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The Medical Implications of Nuclear War (1986) / Chapter Skim
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Summary and Perspective: With Some Observations on Informed Consent
Pages 583-588

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From page 583...
... ABRAMS, M.D. Stanford University, Stanford, California By accident, rather than by design, the symposium on the Medical Implications of Nuclear War took place almost exactly at the time that arms control negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States resumed in Geneva.
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From page 584...
... 15. At any one time nuclear weapons personnel include numerous unstable individuals drug addicts, alcohol abusers, and psychotics.
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From page 585...
... The USSR and the United States each believes that the other is an expanding, aggressive, imperialist society intent on dominating large portions of the globe remote from its geographic borders. Methods to reduce mutual fear and mistrust are central to the maintenance of peace and avoidance of nuclear weapons use in the modern era.
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From page 586...
... My most profound hope is that none of these phenomena will have the kind of experimental verification that has established the credibility of modern science that no one of us, in the near term or in a distant era, will have the opportunity to match the predictive brilliance of modern science with the empiric observations of the magnitude of these effects. When Small, Brode, and Postol start with the fires; when Crutzen, Birks, and Carrier inject hundreds of tons of smoke and soot into the atmosphere; when Harwell and SCOPE define the effects on agriculture and the ensuing starvation in Asia, then it becomes manifest beyond question that the superpowers are engaged in an adventure that has potential ramifications extending far beyond their borders.
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From page 587...
... and Soviet policymakers to recognize the potential effect of their actions on the rest of the world goes hand in hand with the absence of any consideration of the doctrine of informed consent. In recent years, the malpractice doctrine has been considerably broadened to include the physician's duty to obtain an informed refusal, to warn third parties, and to notify patients whenever past procedures or treatment are discovered to be potentially harmful.
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From page 588...
... ~ cannot close without commenting on the notion expressed in some quarters that the grave matters dealt with in the papers in this volume are less than a proper subject to engage the energies of the Institute of Medicine. When we are asked to forego a scientific inquiry into the most important potential health and life issue of the century to agree that we must leave it to the politicians or to the military-we know that to do so is to renounce our obligations in medicine and science.
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Key Terms

  • massive nuclear
  • third parties
  • nuclear exchange
  • medical implications
  • modern science

  • weapons personnel
  • due care
  • potentially catastrophic
  • nitrogen oxides
  • reduce mutual

  • medical supplies
  • prove catastrophic
  • producing climatologic
  • withdraw consent
  • ramifications extending

  • huge disparities
  • asked crutzen
  • prevention measures
  • harmful ultraviolet
  • accepted figures

  • past procedures
  • grave matters
  • ultraviolet radiation
  • alcohol abusers
  • war engenders

  • previously accepted
  • national medical
  • credible consequence
  • goes hand
  • nuclear age


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