From: "Nadia McLaren" <nadia@uia.be>
Date: 18 Aug 2005
Subject: Depleted Uranium: Creative disposal of nuclear waste?
Friends
This is not a nice topic. The issue has been around for years -- denied, sidestepped and covered-up. The use of depleted uranium weapons again in Iraq has reopened it. I've sent material on this before. So if you feel informed, do nothing else but view the online trailer for the film. It says it all. If you want more details, read down.
Since humans are increasingly incompatible with the nuclear and chemical contamination of their weaponry, it is little wonder that the war development machinery is focused on unmanned drones, mobile intelligence bugs, remote and long-distance weapons and space militarization. What is also a concern is that if our politicians and military leaders can be so cavalier about irradiating their own soldiers, not to mention civilians, their use of other nuclear weapons may not be far behind -- think Iran. More on that soon.
But my basic message, as always, is that this information is to empower action, not fear. Awareness is the best mobilizer of peaceful resistance of what is being done in our name.
Nadia
Theatrical trailer: beyondtreason.com/media/beyond_treason.wmv The text accompanying this is in the body of the message.
11,000 US SOLDIERS DEAD FROM DU POISONING
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NIC200502 27&articleId=443"
Considering the tons of depleted uranium used by the U.S., the Iraq war can truly be called a nuclear war. Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter charged Monday that the reason Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi stepped down earlier this month was the growing scandal surrounding the use of uranium munitions in the Iraq War. (...) "Out of the 580,400 soldiers who served in GW1 (the first Gulf War), of them, 11,000 are now dead! By the year 2000, there were 325,000 on Permanent Medical Disability. This astounding number of 'Disabled Vets' means that a decade later, 56% of those soldiers who served have some form of permanent medical problems!" The disability rate for the wars of the last century was 5 percent; it was higher, 10 percent, in Viet Nam.(...) "The long-term effects have revealed that DU (uranium oxide) is a virtual death sentence," stated Berklau. "Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist, who retired from the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, and was also involved with the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in the soldiers (from the 2003 Iraq War) as 'spectacular -- and a matter of concern!' "When asked if the main purpose of using DU was for "destroying things and killing people," Fulk was more specific: "I would say it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people!"
A NEW KIND OF NUCLEAR WAR Sunday 26th June 2005 (17h03) : NUCLEAR WAR IN IRAQ 22 comment(s).
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=6654
While we were brushing our teeth this morning, or staring into the refrigerator to decide what to have for breakfast, contemplating whether to get a new ring tone for the phone, and going about yet another uneventful day in our mundane, but hopefully pleasant, existence spare a thought for what was going on during those very moments of domestic routine in a land far away both geographically and mentally.
A nuclear war is being waged - not your typical nuclear war of powerful, glowing mushroom-cloud blasts that reduce everything in their paths to blackened, flattened ruin, but a covert nuclear war using a mechanism that is just as deadly but not so obvious.
During the past few wars, starting with the Balkan wars, and the first Gulf War and on to Afghanistan and the current Iraq war, a major "improvement" to weapons has been in use. It was the tipping of munitions - bullets, shells and bombs with so-called Depleted Uranium. So-called because there is nothing really depleted about it. It is just as lethal un-depleted Uranium.
DU is a by-product of the Nuclear industry - a hitherto waste product and a problem to dispose of. Now the perfect solution was to put it to use making weapons more lethal.
This nuclear war has spread radioactive dust and refuse across the whole landscape where these munitions have been used. The immediate "benefit" of tipping weapons with DU is that it gives a multifold penetration power, hitherto not possible with regular weapons. Munitions can penetrate armour plating with ease and reduce tanks and buildings to ruin. When they explode the power is immense, causing a massive fireball that engulfs all, burning or vapourising its hapless victims without mercy.
This is the immediate horror of war - that we rarely hear about or see. (What we do see and hear about is the sanitised version.)
