Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Since the destruction of Hiroshima in August 1945, the medical community has understood that it cannot respond in a meaningful way to the terrible devastation caused by nuclear weapons.Dr. Marcel Junod of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) arrived in Hiroshima just one month after the attack and chronicled the enormity of the destruction, the decimation of the city's medical resources, and the inability of the relatively few surviving health professionals to care for the enormous number of severely injured patients [1].In a 2012 statement at the United Nations, the ICRC reaffirmed its belief that the world lacks any "adequate international response capacity to assist the victims if a nuclear weapon were to be detonated" [2].Based on this understanding the medical community must prevent what we cannot cure.Today, it is not the detonation of a single nuclear weapon that we must fear.Despite the end of the Cold War, there are still more than 17,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, most of them many times more destructive that the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki [3,4].It is more important than ever for the medical community to educate the world about the danger posed by these weapons and our inability to respond to the humanitarian disaster that will result from their use. The Current DangerRecent studies have shown that the use of only a small fraction of the world's nuclear arsenal, in a war confined to one region of the globe, would cause a worldwide disaster.A 2006 paper by Alan Robock and his colleagues modeled the consequences of a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which each side used fifty Hiroshima-sized bombs, less than half of their actual nuclear arsenals and less than 0.03 percent of the world's nuclear arsenal [5].The direct effects in South Asia would be catastrophic: more than 20 million people dead in less than a week from the explosions, fires, and immediate radiation effects.The global impact would be even worse.The fires caused by these hundred nuclear explosions would inject five million tons of soot high into the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight.Across the planet, temperatures would drop an average of 1.3 degrees Celsius, the growing season would be shortened, precipitation would decline, and food production plummet.In the US, corn production would decline 12 percent for a full decade [6].In China, rice production would decline 17 percent, corn
Source: The AMA Journal of Ethic
Authors: Ira Helfand, Antti Junkkari, Ogebe Onazi
Language: English
Topic: Nuclear Issues and Defense
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4233553550