We'll All Go Together

With eloquence, numbing statistics and grim scenarios, physicians and scientists last weekend described the horror, the horror that would be "Apocalypse Boston"-a nuclear attack on the Hub.

At a two-day Science Center symposium, hundreds of doctors, students and activists contemplated modern Armageddon, filling in the viods of imagination with the detailed predictions of experts rather than the rhetoric of politicians.

Dr. Howard H. Hiatt, dean of the School of Public Health, gave his audience something to keep in mind as superpower leaders start talking about "winnable" nuclear wars.

A 20-megaton detonation in Boston, he said, would form a crater 300 feet deep and a half mile wide. More than two million people would be killed instantly; another five million or more would die later from injuries and radiation. And with roughly 17,000 survivors in need of care per doctor, Hiatt said effective medical treatment would be impossible.

The conference ended with nine noted physicians, including three from Harvard, urging telegrams to President Carter and Soviet Chairman Leonid I. Breznev to renounce the use of nuclear weapons.