The aftermath of the immediate horror is the after-horror - over 1000 tonnes of DU has been deployed in the current war in Iraq. The chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion in 1986 released 700 tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Over 20,000 bombs (many DU tipped) were deployed in Afghanistan up to mid 2002. "The DU explosive charges in the guided bomb systems used in Afghanistan can weigh as much as one and a half metric tons - as in Raytheon 's Bunker Buster - GBU-28" (Le Monde March 2002)
This material gets into the soil, leaches into plants, rises in dust when the ground is disturbed, gets into the lungs and seeps into the skin of local populations, and the soldiers of both sides, and is carried around the world on the winds.
Children playing on and around destroyed tanks and battlefields are particularly susceptable.
"Children rather than adults may be considered to be more at risk of DU exposure when returning to normal activities within a war zone through contaminated food and water, since typical hand-to-mouth activity of inquisitive play could lead to high DU ingestion from contaminated soil." (The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 5, No 44, October 29, 2001
Soldiers exposed to radiation by the handling of these weapons and the dust released after they explode have been affected in large numbers.
The first Gulf War resulted in a very low official US soldier death toll and 7035 injured.
The reality is that of 580,000 soldiers who served in that war 325,000 are on permanent medical disabilty and 11,000 have subsequently died - an astonishing figure of 56% of those who served are now seriously ill with radiation related sicknesses, eupehmistically labelled "Gulf War Syndrome" by the medical and military establishments that refuse, of course, to acknowledge its true cause. Typical official explanations are dust storms, reaction to vaccines, exposure to pesticides. Other "official studies" try to further whitewash the situation by inadequate tests on military personnel who were not exposed to the dangers, and subsequently reporting "negligable or zero" levels of radiation in their urine.
Since dust storms, vaccines and pesticides are not known to cause cancers of the magnitude being experienced then the DU issue is front and centre of suspicion.
>From the 2003 Iraq invasion, in one US military unit alone, eight out of twenty soldiers have developed malignancies. That is 40% have become seriously ill only 16 months after being exposed to the radiation.
Throughout Iraq (and Afghanistan) doctors are reporting frightening statistics of hitherto unseen levels of hideous birth defects, and radiation sickness related conditions in a wide cross section of the population.
For the people of Iraq the lack of adequate medical facilities, and indeed proper infrastructure of power, water and supply shortages means that any semblance of proper treatment is usually next to impossible and the situation is totally futile.
Don't forget that during the "Sanctions" against Iraq between the two wars - it is reported that over 500,000 children died as a result of lack of medical and other supplies. A figure that former Secretary Of State, Madeline Albright said was "worth it".
For the soldier who unwittingly has been exposed to high doses of radiation, the threat is not only immediate to his or her own wellbeing but the danger is brought home. The reproductive system becomes a radioactive infection agent, passing on damaged genes to their offspring and even to their spouses.
In a group of 251 soldiers in Missouri who had produced normal babies prior to deployment to the first Gulf War, 67% of post-war babies were born with severe defects - missing arms, eyes, legs and with rare immune and blood diseases.
Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist, when asked about what efffect DU contamination has upon the body explained that the effects of uranium contamination targets the DNA. This causes a multitude of medical conditions that are typically vague and far reaching - in effect the body is "trashed".
When asked if the main purpose for using DU was not only improving weapon performance but indirectly to cause maximum destruction to life, she was blunt - "I would say that it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people."
The first DU weapons were produced in 1968 for the US navy and early, crude versions were used by Israel against the Arabs in the Yom Kippur war of 1973. DU weapons have been subsequently sold by the US to 29 countries. Thousands of tons of DU weapons were tested in the US between 1974 and 1999, and contamination from these tests resulted in a dramatic increase in cancers and leukemia rates of those living around the test facilities.
The military again denies any connection to DU.
