NOBEL WINNER URGED GORBACHEV TO EXTEND BAN ON NUCLEAR TESTS
Author: By Diane Alter, Globe Staff
Date: Sunday, December 22, 1985
Page: 5
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
The Boston cofounder of the doctors' group that won the 1985 Nobel Peace
Prize said yesterday at a dinner in his honor that he had urged Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev to extend a moratorium on nuclear testing.
Cardiologist Bernard Lown, who is the American president of International
Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, met Wednesday in Moscow with
Gorbachev after receiving the Nobel prize in Oslo Dec. 10.
"I complimented him on behalf of IPPNW for stopping nuclear explosions, for
ending all nuclear testing, and thereby heeding the IPPNW medical
prescription, which we believe is the essential first step to nuclear
disarmament," Lown said in prepared remarks made available just before the
speech at the Marriott Hotel at Copley Place.
"When pressed hard about extending the moratorium," Lown said of Gorbachev,
"he made the remarkable statement, 'Reciprocity is our only condition."'
At the meeting with Gorbachev, Lown was accompanied by Dr. Yevgeny Chazov,
Soviet deputy health minister and copresident of the physician's group. Lown
had said before his meeting that the two physicians would ask Gorbachev to
extend the unilateral Soviet moratorium of underground nuclear tests beyond
the Dec. 31 date announced in Moscow last summer.
Lown, a professor of cardiology at the Harvard School of Public Health,
said the Soviet leader "was passionate in talking about the need for ridding
the world of nuclear weapons. The West has an extraordinary opportunity to
make a durable peace."
Lown blamed the West's"simplistic outlook" toward the Soviet Union for a
''dangerous and tragic impasse."
"A climate of fear and distrust has led to perceptual distortions with
complex differences between diverse social systems reduced to martial combat
between forces of good and evil," said Lown.
ALTERS;12/21,21:48 CORCOR;12/23,20:16 LOWN22
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