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Lown Lecture

Text-Only Version

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."