A new book by Michael Collins Piper, published by American Free Press, "The High Priests of War: The Secret History of How America's Neo- Conservative Trotskyites Came to Power and Orchestrated the War Against Iraq as the First Step in Their Drive for Global Empire," details how the US administration neocons led by Henry Kissinger from as far back as the late 1960s had formulated plans to launch wars against the Arab world. This manifested itself into "The War Against Terror", after the 911 atrocity - which, by the way, was NOT caused by a bunch of Arabs living in caves, but that's a different altogether more scary story. The book delves into the creation of the neocons - by Trotsky lover Irving Kristol - whose son is currently one of the most influential men in the US. The Israeli lobby's neocon network has strong links with Kissinger and other notables as George Schultz, Zbignew Brzezinski, Paul Wolfowitz, Samuel S Huntington, and of course the more visible Cheney, Rumsfeld and not to forget the media contingent -for example our own Rupert Murdoch - hence the rabid support of the Iraq war on Foxnews and why you would never hear about the DU story or the true reasons for the Iraq [and onward-Christian-soldier invasions still to come] on Fox or any other mainstream network. In Brzezinski's book "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives," the map of the Eurasian chessboard includes four regions strategic to U.S. foreign policy. One of those regions (Afghanistan and Iraq) is currently laid waste with DU radiation.
The US, Australia and Britain went to war with Iraq based on a totally fabricated premise that Iraq possessed "Weapons Of Mass Destruction". Ironically the United Nations defines the use of Depleted Uranium as a "Weapon Of Mass Destruction". The "coallition of the willing" are deliberately flouting a United Nations resolution which classifies Depleted Uranium munitions as illegal weapons of mass destruction. According to an August 2002 report by the UN subcommission, laws which are breached by the use of DU shells include: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Charter of the United Nations; the Genocide Convention; the Convention Against Torture; the four Geneva Conventions of 1949; the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980; and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which expressly forbid employing 'poison or poisoned weapons' and 'arms, projectiles or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering'. All of these laws are designed to spare civilians from unwarranted suffering in armed conflicts. When we have the new US Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, the man who set the groundrules regarding what is "acceptable torture" - saying that the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" - well you get an idea of the seriousness of the problem. Professor Doug Rokke, ex-director of the Pentagon's depleted uranium project -- a former professor of environmental science at Jacksonville University and onetime US army colonel who was tasked by the US department of defence with the post- first Gulf war depleted uranium desert clean-up -- said use of DU was a 'war crime'. Rokke said: '...This war was about Iraq possessing illegal weapons of mass destruction -- yet we are using weapons of mass destruction ourselves - such double-standards are repellent.' Rokke added: 'A nation's military personnel cannot wilfully contaminate any other nation, cause harm to persons and the environment and then ignore the consequences of their actions. To do so is a crime against humanity. It is equivalent to a war crime.' Not only is it a War Crime, it is a War Crime in four ways. Karen Parker JD, famous UN War Crimes and humanitarian lawyer stated "My ' four-point' test is this: "It spreads" (beyond the field of battle); "it lasts" (can't be turned off when the war ends); "it injures people in impermissible ways" (as in making an as yet unborn child deformed); and "it harms the environment".
Since the one and only time "real" nuclear weapons were used - Hiroshima and Nagasaki world opinion has not been favourable for the use of such destructive weapons - the Ultimate WMD.
Uranium-tipped bombs, shells and bullets are just different forms of slow-acting, nuclear weapons by stealth. They are slower than the instant big boom and flash of Nagasaki type Nuclear Weapons. Now we are using the next generation of nuclear weapons on the hapless civilians of Iraq - and our own soldiers, indeed the whole world, is going to pay a heavy price. Uranium weapons spread deadly radioactivity that kills and contaminates forever.
Japanese professor, Dr. K. Yagasaki, has calculated that 800 tons of DU is the atomicity equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. The U.S. has used more DU since 1991 than the atomicity equivalent of 400,000 Nagasaki bombs. 10 times the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere from atmospheric testing!
In June 2003, the World Health Organization announced in a press release that global cancer rates will increase 50 percent by 2020.
So when you are filling up tomorrow's breakfast dish with cereal - spare a sobering thought that those flakes of corn could be contaminated by an invisible danger - but even if they are not, rest assured that hundreds of thousands of people are.
