Galveston County Daily News, June 26, 2007
Column by Howard Brody, Director, UTMB Institute for Medical Humanities
GALVESTON - Back in the early 1980s, I was one of a group of physicians who carried out the nuclear bombing of Lansing, Michigan. We didn't, of course -- thank goodness. What we did was produce a program for a local cable TV station, showing exactly what would happen as one moved from Ground Zero (which we assumed to be the Capitol) one, two, three, five and 10 miles outward. We showed, for instance, that the major hospitals were close enough to Ground Zero to disappear in the first blast leaving little of any medical aid for any survivors coming in from farther away.
Our group was a local chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which as the U.S. wing of the International Physicians Against Nuclear War. At the end of the '80s, with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the apparent diminution of the actual risk of nuclear war, I moved away from PSR and on to other causes. I was reminded of our Lansing exercise recently when George Lakoff, a linguist and political analyst, called attention to an ominous series of events. There is talk of a military strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities, if Iran refuses to stop its uranium enrichment program. Some military authorities believe that that facility is so well protected and so deep in the ground, that only a nuclear weapon would be sure to destroy it. http://news.galvestondailynews.com/story.lasso?ewcd=fc185b47009c6c83