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Dr. Bernard Lown '42, 1985 Nobel Peace
Prize Winner: "We and the Russians at this point in history had enough
megatonnage to kill everybody alive 20 times. Now, you think you're
better off if you're killed 15 times rather than 5 times? It was
awesome. Every human being had four tons of TNT equivalent in this
amount of nuclear arsenals. But whenever I talk to Americans, friends
and colleagues about this, the invariable answer was five words. The
five words always checkmated me: 'You can't trust the Russians.' And we
continue to test underground and testing underground without recognizing
the evil of testing above ground and above ground, people talk of
Chernobyl. Now, if you look at Chernobyl, there were at least 81 million
curies--an enormous amount of curies. But look at one megaton--one
megaton is 10 billion curies. And the total atmospheric testing done to
the time Kennedy signed was 629 megatons. And according to Sakharov,
every megaton is responsible for 10 thousand cancers. So, you can do the
math, it's very simple. 6,290,000 people died as a result of the
atmospheric testing." |