Sources used in this story that readers are encouraged to consult:
References
1. Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets: A death sentence here and abroad" by Leuren Moret, http://www.sfbayview.com/081804/Dep...
2. Bob Nichols - bobnichols@cox.net. www.globalresearch.ca/articles/NIC5... http://www.sfbayview.com/012605/hea...
Depleted Uranium - audio file - dr schultz and dr ali - appearing on Breakfornews.com http://www.kathymcmahonutvinternet....
See Doco: The Doctor, The Depleted Uranium and the Dying Children - SBS TV Australia - to be repeated 2005 - call 1800 500 727 for details.
Additional research: American Free Press four-part series on DU by Christopher Bollyn.
Part I: "Depleted Uranium: U.S. Commits War Crime Against Iraq, Humanity,"
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html
Part II: "Cancer Epidemic Caused by U.S. WMD:
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html
Part III: "DU Syndrome Stricken Vets Denied Care: Pentagon Hides DU Dangers to Deny Medical Care to Vets",
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html
Part IV: "Pentagon Brass Suppresses Truth About Toxic Weapons: Poisonous Uranium Munitions Threaten World",
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html
August 2004 World Affairs Journal. Leuren Moret: "Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War," http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/...
SIGN OUR U.N. PETITION TO BAN WEAPONS AND WARFARE IN SPACE
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/832338563
Campaign for Cooperation in Space
http://www.peaceinspace.org
DU - THE TICKING NUKE IN BUSH'S WHITE HOUSE WAR ROOM By Dave Lindorff 8-16-5
http://www.rense.com/general67/DUtestingforreturning.htm
Quietly, and under the radar for now, a movement is growing across the country that could blow up White House war planning and finish off the U.S. adventure in Iraq.
That movement is state-by-state legislation to provide for testing of returning National Guard troops for signs of contamination by depleted uranium.
Kicked off in Connecticut by a feisty Democratic state representative from New Haven named Patricia Dillon, a woman who was trained in epidemiology at Yale--her bill passed the state legislature in July unanimously, and goes into effect this October, about the time many Connecticut Guard troops will finally be coming home from Iraq--the measure has copycats hard at work in some 14-20 other states. Louisiana has already passed a similar law.
The military has been insisting that the 3000 tons of DU munitions it has blown up in Iraq in this war so far (and the 1000 tons more it has exploded and fired off in Afghanistan) are safe for troops and for civilians, though there is no real data to prove this because the Pentagon has vigorously resisted testing returning troops (only 270 so far, and using a far-from-state-of-the-art test) and the State Department and Pentagon have barred UN or other outside testers from looking into DU contamination in Iraq.
The official line --really an obfuscation--is that Uranium is only minimally radioactive. While this is true, it is chemically toxic in minute trace amounts, because Uranium ions are actually attracted to bond with DNA, where they can wreak havoc with cells (especially the cells of developing fetuses).
Meanwhile, an early small test sample of nine returned NY State National Guard soldiers, financed by the NY Daily News, found four, or nearly half the sample, to be clearly DU contaminated, with the others showing obvious symptoms (headaches, renal and neurological problems, etc.).
If even a much smaller proportion than 44% of the tens of thousands of U.S. Guard troops who get tested in Connecticut, Louisiana and other states prove to be contaminated with uranium from U.S. weapons, more states are bound to establish similar testing laws. Beyond that, reservists and active duty troops and veterans, all already anxious about the issue, are certain to start demanding the sophisticated tests.
Meanwhile, if DU tests start showing serious contamination of U.S. troops, how are Iraqis going to react? Already Iraqis are troubled by a dramatic (seven-fold) rise in childhood cancers and birth defects, particularly in the south.
Unlike in the first Gulf War, when all 300 tons of DU used was fired off in the Kuwaiti and Iraqi desert, this time nearly 10 times as much DU has largely been exploded and burned in urban fighting, putting the dust right in the path of millions of civilians.
This bomb is ticking...
