaster of Iraq. We continue to ignore history at our peril. The history of IPPNW and the doctors’ successful antinuclear struggles can serve as an immunization against the nuclear virus that threatens our national well-being.
Perhaps the most important lesson in the doctors’ antinuclear campaign is a sense of hard-headed optimism. Against impossible odds, a small cadre of passionately committed physicians roused multitudes. Well-focused activities stirred hope and empowered further engagement. Newly mobilized advocates insisted that decision makers address the nuclear threat.
Do human beings have a future on planet Earth? The story conveyed in these pages provides a ringing affirmation.
There are more lessons in the story I am about to relate. The moment we abandon the moral high ground, we are no longer a superpower but a dangerous bully. The road from Hiroshima led to the killing fields of Vietnam and Iraq. This road foreshadows other catastrophes and the unavoidable cost of self-victimization. We have already undermined our envied position as a city upon a hill and have begun to unravel the finely spun fabric of our democratic institutions.
Securing a future free of genocidal weapons requires above all eliminating the economic and political inequities that sunder rich and poor countries. As the Berlin wall divided East and West, so inequality now creates a fracturing divide that augurs global chaos, terrorism, and war. We humans are in more need than ever of a prescription for survival. This memoir shows that change is possible and within reach.