Rapid Responses to:
|
|
Rapid Responses: Rapid Responses published:
-
![[Read Rapid Response]](/icons/misc/sectionDOWN.gif)
Aping American freedoms
- Mark Struthers (21 January 2005)
-
Freedom from the nuclear threat needed. Where is the US leadership on nuclear disarmament?
- Nick Wilson, Osman Mansoor (22 January 2005)
-
Freedom from the tyranny of excessive fertility
- Malcolm Potts (23 January 2005)
-
Re: Freedom from the nuclear threat needed. Where is the US leadership on nuclear disarmament?
- Michael Martin-Smith (24 January 2005)
-
Apocalypse Now
- Mark Struthers (26 January 2005)
-
Apocalypse Soon
- Mark Struthers (27 January 2005)
-
Freedom from the tyranny of.....
- Jamie S Robertson (28 January 2005)
|
|
|||
|
Mark Struthers, GP Bedfordshire, UK. mark.struthers@which.net
Send response to journal:
|
The war on Iraq is a disaster. The war on terrorism fuels more terror. “That the American healthcare system is in a mess has long been apparent.” US exports have long been unhealthy and an apparent cause of global sickness. For Britain’s future wellness, hasn’t the time come for a curb on American import freedoms? Competing interests: as an Electoral Reform Society (ERS) member I intend to vote 1,2,3 for STV (single transferable vote) and for greater choice at the next election |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Nick Wilson, Chair IPPNW (NZ) PO Box 1702, Wellington, New Zealand, Osman Mansoor
Send response to journal:
|
A BMJ editorial highlights some failures of the Bush Administration to provide leadership on international health issues [1]. The problems associated with this administration’s HIV/AIDS and family planning policies have also previously been described in the BMJ [2,3]. Other major failures that are not mentioned include the barriers put forward by the USA in regard to global initiatives for tobacco control and the global obesity epidemic, primarily to safeguard commercial interests. Perhaps, the most dangerous US-leadership failure is the lack of progress on nuclear disarmament. The US stockpile of 5300 operational nuclear weapons (many on high alert) [4], makes a mockery of their obligations to pursue disarmament under Article 5 of the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Furthermore, the US has rejected ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and made steps towards developing new nuclear weapons (ie, bunker-busting weapons). The pursuit of national missile defence may also contribute to destabilising regional arms races (eg, involving China). The rest of the world needs to exert substantive diplomatic pressure to get the United States to act responsibly on nuclear disarmament. A good place to do this is the NPT Review Conference this May in New York City. Successful progress at this conference will help to address the major threat to global health posed by these weapons of mass destruction. All concerned citizens are being invited to participate in a demonstration on 1 May 2005 in New York to encourage all the worlds’ governments to move towards banning nuclear weapons. References 1) McKee M, Foster S. George W Bush’s second term. BMJ 2005;330:155. 2) Clark J. Bush’s international health policies “condemn millions of women to die”. BMJ 2004;329:590. 3) Walgate R. Bush’s AIDS plan criticised for emphasising abstinence and forbidding condoms. BMJ 2004;329:192. 4) Norris RS, Kristensen HM. US nuclear forces, 2005. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2005;61(1):73-75. http://www.thebulletin.org/article_nn.php?art_ofn=jf05norris Competing interests: The authors are the Chair and Secretary (respectively) of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (New Zealand Branch) |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Malcolm Potts, Bixby Professor, School of Public Health University California, Berkeley
Send response to journal:
|
Sir, As pointed out in the editorial,1 George W Bush’s Second Term, the decisions that President Bush and his administration “must make will have profound consequences for the health of America's people and for those in many other countries.” In his Inaugural address opening his second term, the President called for “freedom in all the world,” and he spoke specifically of the “humiliation and servitude” that women still suffer in many countries. In January 1941, a more eloquent American president, Franklin Roosevelt, spoke of four essential freedoms: freedom of speech and worship and freedom from want; and fear. Two decades later, Sir Dugald Baird, Regius Professsor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in a celebrated speech that was reported in this journal added a Fifth Freedom to Roosevelt’s list, “freedom from the tyranny of excessive fertility.” 