BEYOND TREASON - GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENTATION ON MILITARY & CIVILIAN POPULATIONS
http://www.beyondtreason.com/media/beyond_treason.wmv
This film, 105 minutes reveals the U.S. Government's long history of experimenting on military troops and their own documents that prove it.
* Depleted Uranium Exposure * Chemical & Biological Exposure * Experimental Vaccinations
FEATURING:
Dr. Doug Rokke Director of the U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project Leuren Moret Geological Scientist and International Radiation Expert Dennis Kyne NBC Medical Specialist Veteran's Advocate Joyce Riley, RN BSN Spokesperson, American Gulf War Veterans Association Bob Jones, SSGT RET. Veteran - Op. Desert Storm Mark Zeller, SSGT Veteran - Op. Desert Storm
What causes Gulf War Illness? (a.k.a. Gulf War Syndrome; Persian Gulf Illness)
Some believe these illnesses are caused by exposure to depleted uranium munitions used on the battlefield. Others believe chemical and biological exposures are the prime suspect. While yet an even larger group argue that experimental vaccines given to our troops, without their knowledge or consent, may have lead to the demise of many of these soldiers.
Is it a combination of overlapping exposures?
A growing number of scientists and respected experts in their fields have been coming forward to share their research and first-hand knowledge of official betrayal.
As ailing Gulf War Heroes from all 27 coalition countries slowly die of "unknown causes," they wait for answers from their respective governments· but no satisfying or even credible answers have come forth from the military establishment. Records that span over a decade point to negligence and even culpability on the part of the U.S. Department of Defense and their "disposable army" mentality.
The VA has determined that 250,000 troops are now permanently disabled, 15,000 troops are dead and over 425,000 are ill and slowly dying from what the Department of Defense still calls a "mystery disease." How many more will have to die before action is taken?
This 105 minute film presents comprehensive and compelling documentation from United States Government archives of a massive cover-up lasting over two generations
BEYOND TREASON Directed by William Lewis TOTAL RUNNING TIME WITH BONUS MATERIAL: 114 MINUTES Theatrical trailer: beyondtreason.com/media/beyond_treason.wmv
...............................................................
DEPLETED URANIUM SITUATION REQUIRES ACTION BY PRESIDENT BUSH AND PRIME MINISTER BLAIR & U.S. CONGRESS
FROM: Dr. Doug Rokke, Ph.D., Former Director of U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project, Former Gulf War 1 DU assessment team health physicist, Confirmed DU casualty
June 2, 2005
[EXCERPT]
While U.S. and British military personnel continue using uranium munitions -- America's and England's own "dirty bombs" U.S. Army, U.S. Department of Energy, and U.S. Department of Defense officials continue to deny that there are any adverse health and environmental effects as a consequence of the manufacture, testing, and/or use of uranium munitions to avoid liability for the willful and illegal dispersal of a radioactive toxic material - depleted uranium. They arrogantly refuse to comply with their own regulations, orders, and directives that require United States Department of Defense officials to provide prompt and effective medical care "all" exposed individuals [Medical Management of Unusual Depleted Uranium Casualties, DOD, Pentagon, 10/14/93, Medical Management of Army personnel Exposed to Depleted Uranium (DU) Headquarters, U.S. Army Medical Command 29 April 2004), and section 2-5 of AR 70-48].
They also refuse to clean up dispersed radioactive Contamination as required by Army Regulation- AR 700-48: "Management of Equipment Contaminated With Depleted Uranium or Radioactive Commodities" (Headquarters, Department Of The Army, Washington, D.C., September 2002) and U.S. Army Technical Bulletin- TB 9-1300-278: "Guidelines For Safe Response To Handling, Storage, And Transportation Accidents Involving Army Tank Munitions Or Armor Which Contain Depleted Uranium" (Headquarters, Department Of The Army, Washington, D.C., JULY 1996)
Therefore medical care must be provided by the United States Department of Defense officials to all individuals affected by the manufacturing, testing, and/or use of uranium munitions.
Thorough environmental remediation also must be completed without further delay.
