Physicians confront the apocalypse. The American medical profession and the threat of nuclear war

The Technological Infrastructure of Science

“…While in its first two years (1945-46) BAS's circulation went from about 500 to around 5,000, by the mid 1960s it passed the 20,000 mark, a number only superseded (reaching about 25,000) in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl accident (Mary Ruth Yoe, "Nuclear Force," University of Chicago Magazine, 98:1, October 2005, http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0510/features/nuclear-print.shtml, accessed 3-13-07). Finally, Paul Boyer (1985b) shows that the period of the mid-1950s to the early 1960s marks the emergence of the political voices of doctors and physicians in debates over testing and nuclear war ("Physicians Confront the Apocalypse: The American Medical Profession and the Threat of Nuclear War," Journal of the American Medical Association 254: 633-43); while Watkins (2001) Incidentally, I have studied his recent manuscript since seeing you. It is good work, but after careful study I am far from convinced that all of his conclusions follow from the data.…”

On ‘the biology of war’

“…Together with Professor Albert Einstein and Privy Councillor Wilhelm Fdrster he drafted a Counter-Manifesto in which he mentioned the existence of a 'worldembracing civilization': 'Technical achievement has made the world smaller, and today the countries of that large peninsula Europe seem brought as near to one another as the cities of each individual small Mediterranean peninsula used to be; and Europe-it might almost be said the world-is already one and indivisible, owing to its multitudinous associations' (pp. [7][8]. This appeal was distributed privately.…”

Going for the Burn: Medical Preparedness in Early Cold War America

“…Although Paul Boyer, one of the leading historians of atomic America, has argued that American physicians, with few exceptions, seemed more preoccupied with the threat of "socialized medicine" than the larger medical implications of atomic bombs, many American physicians soon turned their attention to the medical implications of an atomic attack on an American city. 2 Despite an enormous literature on the civilian defense programs in Cold War America, historians have paid scant attention to the clinical medical and surgical concerns that accompanied the atomic age, even though such preparations had significant implications for medical research, medical stockpiling of supplies, and the medical and surgical care of burn victims. 3 This paper focuses on one aspect of the postwar medical agenda, the interest and concern over the thermal injuries that resulted from an atomic explosion, the "largest and most important category (numerically) of atomic-bomb injury."…”