Eye Opener

U.S. views get on prime time

It began as a "casual balloon" launched by American physicians during a meeting with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Asked the Americans: Why not have doctors from the two superpowers discuss on Soviet television the medical consequences of nuclear war? "Why not?" Dobrynin responded. The result, an unprecedented hourlong program watched by an estimated 50 million people, attracted so much interest that Soviet authorities rebroadcast it last week.

In keeping with an agreement reached before the broadcast, the panel avoided prickly questions of national policy. The American participants--Harvard University Cardiologists Bernard Lown and James Muller and Tufts University Professor John Pastore--discussed such topics as the effects of a one-megaton bomb on a city, medical care for nuclear victims and the long-term effects of radiation fallout. The Soviets likewise avoided ideological confrontations. Said Yevgeni Chazov, one of President Leonid Brezhnev's physicians: "We have come here openly and honestly to tell the people about our movement, whose main objective is the preservation of life on earth."

For many Soviet viewers, the program provided the first real glimpse of the horrors of nuclear war. Said a schoolboy of 14 who had seen pictures of mushroom clouds but not of an A-bomb's effects on the ground: "I never imagined that nuclear bombs could be so destructive."

Officials in Washington declined to dismiss the program as a Soviet propaganda ploy. Said a State Department spokesman: "We don't want to debunk something that might succeed in bringing about a greater feeling of concern about nuclear war in the Soviet Union." Still, the day when 700,000 people gather in Red Square to oppose nuclear weapons, as they did in New York City's Central Park last month, is probably as distant as ever. sb

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