2 No woman can be free unless she can throw off the tyranny of unintended pregnancy. For millions of women the freedom to decide if and when to have the next child is even more important than the freedom of the ballot box. Pills and IUDs are more powerful weapons against tyranny than Abraham’s tanks and F16 war planes and if George W. Bush is to help life women out of “humiliation and servitude” then he must reverse his administration’s hostility to family planning based on short term political gain. The president’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, lost a Senate race because his support of Planned Parenthood offended some Catholic voters. The first president Bush authored the 1970 Family Planning Act. He correctly saw that "Success in the population field, under United Nations leadership, may, in turn, determine whether we resolve successfully the other great questions of peace, prosperity and individual rights that face the world." 3 First Lady Laura Bush supports one of the most successful family planning organizations in Mexico. If America is to attempt to bring ”freedom to all the world”, then its President must show intellectual integrity, choose the long term over the opportunistic and, above all, respect women and ensure they enjoy “freedom from the tyranny of excessive fertility” Malcolm Potts, MB, BChir, PhD, FRCOG. Bixby Professor Population and Family Planning University of California, Berkeley. 1 George W Bush’s Second Term. Brit Med J. 330:155-156. 2005. 2 Baird, DA. A fifth freedom. Brit Med J. ii: 1141-48. 1965. 3 Scheer R. Bush's Sop to the Right Hits Women Worldwide Los Angeles Times. Jan 30. 2001. Competing interests: None declared |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Michael Martin-Smith, Senior Partner, General Practice HU5 3EU
Send response to journal:
|
It can be argued that the gravest threat from actual use of nuclear weapons arises in the Middle East - notably in the fact that Israel possesses over 300 nuclear weapons and an ability to deliver them. While she has no interest or inclination to use these as first-strike weapons, Israel perhaps remains the only state on Earth whose total extermination is desired by people who are bent on acquiring the means to realise it To this day, Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion remain among the most popular books in the Arab world after the Koran. As long as mass media in 22 Arab States are treated to soap operas highlighting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as fact, and as long as nationalist newspapers in the Arab world perpetuate the classic anti- Jewish Passover child sacrifice blood libel, along with a modern variation blaming the recent Asian tsunami on a Zionist conspiracy, Israel has no inducement to surrender her nuclear weapons - and indeed would be reckless to do so. They survive only insofar as they are realists. The continued Holocaust denial by neonazi groups - Islamist and Western alike, and the continued expressed determination by Iran and others to destroy the "Zionist Entity", will make the prospect of nuclear safety unattainable. Antisemitism, in both its neoNazi Right wing and its PC Left wing antizionist isomers, has a new, deadly, ally in Islamist extremism. It can be likened to an infectious psychotic disorder which mutates its coat in each generation. This "Unholy Trinity" spells death for human civilisation in our generation, and must be stopped. Michael Martin-Smith Competing interests: Works for the construction of a positive selfsustaining evolutionary human future beyond the Earth |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Mark Struthers, General Practitioner Bedfordshire, UK. mark.struthers@which.net
Send response to journal:
|
I am sure Dr Michael Martin-Smith ( 24 January) is right to argue that the fomenting cauldron that is the Middle East poses a grave risk for the use of nuclear weapons of mass destruction. However, it is a little eccentric to exclude the only country that has ever used a nuclear weapon in anger as a future threat to the existence of human civilisation. And it’s difficult to see why the Asian tsunami should have been exclusively a Zionist plot. Noam Chomsky referred to the conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians as centrally involving the United States in his book ‘Fateful Triangle’. Thus, the right wing Christian extremist, the uncompromising Jew and the fundamentalist Muslim are a much more likely ‘Unholy Trinity’ to spell death to life’s existence on this planet. It is obvious that this potent clash of psychotic religiosity is an explosive mixture waiting to ignite a nuclear conflagration and Armageddon. America is the fuse: violence and retribution fires America. An America that showers the world with freedom and democracy like a confetti of cluster bombs reassures no one that a nuclear exchange can be avoided. It seems unlikely that a clumsy politician like George W Bush will leave the world in a more healthy state than he found it. There may be no history to judge. Competing interests: a belief that Dubya will have misunderestimated his Martian exit strategy |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Mark Struthers, General Practitioner Bedfordshire, UK. mark.struthers@which.net
