Yet Pastore conceded that “an awful lot depends on the will of leaders” and “that’s a tough nut to crack.”
Elizabeth’s Medical Center who informally advises Muller. The back-channel outreach to Russian scientists is a part of what the State Department calls “track two” diplomacy that can maintain interpersonal dialogue when governments are at odds, said Dr. “The world can only roll the dice on the nuclear threat so many times without a catastrophe occurring,” he said. Muller fears the idea of limited nuclear war, long considered beyond the pale, is resurfacing. In 2017, then-president Donald Trump threatened to unleash “fire and fury” against North Korea, while that country’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, spoke of sparking an “enveloping fire” around the US territory of Guam. Putin’s blunt warning last week that countries interfering in his campaign against Ukraine would face “consequences that you have never encountered” was only the latest example. Muller, who practiced for decades at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is part of a brain trust of Massachusetts doctors who have grown alarmed by a fresh outburst of saber-rattling from heads of nuclear states in recent years after decades of comparative restraint. For him, the conflict raging in Ukraine - with Putin putting his nuclear forces on high alert - highlights the increasingly urgent need for global cooperation, not only to assure human survival from nuclear weapons but to fight diseases, pandemics, and climate change.