Physicians for Social Responsibility

Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), a nonprofit organization, was founded in 1961 after a group of Boston, Massachusetts, physicians sought to analyze the medical implications of nuclear weaponry, including what they believed were the deleterious effects of the presence of strontium 90 in the environment.

Strontium 90, an isotope, is a by-product of the fission of uranium and plutonium in both nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors that produce nuclear power. Large amounts of strontium 90 were emitted during atmospheric nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and 1960s, and it is considered one of the most hazardous by-products of nuclear waste. Because strontium 90 is chemically similar to the chemical element calcium, it can concentrate in bones and teeth, and PSR was involved in early studies that documented strontium 90's presence in children's teeth.

According to a historical perspective published in 1998 in a leading medical journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, physicians in the cold war era of the 1950s were generally active partners with the U.S. government in planning the “duck-and-cover” approach to civil defense in the event of nuclear war. Leading medical journals of the day published articles that discussed methods of civil defense preparation.

But in 1962, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine had published a themed issue explicating the medical consequences of thermonuclear war. The newly formed PSR analyzed a nuclear attack on the United States that had been hypothesized by the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy and foretold of massive injuries and widespread destruction of medical infrastructure. The authors of the articles, along with the author of an editorial that accompanied the articles, argued that the only effective medical intervention with regard to nuclear war was its wholesale prevention, and physicians—by virtue of their obligation to patients and public health—had a special responsibility to work toward the abolition of nuclear weaponry.

After the heightened tensions of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the 1963 signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, which ended nuclear testing in the atmosphere, undersea, and in space, public interest in the issue waned. Newspaper accounts suggest that PSR also waned until, in 1977, Australian-born pediatrician Helen Caldicott moved to Boston and joined the organization. Serving as its president, Caldicott, known for her antinuclear passion and her rhetorical ability, increased the visibility of PSR while it, in turn, gave her a speaker's platform that increased her own visibility. PSR's membership soared, and its membership base widened, but a clash—some say inevitable—of both egos and activist styles resulted in Caldicott's departure from the group in 1983.

Meanwhile, concerned about nuclear underground testing and a series of international events and policies that explicitly implied that nuclear war was survivable and winnable, a U.S. physician, Bernard Lown, a cofounder of PSR, and a Soviet physician, Evgueni Chazov, along with others had formed the organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in 1980. That association worked closely with PSR, with the goal of alerting and educating policymakers, the medical community, and the public about the dangers of nuclear war.

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