Editor,
Recent articles appearing in the Washington Post and the New Yorker document that the United States is actively considering plans to attack Iranian underground nuclear installations with nuclear weapons. Such an attack might well kill up to 2.6 million people. Threatening Iran with nuclear weapons is not working, and using nuclear weapons should not be considered.
Using Department of Defense software, national Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) issued a report, published in 2005 and co-authored by Maine physician Dr. Peter Wilk, which concluded that a nuclear “bunker buster” strike against the suspected Iranian underground nuclear materials storage site at Isfahan, using nuclear weapons currently in the U.S. arsenal, would cause massive numbers of casualties and “severe adverse health impacts on civilian and military populations near targeted areas.” Radioactive fallout from such a strike could drift over civilian populations in neighboring states, as well our own military troops in Afghanistan.
About two-thirds of those casualties would die from the immediate radiation effects of the bomb, or from local fallout. More than one million people would suffer immediate injuries including thermal and flash burns, radiation sickness, broken limbs, lacerations, blindness, crush injuries, burst eardrums and other traumas. Most if not all medical facilities near the strike zone would be destroyed.
I join PSR/Maine and Peace Action Maine in urging the President to take the “nuclear option” off the table and to rely on diplomatic means to resolve the crisis over Iran’s nuclear program.
Sally Breen
Windham
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