U.S., Soviet Doctors Receive Peace Prize : Ceremony Draws Protesters; Three Envoys Stay Away

OSLO — As hundreds of demonstrators protested outside and U.S., West German and British ambassadors snubbed the ceremony, an American and a Soviet doctor received the 1985 Peace Prize today for an anti-war effort critics have called politically naive.

Dr. Yevgeny Chazov, the personal physician to three Soviet leaders, and Dr. Bernard Lown of Cambridge, Mass., accepted the $235,000 peace prize on behalf of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

It was only the second time the prize was given to a Soviet citizen and came a decade after Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov won his Peace Prize.

Soviet dissidents and hundreds of Sakharov supporters stood in the snowy streets outside University Hall to protest today’s award because the Soviet recipient once publicly denounced Sakharov.

‘Find Better Friends’

Leading the protest was former Nobel Committee Chairwoman Aase Lionaes, who braved the 14-degree temperatures and carried a poster bearing Sakharov’s picture.

“Find better friends, Dr. Lown,” read another poster.

Ambassadors from the United States, West Germany and Britain normally attend the prestigious ceremony, but they were out of Norway today on “other business” or vacations. Their absences, although not officially linked to the award, were viewed as demonstrations of unhappiness with the selection.

But Soviet Ambassador Dimitry Polyanski attended, breaking a 10-year boycott that began when Sakharov won the Peace Prize in 1975.

Chazov and Lown--among the world’s foremost heart specialists--are co-presidents of the independent, Boston-based physicians’ peace organization, which was awarded the 1985 prize for warning the world of the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war.

Praised for Warning

“These physicians have told us what will happen if these weapons were to be used,” Nobel Committee Chairman Egil Aarvik said at the award ceremony at Oslo University Hall.

“We know now about the atomic winter with its destruction of the biosphere and of all conditions necessary for life,” he said.

Summoned together to the rostrum, Lown, a Lithuanian-born American, and Chazov of the Soviet Union attacked “the expansion of the arms race into space” and called for a ban on nuclear tests.

Lown, confronting objections that his co-recipient signed a document in 1973 criticizing Sakharov, said their organization was established to deal with nuclear weapons only.

Situation Explained

“We are not indifferent to other human rights and hard-won civil liberties,” Lown said in his acceptance speech before King Olav V and other distinguished spectators.

“But first we must be able to bequeath to our children the most fundamental of all rights, which preconditions all others--the right of survival.

“We physicians protest the outrage of holding the entire world hostage. We protest the moral obscenity of each of us being held continuously targeted for extinction.

“We protest the ongoing increase in overkill. We protest the expansion of the arms race into space.”

Later, at a ceremony in Stockholm, five Americans, a West German and a Frenchman received the Nobel Prizes in medicine, chemistry, physics, economics and literature.