The Iran War is a Disaster for Health and Nuclear Safety
The Iran War is a Disaster for Health and Nuclear Safety
Today, the war with Iran has claimed thousands of lives, including the lives of more than 150 school children and 13 U.S. service members, among them Capt. Ariana Savino, an airforce pilot from here in South King County. Attacks on oil facilities have caused plumes of toxic smoke in cities like Tehran, and it's estimated that the war is costing American taxpayers over 1 billion dollars a day, enough to cover the costs of every low income patient who has struggled to afford medication that I saw in my three years of residency in Tacoma many times over.
Public disgust is growing, with even the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives now trying to halt the war. Still, we appear stuck in a war started for reasons that run deep in our domestic and international politics, but most crucially, we are here because of the United States’ unilateral decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. While this deal was never considered to be perfect, it was a stabilizing agreement that kept us as a global community from moving closer to an all-out nuclear conflict. President Trump’s justifications for pursuing a war with Iran are false and only bring us closer to nuclear war that would be the United States’ own doing.
And the consequences of an all-out nuclear conflict are horrifying for the health of those close to any potential explosion, but also to the health of the world. I’ve learned through my work with Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility and Veterans for Peace organizations that we as a public have slowly been led to believe that exposure to radioactivity isn't all that bad; it's survivable. Nuclear exposure has been normalized to the point that we, as the American public, seem to be unconcerned about the possibility of nuclear war breaking out between Israel and Iran. I think a few things are at play here, but the bottom line is that the possibility of nuclear detonations is horrifying and cannot be thought of as necessary or permissible. As a physician, a professional charged with taking care of others and working with them toward health, the use of nuclear weapons is not and will never be part of anyone's good health.
The threat of nuclear war is just as real as it was in the "history books" during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Just because we are not practicing drills or building fallout shelters does not mean that nuclear war is any less devastating than it would have been at the height of the Cold War. Research published as recently as 2022 showed that it would only take a few weapons (less than 50) to cause catastrophic climate change (severe global cooling that would make growing food very difficult and impossible in some areas of the world). And even if that many weapons are not used, the fallout from even one weapon can travel all around the world and there is little reason to believe that it could not cause cancer in someone on the other side of the world. Pay attention; the possible effects are devastatingly real.
As we watch this war between the U.S., Israel and Iran and by proxy other regional and international powers, we see multiple simultaneous threats to the health of everyone around the globe. First, it is already happening that the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz will keep oil from passing through. And while we need to curtail our global dependence on oil, this is not the way to accomplish this. Second, much of the world's trade goes through this waterway and that includes nitrogen bases for fertilizer so that countries, including the United States, can grow food. And third, most dangerously, we could see nuclear strikes, which cause suffering throughout the entire world. Such a scenario can't be ruled out when any party possesses nuclear weapons, as is the case for both the U.S. and Israel, or in the Ukraine war, where Russia has nuclear weapons that could be used.
Now, it's important to highlight that any strikes are likely to come from Israel, not from Iran, in spite of propaganda from the Trump administration painting Iran as the nuclear threat. Even before Iran’s infrastructure was damaged by U.S. and Israeli strikes, international experts and even U.S. officials stated that Iran was not close to building a nuclear weapon. Therefore Iran was not the threat that the U.S. and Israel portrayed.
I am a physician and not currently an expert on international relations, but I do find this escalation in conflict to be antithetical to everything that we say we stand for in the "Free World." This immature, careless, and imminently dangerous action on the part of the United States and Israel needs to be called off. Diplomacy and conversations are the way to move forward in a civilized world.
We must raise our voices higher and make our elected officials increasingly uncomfortable over their acquiescence to this accelerating U.S. interventionism. Ring the phones off the hook at the offices of your congressional representative and the offices of Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell to build on the recent House vote and actually block President Trump’s unauthorized war. We must stop this before nuclear weapons are used.
Dr. Karl Riecken, DO, MA, FMCP-M is a family and functional medicine physician in SeaTac, WA. He is a member of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility and focuses his advocacy work on health-related realities of nuclear weapons and technologies.
