Doctors Against Nuclear Weapons/War

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)

Resistance to nuclear weapons has not only come from peaceniks but from the medical profession.

In 1980, medical doctors from the two Cold War nations (Drs. Bernard Lown, James Muller, Eric Chivian and Herb Abrams, US and Drs. Eugueni Chazov, Leonid Ilyin and Mikhail Kuzin, USSR) met and agreed to organize a physicians movement againsat the nuclear threat. 

As physicians, they believed that they had an obligation to prevent what they could treat.  

IPPNW developed a number of important research studies about the effects of atomic bombs by looking at data collected by Japanese doctors who studied effects of the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  IPPNW also documented the heath and environmental effects of the production, testing and use of nuclear weapons from the 1980s through the 1990s. 

In 1985, the organization was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Today they are leaders of a new campaign that they hope to lead to abolishing nuclear weapons:  the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). 

The ICAN action plan has three strategic components:

1. there is a humanitarian imperative to stigmatize nuclear weapons as fundamentally inhumane; banning them outright requires a comprehensive treaty-based approach rather than arms control;
2. the time is right to build stronger links and common cause with local, national, and international humanitarian, peace, human rights, environmental, and disarmament NGOs, and to develop a network of civil society campaigners all over the world committed to push for nuclear abolition;
3. non-nuclear-weapon states can and should take the lead to prepare for and negotiate a global treaty banning nuclear weapons, which will create an indisputable obligation for the nuclear-weapon states to eliminate their arsenals.