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The world’s health and medical community is being urged to take a stand against nuclear weapons, with 11 of the world’s leading health and medical journals publishing an editorial about the increasing threat of nuclear war.
The Medical Journal of Australia joins with other journals to call for elimination of nuclear weapons
The Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) has joined other health and medical journals to call for urgent steps to curb the threat of nuclear war and for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
The editorial, co-authored by the MJA’s Editor-in-Chief Professor Virginia Barbour, was published in the MJA today.
“As editor-in-chief of Australia’s premier medical journal, I believe it is right that the MJA takes a stand on this issue,” Professor Barbour said.
“We are living in a time of intense fighting in Ukraine and increased tensions on the Korean peninsula.
“These concerning developments have prompted leaders across the health and medical community to highlight that any use of nuclear weapons would be catastrophic for humanity.”
The MJA was pleased to join with other prominent journals to advocate for this issue, Professor Barbour said.
“It is important to see call a coordinated for action from a variety of international journals such as The Lancet, the BMJ, the New England Journal of Medicine and the JAMA,” she said.
The publication of the editorial is timely as it coincides with two key events, Professor Barbour said.
“The editorial coincides with both the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Preparatory Committee Meeting and the 78th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan,” Professor Barbour said.
Current nuclear arms control and non-proliferation efforts are inadequate to protect the world’s population, the editorial reads.
“Progress has been disappointingly slow and the most recent NPT review conference in 2022 ended without an agreed statement,” the editorial reads.
The modernisation of nuclear weapons also poses a threat of nuclear war by design, error, or miscalculation, it reads.
“Modernisation of nuclear arsenals could increase risks: for example, hypersonic missiles decrease the time available to distinguish between an attack and a false alarm, increasing the likelihood of rapid escalation,” it reads.
The health community has a crucial role in efforts to reduce the risk of nuclear war and must continue to play its part, the editorial reads.
“In the 1980s the efforts of health professionals, led by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), helped to end the Cold War arms race by educating policy makers and the public on both sides of the Iron Curtain about the medical consequences of nuclear war.”
The editorial calls on states with nuclear weapons to adopt a no first use policy, to take their nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert, and urges all states involved in current conflicts to pledge “publicly and unequivocally that they will not use nuclear weapons in these conflicts”.
Read the editorial in The Medical Journal of Australia.
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Dear Editor,
Needless to say, it was timely and appropriate for MJA to join its colleagues in a most justified call worldwide from the world’s medical elite/intelligentsia to eliminate nuclear weapons totally. Only two decades ago when I was still a U.N. correspondent at the Vienna International Centre (housing important U.N. organisations like the IAEA, CTBTO, UNODC, UNIDO, UNOOSA, etc.), it was the Canberra Convention that brilliantly brought out the first ever multilateral convention condemning the possession of nuclear weapons (NW’s) by any state as being illegal, immoral because the basic powerful argument was, the possessor of such weapons was prepared for mass destruction of human beings (in the category of weapons of mass destruction – the WMD) in the name of defence of its people and territory. At an annual IAEA General Conference reception one New Zealand diplomat even told me that NZ does not consider possession of NW’s as having deterrence value, on the contrary, they only add to the insecurity of any nation in possessing them as they can be targeted.
Medical Science is born to save human lives as per the Hippocratic Oath and not aim at the opposite what the possession of WMD in reality implies – i.e., total human destruction. As a world peace friend and world health supporter, I strongly endorse this right decision on the part of the Australian Journal of Medicine. But that’s only the first step. More important is for the Aussie medical community in one voice put enormous pressure on the Australian Government to stop the U.S. from making Australia a home of U.S. nuclear military centres housing U.S. nukes, inviting both the Chinese & Russian megaton thermonuclear weapons directed at such centres. That could cause, in a nuclear war, not just one Australian human life but millions of them along with the elimination of all fauna and flora. Thus, it is time for enlightened Aussie-educated to put its act together not to allow the stationing of any nuclear weapon on its soil. Fight any American or British brainwashing in this regard. It is your Australian Human Life that is of prime concern and nothing else (not false British & U.S. security), Once any WMD is fired from an Australian jurisdiction then Australia would face a nuclear holocaust. So please, take care of your Peace in peaceful times!
George Chakko, former U.N. correspondent at the Vienna International Centre, is now retired in Vienna, Austria.
Vienna, 08/ 08/ 2023 03:53 am CEST
The more the merrier.
Nuclear weapons are an abomination, the manifestation of the darkest parts of a person’s heart to build a weapon of indiscriminate killing.
Rather naive.
When has it ever been possible to unlearn knowledge? AI? Embryo sex selection? Gain-of-function anyone?
Plus MAD (mutually assured destruction) is arguably the only reason why there was never a Hot as opposed to Cold War between the West and the Soviets, and why Ukraine is currently more constrained than it might otherwise be.
Presumably just coat-tailing on Oppenheimer.