The only way to prepare for nuclear war is to prevent it | Opinion

The Tri-City Herald’s recent article, “Where are targets in Washington if there’s nuclear war? See if you’re at risk,” highlights the increasing threat of nuclear war. We applaud bringing the threat of nuclear war to the public consciousness.

World leaders threaten nuclear weapons use, and the Trump administration is calling for renewed nuclear testing and expanded pit production, both of which are fueling a new arms race that would undermine international treaties. Case in point, whether abandoning the Iran nuclear agreement will prevent Iran from developing a weapon remains deeply uncertain.

Unfortunately, the Herald’s article leans heavily on MIRA Safety, a Texas company that profits from nuclear anxiety. Readers should know that MIRA Safety’s “expert” commentary comes bundled with product placement. The suggestion that 72 hours of food, water and clean air, along with the purchase of a Safety CM-6M Tactical Gas Mask, a Safety Geiger Counter and Thyrosafe Potassium Iodide Tablets constitutes meaningful preparation for nuclear war does not withstand scrutiny. Personally, we would not recommend this type of preparation to our families. It’s unfortunately akin to recommending a poncho to survive a hurricane

The Tri-Cities have a long history of needing to understand the potential health impacts of nuclear weapon production and waste storage releases. Today, Washington’s Columbia Generating Station is just 10 miles north of Richland, Wash.

Access to credible — not commercially motivated — resources matters. U.S. DHHS Radiation Emergency Medical Management guidelines support clinicians, emergency planners, hospitals and responders, covering triage, decontamination, radiation injury, fallout and sheltering. The CDC also offers relevant public health information, such as guidance stemming from the 1979 Three Mile Island accident.

And speaking as physicians, we would all desperately want to be able to help in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Even the resources above do not include all of the types of radiation problems that would result from a nuclear weapon, such as particle fallout lasting long after the wave radiation has dissipated. The reality is that the infrastructure we rely on to give care would almost certainly collapse, and that’s if we (or any physicians, nurses, medics and other first responders) even survive an initial blast. We would not be able to help.

The notion that personal gear provides meaningful protection distracts from reality: nuclear war is a potential extinction event. As Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev jointly stated in 1985, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

While sheltering can reduce fallout exposure for survivors outside blast zones, it cannot preserve hospitals, restore supply chains, or prevent long-term famine and societal collapse. Supercomputer modeling published in Advancing Earth and Space Sciences concludes that a full-scale nuclear attack would be suicidal for the aggressor. Publications in Nature as recently as 2022 suggest that even limited nuclear war would result in severe famine for those who happen to survive.

Annie Jacobsen’s “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” drawn from dozens of expert interviews, makes these consequences viscerally real: a single nuclear strike escalates within minutes into a civilization-ending catastrophe, killing hundreds of millions immediately and leaving survivors in a poisoned, frozen and politically shattered world. It’s been said many times before, “the survivors will envy the dead.”

The only real answer is prevention. Treating nuclear war as a manageable emergency — like a forest fire or winter storm — normalizes the threat rather than confronting it. From we three physicians’ perspectives, the correct response to a disease with no cure is prevention. Wouldn’t you rather your physician be focused on prevention than giving you a medication to lessen the symptoms?

There is hope. After the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, the world reduced its stockpile from 70,000 warheads to nearly 10,000. Ward Wilson’s “It Is Possible: A Future Without Nuclear Weapons” argues convincingly that nuclear weapons are ineffective and obsolete. “Nuclear Abolition: A Scenario” by Timmons Willis details a practical path forward.

An article published in 120 medical journals around the world the same week in 2025, “Ending Nuclear Weapons, Before They End Us,” estimated that 2,100 nuclear warheads in France, Russia, the U.K., the U.S. and China were on high alert, ready for launch within minutes. Given that is four times the number that could decimate our biosphere with smoke and lead to a mass extinction event of over two billion people starving, they offered four important first steps:

• Nuclear weapons countries adopt a no-first-use policy
• They take their nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert
• All states involved in current conflicts urged to pledge publicly and unequivocally that they will not use nuclear weapons in these conflicts
• Join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) that has 95 states signatories, 74 of which have become legally bound

Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility and its offspring organization, Northwest Against Nuclear Weapons, are pursuing these strategies — uniting peace, labor, environmental, faith and health communities to pressure elected officials, local governments and weapons production companies toward abolition.

We need to prepare for ordinary emergencies. We must organize to prevent nuclear war.

We care deeply about your lives. Does a company that profits off of fear care about your lives or its bottom line? We make no money preventing nuclear war, but we get to survive on the earth we love with the people we love.

Dr. Steve Overman, Dr. Karl Riecken and Dr. Riley Fisher are members of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility.