University Daily Kansan / Wednesday. January 20. 1988
11
Doctors promote peace Anti-nuclear activist discusses responsibility
By Regan Brown
Kansan staff writer
There was a time when Ed Lucas helped build bombers. The military projects he worked on as an engineer and physicist included B-52s and B-1s.
Looking back he described that pause of his life as "working without thought."
Now a second-year medical student at the University of Kansas Medical Center, Lucas came to Lawrence last night to tell local physicians about Physicians for Social Responsibility. In a speech at the Eldridge House to the Douglas County Medical Society, he described the logistics of nuclear war and how doctors can help avert it.
"It's an issue of care," he said. Doctors are trained to prevent the things they cannot cure, and this should apply to nuclear war as well
as disease. Lucas said.
He said his group's mission was worldwide education on the issue of the nuclear arms race. Physicians are in a unique position to influence world leaders, Lucas said, because their opinions are taken seriously.
Promoting world peace can be as simple as doctors placing materials about nuclear disarmament in their waiting rooms. Lucas said.
When Physicians for Social Responsibility was founded in 1961, its members were more concerned about the medical effects of nuclear power plant accidents than the global implications of the arms race.
As U.S. nuclear policy became increasingly more aggressive, the group became a single-issue organization and the cause of arms limitation, he said.
It is the ittih-largest medical organization in the country. Lucas said,
with more than 50,000 members. In 1980, the group joined with Soviet physicians to join the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War.
Physicians for Social Responsibility supports the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty and favors a comprehensive test ban treaty with the Soviets. As for Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars," Lucas said. "Other than having a few flaws, such as being easily overwhelmed, underflood, and an economic disaster. I think it's a hell of a system."
Lucas said there were better ways to spend the estimated $200 billion to one trillion dollars that it will cost to fund education. "What want it if we were free," he added.
As of 1984, 26 percent of medical students belonged to Physicians for Social Responsibility, Lucas said.
Expert testimony was heard yesterday from Eckert, a Wichita pathologist. He testified that in his Sept. 16 autopsy, he found 15-20 areas on the body that had suffered some sort of trauma.
Another version was that he was cut outside on the porch as he attempted to take the knife away from her.
He said that in his experience, such traumas can be caused by blows from the hand, knee, elbow or foot of an assailant.
"She died as a complication of the trauma she suffered and the head injury," he said. Asked by Assistant Nurse Anne Cordray, four, to say, this woman, had been
Davis said Kemp told investigators that his wife had run into the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and slashed his left wrist three times as they struggled in the mobile home's hallway. Davis said that Kemp later told him that he had attempted to kill himself by slashing his wrists.
the front door. Davis said.
beaten to death?" Eckert replied, "I think this could be a description that would fit."
Continued from p. 3
Kemp
The trial began Monday with opening statements by Flory, who told the jury of seven men and five women that "the state will not present an eyewitness or a murder weapon except the defendant himself," and that evidence presented would tell a tragic and disturbing story.
Fleming deferred opening defense statements until after the state presents its witnesses.
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