My Generation’s Deadly Inheritance August 9, 2025

The New York Times

During the U.N. conference in March, a group of medical students sat in a church basement on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where Dr. Arthur Hale, then in his fourth year at Harvard Medical School, explained that if a nuclear weapon the size used on Hiroshima fell on Washington, an estimated 120,000 people would die, and 170,000 more would be injured. He then cited recent research on nuclear famine: Even a so-called limited nuclear war could kill enough crops that hundreds of millions of people could starve.

“These are just the things that you might want to have in your back pocket,” he told the other medical students.

The students met to learn how to use their medical expertise to educate the public about the pain inflicted by nuclear weapons and why, in the words of Dr. Bernard Lown, a founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, “modern medicine has nothing to offer, not even a token benefit, in the case of thermonuclear war.” They are carrying on the long tradition of physicians speaking out about the threat nuclear weapons pose to humans: The meeting was organized by the international physicians group, which was founded by American and Soviet doctors in 1980 and has affiliates in about 60 countries. It is widely credited with helping end the arms race once before.