MDS DECRY RISKS OF NUCLEAR ARMS PLANTS

Author: By Richard A. Knox, Globe Staff

Date: Wednesday, December 7, 1988
Page: 11
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

Dr. Bernard Lown of Harvard University and Dr. Mikhail Kuzin, a prominent Soviet surgeon, called on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President-elect George Bush to "end the secrecy and . . . give us the widest possible access to information" on nuclear weapons production.

Lown and Kuzin are copresidents of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for its efforts on behalf of arms control.

The weapons production study proposal, announced yesterday at a Cambridge news conference, represents a new tactic that members of the physicians' group said is intended to revitalize its campaign against nuclear war by linking it to rising worldwide concern about the environment.

"We decided we need to pay more attention to public concern all over the world to the environment and ecology," said Dr. Anthony Robbins of the Boston University School of Public Health, who is treasurer of the physicians' group.

Members of the organization acknowledged that its recent campaign on behalf of a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty has not caught the public's attention.

Peter Zheulin, the organization's spokesman, said it had not abandoned the test ban issue but realized that public concern over reported radiation hazards at US nuclear weapons plants "is not just an American problem," but a worldwide concern.

He was referring to recent reports about radiation accidents involving workers, environmental leakage and safety problems that have closed four of the nation's 17 plants that are involved in the production of nuclear weapons.

"We believe that when the public knows what the health and environmental costs are, they will be less inclined to support nuclear weapons production," said Robbins, who is past president of the American Public Health Association and former director of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.

Kuzin, who is director of Moscow's Vishnevsky Institute of Surgery and a member of the presidium of the Soviet Academy of Medicine, said it is possible that the Soviet Union has had problems similar to those reported at weapons production facilities at Savannah River, Ga.; Hanford, Wash.; Rocky Flats, Colo.; and Fernald, Ohio.

"But it is impossible to know," Kuzin said, "because the information we need to assess the public health consequences of nuclear weapons production is kept secret in all nuclear weapons states. I hope that in the age of glasnost we can begin to shed light on these dangerous secrets."

American leaders of the physicians' group said they were surprised that their Soviet counterparts readily agreed to call on their government to disclose details of Soviet weapons production, radiation accidents and exposure of workers and surrounding communities to hazardous radioactivity.

At an executive committee meeting of the group last weekend, "Kuzin acted as if it was not unreasonable to make this demand, that it was reasonable to give it a try," Robbins said. "We haven't exactly had an easy time of trying to get this kind of information out of our government."

Robbins said the proposed study would attempt to calculate the probable number of cancer deaths and environmental costs of global nuclear weapons production, "even though they are never exploded."

"We know what happens when the bombs go off," said Dr. Kenjiro Yokoro, vice-president of the physicians' group and a professor at Hiroshima University. "But the production of nuclear weapons produces new victims every day. It is an evil that we must understand and bring out of the shadows."

The group is inviting medical and environmental groups around the world to collaborate in the proposed study, which Robbins said might take two to three years.

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