Boston—Sometime in the next three months every newspaper editor in the country will receive a letter from a local physician on the effects of nuclear war. “Suppose a Soviet one-megaton missile hit at the corner of Broad and Main Streets?” the doctor will inquire, going on to answer his or her own question in a fashion to make Dante’s Inferno read like The Little Engine That Could.
The art-form was developed by an outfit called Physicians for Social Responsibility and tried out for size by its president, Dr. Helen Caldicott, in a Phi Beta Kappa address last June. Nothing quite like it has been heard in New England since the Reverend Jonathan Edwards delivered himself in 1741 of the terrifying sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
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