Doctors urged to oppose non-lethal weapons
RTna 11.07.97 16:40
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LONDON (Reuter) - Doctors should speak up against the development
of so-called non-lethal weapons that could actually inflict
horrific damage, a Red Cross expert said Friday.
Writing in the British Medical Journal, Dr. Robin Coupland said
it was easy to be "seduced" by the idea of weapons that
allegedly would disable troops without killing them.
"The public may be seduced by the term 'non-lethal'. There
are reasons why the medical profession should not be,"
Coupland wrote in a commentary.
He gave as an example calmative drugs, which could be sprayed on
armies to make them stop fighting.
"Will a 'calmative' agent only calm?" he asked.
"Since the only difference between a poison and a drug is
the dose, do military planners reall believe that they can
control the 'dose' on a battlefield?"
Even if doctors did not co-operate with arms manufacturers,
medical research could still be used to develop frightening
weapons.
"There is also a fundamental ethical dilemma for doctors.
The development of this new generation of weapons incorporates
knowledge from the remarkable advances made in medical science;
two examples are calmatives and eye attack lasers," wrote
Coupland, a surgeon in the International Committee of the Red
Cross Health Operations division in Geneva.
Last week the British Medical Association urged legal action to
prevent the development of genetic weapons that could target
ethnic groups.
"The medical profession must guard against use of its
knowledge for the purposes of weapon development," Coupland
said.
He said there was a precedent for such action. "Blinding
laser weapons were prohibitied at a United Nations conference in
1995.
"However, there is no specific international treaty that
covers other new weapons. Is it not the responsibility of doctors
to recommend some kind of proactive control based on a comparison
between the known effects of conventional weapons and the
purported effects of new weapons?"