Antinuclear

Tilman Ruff – an Australian anti nuclear hero

Nuclear nemesis, The Age, JO CHANDLER, April 10, 2010Ads  WHAT makes an activist “……Associate Professor Tilman Ruff, part-time physician, full-time campaigner against nuclear arms, and cancer survivor – a doctor who considers protecting the world from nuclear arms as fundamental to public health as the vaccines he dispenses……. His course was inspired by two people, both doctors who defined the threat of nuclear war as the most urgent and fearsome hazard to human health. One was Melbourne activist Dr Helen Caldicott, the other was a distinguished cardiologist from Boston called Bernard Lown, co-founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW).

The group was set up by physicians from the US and the former Soviet Union articulating the first principle of their profession – that doctors have an obligation to prevent what they cannot treat. They began the task of trying to explain the cataclysmic medical and scientific facts about nuclear war to policymakers and the public, exposing the weakness of civil defence strategies………….

He wonders sometimes about the clouds of radiation that tracked over southern Australia in the ’50s after nuclear testing in the deserts. He knows all about the particular vulnerability of unborn babies and young children to such isotopes….

”We’ve come a long way. The numbers of nuclear weapons have been reduced from the peak of 70,000 in 1986 to about 23,000 – that’s a drastic reduction…

….He pursues the objective through the grassroots – with the global group he chairs, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) – and diplomatically, as one of two invited non-government advisers to the co-chairs of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament…..

The idealist in Ruff is frustrated that it is not going further, happening faster. ”But I am enormously encouraged because we are seeing movement on multiple fronts.

Nuclear nemesis

April 10, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, people | antinuclear, Australia, nuclear weapons