In 1982, an estimated 1 million people came to Central Park in New York City to protest nuclear power and the arm’s race between the United States and the Soviet Union.
SPRINGFIELD – For the next few days, Dr. Ira Helfand will turn his attention from treating patients with flu, fractures and sports injuries to another health issue: nuclear warfare and its potentially catastrophic global consequences.
On Monday, the Northampton physician is scheduled to speak to anti-nuclear activists from 130 nations at a conference sponsored by the Norwegian government in Oslo.
Ira Helfand
To Helfand, co-president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the subject is obvious and yet somehow overlooked.
“People don’t really understand how bad a nuclear war would be; they think they do, but when you really describe it to them, they are horrified,” said Helfand, whose group received the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
As a partner in Springfield’s Family Care Medical Center and former chairman of Cooley Dickinson Hospital’s emergency medicine department, Helfand has also been an important figure in the anti-nuclear movement since the late 1970s.
His interest began in a small mountain town in New Mexico, where the Milford native and Harvard University graduate was serving internship on a Navajo reservation.
In a bus station, he spotted the book “We Almost Lost Detroit” by John G. Fuller, detailing a partial meltdown in 1966 at a nuclear plant 30 minutes outside Detroit.
He finished the book two days later, and began his four-decade crusade against the spread of nuclear power and nuclear arms.
After returning to Cambridge in 1978, he co-founded the Cambridge-based Physicians for Social Responsibility to oppose spread of nuclear arms.
Eight months later, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middlefield, Pa., suffered a partial meltdown. The group’s membership jumped from 300 to 5,000 in a few weeks, Helfand said.
The crisis at Three Mile Island and the 1986 meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Soviet Union galvanized the anti-nuclear movement, marches, protests and civil disobedience. In 1982, an estimated 1 million people came to Central Park in New York City to protest nuclear power and the arm’s race between the United States and the Soviet Union.
“During the 1980s, the fear of nuclear war was the number one concern,” Helfand said.
But the anti-nuclear movement lost momentum in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended. As tensions between the two superpowers eased, so did public fears of a deliberate or accidental nuclear attack.
Still, the two countries have thousands of missiles aimed at each other, capable of being launched in 15 minutes and reaching targets in 30 minutes, Helfand said.
The number of nations with nuclear weapons has grown from five - the United States, Russia, England, France and China - to nine, Helfand said.
India, Pakistan, North Korea are known to have nuclear weapons while Israel is widely believed to have a secret arsenal and Iran is developing one, Helfand said.
Equally alarming are suggestions by some scientists that a limited, regional nuclear war would not have catastrophic global consequences, he said.
In response, Helfand spent five years working with climate scientists to research potential health and environmental consequences from a regional nuclear war.
In a report last year, Helfand stated that a war involving less than one percent of the world’s nuclear arsenals would cause climate disruption, worldwide crop shortages and mass starvation.
In Oslo Monday, Helfand will speak on the same topic.
“As a doctor, it doesn’t make sense to just warn our patients about smoking, wearing seat belts and environmental dangers when the single greatest threat to public health is nuclear war,” he said.
Among the 130 nation’s attending the conference, there will be some notable absences - the United States, for one, along Russia, China and other nation’s with nuclear weapons.
For Helfand, the refusal of his own country to join the discussion rankles, especially since he expected the nation’s nuclear policy to change during President Barack Obama’s administration. In a volatile word, with more nations acquiring nuclear arms, time is running out, Helfand said.
“We’re living on borrowed time,” he said. “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.”