Send response to journal:
|
“Nuclear weapons have changed everything, except our modes of thought” Albert Einstein Early on the morning of 6 August 1945, the atomic bomb called ‘Little Boy’ was dropped from an American bomber called Enola Gay on Hiroshima. Up to the end of 1945, the Hiroshima bomb caused 140,000 deaths. Five years later the total had reached 200,000. The Hiroshima bombing was just the beginning. Just after eleven am on 9 August, the atomic bomb called ‘Fat Man’ was dropped from an American bomber on Nagasaki. At Nagasaki, 70,000 had died by the end of the year and five years later the total had reached 140,000. These disgraceful events were ‘Apocalypse Yesterday’ and are mostly forgotten. A long way away from the bombing, the mood was good. General Leslie Groves, the commander of the Manhattan Project, * was positively cheerful as he passed the news of Hiroshima to Robert Oppenheimer: ‘I am very proud of you and all your people …… apparently it went with a tremendous bang.’ And President Truman, when told the news at lunch on board ship, said to the sailors at his table, ‘This is the greatest thing in history.’ The mood of Otto Frisch, one of the American nuclear scientists was sombre, but his description of some of his colleagues shows that others were not. “ I still remember the feeling of unease, indeed nausea when I saw how many of my friends were rushing to the telephone to book tables at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, in order to celebrate. Of course they were exalted by the success of their work, but it seemed rather ghoulish to celebrate the sudden death of a hundred thousand people, even if they were ‘enemies’.” The decision to drop these terrible bombs on innocent people was a fragmented one. In one of the central decisions of the twentieth century, no one seems to have felt sufficiently responsible to look with energy and imagination for alternatives. The war could have been stopped by other means. The Japanese were looking for a negotiated and honourable surrender in order to keep their Emperor. The mood though was for revenge: America and its leaders were strangely detached, oddly impervious to an alternative to the mass destruction of humanity. In Iraq, Afghanistan and in Cuba, George Bush has brought us ‘Apocalypse Now’. What will Dubya do next? What are his thoughts for tomorrow? Has America and its president learned the lessons of history? These are sobering thoughts for 27 January, Holocaust Day and the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – yet another lasting symbol of man’s inhumanity to man. * The Manhattan Project was the American and British atomic programme to counter the threat of a Nazi bomb. Information taken from Jonathan Glover’s book ‘Humanity: a moral history of the twentieth century.’ Competing interests: None declared |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Jamie S Robertson, Intercalating Medical Student University of Glasgow, G12
Send response to journal:
|
"No woman can be free unless she can throw off the tyranny of unintended pregnancy. For millions of women the freedom to decide if and when to have the next child is even more important than the freedom of the ballot box" Prof. Potts, women DO have the right to choose when to have a baby. What you are forgetting is that there are MANY ways of stopping a pregancy that do not involve the deliberate death (or 'murder'. as it is more commonly known) of an unborn child, and the moral and psychological repercussions that can and do follow. I fully accept that there are instances where a woman cannot help the fact that she is pregnant (eg. rape), so I share some of your concerns about a blanket ban on abortion. I do not, however, see how the basic right to life that a child has can somehow be overridden by a woman's desire for convenience. Shame on you for encouraging women to simply treat other human beings - their own children, no less - as nothing more than a ball of cells worthy of being washed down a drain, primarily because they can't really be bothered having a child right now (or, presumably, using some sort of contraception, or even abstinence, to avoid this scenario in the first place.) I am hardly what one would call a 'fundamentalist'; neither do I particularly think that George Bush is a wonderful leader. (in fact, I'm watching Farenheit 9/11 tonight on TV :) ) I do think, however, that there are other methods of contraception that do not involve the death of human beings, and that these should be harnessed before active abortion. Competing interests: None declared |
|||