Why a Third- Generation Washington Physicians Cares about Hanford and Nuclear Weapons

updated May 27, 2010 by Maria Mergel

David Hall, MD
dchall@familyhealing.com
Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility

I was born nine months after my father returned from thirty months in the South Pacific during World War II. He was a surgeon and commander of a landing hospital that was the first medical response to reach the soldiers as they brought the war to the Japanese. He tried to save the lives of US soldiers as they swarmed the beaches of the Pacific Islands leading to Japan. His brother died on a US destroyer that was torpedoed by the Japanese in 1942.

In 1964, as a college freshman rooting for Barry Goldwater in the Presidential race with Lyndon Johnson, I was leafleted with the question, Who is the personal hero of Nguyen Kao Ky, then vice president of South Vietnam? Answer: Adolf Hitler. My response was to question more fundamentally the legitimacy of the US presence in Vietnam. I subsequently filed for a conscientious objector deferment from the military draft, my conviction grounded in my Episcopalian upbringing and Jesus's call to love your enemies. Married in 1970, Anne and I joined with neighbors in Tacoma to celebrate the early Earth Days.

I followed my father into medicine, but chose child psychiatry over surgery. While in training I attended a psychiatry department Grand Rounds on the medical consequences of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, including documentary film footage. From there it was only a matter of time before I joined Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), a US affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW).

In 1982 Anne and I joined the protest organized on Hood Canal to "greet" the USS Ohio, first of the Trident-class submarines to be homeported at the Bangor Naval Base.

In September 1983 I joined the board of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility (WPSR). In November Anne and I, with our 8- and 11-year old sons, watched The Day After, a dramatization of life after a nuclear war. By 1985 we were both deeply involved in anti-nuclear organizing and civil resistance to the nuclear weapons deployed from Hood Canal. I surveyed second graders on their awareness of nuclear weapons; when I asked what would happen if an atomic bomb exploded near their home, I got answers ranging from "It would blow my house down" to "We would be vaporized."

I was introduced to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in 1986 through WPSR, and in 1992 I traveled with WPSR to Chelyabinsk in western Siberia, site of the Soviet Union's plutonium production facility, at the invitation of our Russian colleagues from IPPNW.

In 1991, while I was president of WPSR for the first time, I joined the PSR national board of directors and served as national president of PSR in 1997. Beginning in the middle 1990s, PSR took up the issues of global climate change and the worldwide spread of human-produced toxic chemicals. Meanwhile, Anne was regularly getting arrested in civil resistance actions at the Bangor Navy base. We shared an arrest for sitting with others on the tracks in front of a Burlington Northern freight train that we believed was delivering missile motors for the nuclear-armed rockets carried by the Trident submarines.

So why do I still do this work of resistance to nuclear weapons?
1) I love my family,
2) I love this Earth that sustains us all,
3) I love my country for the beacon it can be for true freedom and human dignity, and
4) I have a citizen's duty to further my dreams for the benefit of my great-great-grandchildren's grandchildren.

As a child and family psychiatrist I recognize that my clinical work will be erased in an instant if these horrific weapons of mass destruction are ever unleashed.

The gravest threats to civilized life on Earth include nuclear devastation, perpetual war, catastrophic climate change, and the toxic despoiling of our planet.

To achieve peace we need to reverse global warming, abolish nuclear weapons, clean up the toxic mess we've made of Earth, and create local energy economies that eliminate poverty.

This requires a working non-proliferation regime now, carbon-free and nuclear-free energy soon, and a global order of human rights protection that honors people and a healthy environment over corporate profits and national pride.

Peacework is a lifestyle choice wherein each of us does our piece of the work.

 

 

"... sustained progress only occurs when we care more about outcomes than taking credit for our contributions."
*Dr. Lora-Ellen McKinney