I am amazed that fourteen years after I was asked to clean up the initial DU mess from Gulf War 1 and almost ten years since I finished the depleted uranium project that United States Department of Defense officials and many others still attempt to justify uranium munitions use while ignoring mandatory requirements. But beyond the ignored mandatory actions that the willful dispersal of tons of solid radioactive and chemically toxic waste in the form of uranium munitions just does not even pass the common sense test.
The President of the United States -- George W. Bush and The Prime Minister of Great Britain -- Tony Blair & U.S. Congress must acknowledge and accept responsibility for willful use of illegal uranium munitions -- their own "dirty bombs" -- resulting in adverse health and environmental effects.
DEPLETED URANIUM: THE TROJAN HORSE OF NUCLEAR WAR
by Leuren Moret 8 July 2004
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOR407A.html
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself. - William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
The use of depleted uranium weaponry by the United States, defying all international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on earth including the human species, and yet this country continues to do so with full knowledge of its destructive potential.
Since 1991, the United States has staged four wars using depleted uranium weaponry, illegal under all international treaties, conventions and agreements, as well as under the US military law. The continued use of this illegal radioactive weaponry, which has already contaminated vast regions with low level radiation and will contaminate other parts of the world over time, is indeed a world affair and an international issue. The deeper purpose is revealed by comparing regions now contaminated with depleted uranium - from Egypt, the Middle East, Central Asia and the northern half of India - to the US geostrategic imperatives described in Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. CLIP
The fact is that the United States and its military partners have staged four nuclear wars, "slipping nukes under the wire" by using dirty bombs and dirty weapons in countries the US needs to control. Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those regions, where there are resources which the US must control, in order to establish and maintain American primacy.
Described as the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, depleted uranium is the weapon that keeps killing. The half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years, the age of the earth. And, as Uranium-238 decays into daughter radioactive products, in four steps before turning into lead, it continues to release more radiation at each step. There is no way to turn it off, and there is no way to clean it up. It meets the US Government's own definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
After forming microscopic and submicroscopic insoluble Uranium oxide particles on the battlefield, they remain suspended in air and travel around the earth as a radioactive component of atmospheric dust, contaminating the environment, indiscriminately killing, maiming and causing disease in all living things where rain, snow and moisture remove it from the atmosphere. Global radioactive contamination from atmospheric testing was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs, and still contaminates the atmosphere and lower orbital space today. The amount of low level radioactive pollution from depleted uranium released since 1991, is many times more (deposited internally in the body), than was released from atmospheric testing fallout.
A 2003 independent report for the European Parliament by the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), reports that based on Chernobyl studies, low level radiation risk is 100 to 1000 times greater than the International Committee for Radiation Protection models estimate which are based on the flawed Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Studies conducted by the US Government. Referring to the extreme killing effects of radiation on biological systems, Dr. Rosalie Bertell, one of the 46 international radiation expert authors of the ECRR report, describes it as:
"The concept of species annihilation means a relatively swift, deliberately induced end to history, culture, science, biological reproduction and memory. It is the ultimate human rejection of the gift of life, an act which requires a new word to describe it: omnicide."
1943 MANHATTAN PROJECT BLUEPRINT FOR DEPLETED URANIUM
In a declassified memo to General Leslie R. Groves, dated October 30, 1943, three of the top physicists in the Manhattan Project, Dr James B Conant, A H Compton, and H C Urey, made their recommendation, as members of the Subcommittee of the S-1 Executive Committee, on the 'Use of Radioactive Materials as a Military Weapon':
"As a gas warfare instrument the material would be ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground- fired projectile, land vehicles, or aerial bombs. In this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small ... There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty ... it will permeate a standard gas mask filter in quantities large enough to be extremely damaging."
As a Terrain Contaminant:
"To be used in this manner, the radioactive materials would be spread on the ground either from the air or from the ground if in enemy controlled territory. In order to deny terrain to either side except at the expense of exposing personnel to harmful radiations ... Areas so contaminated by radioactive material would be dangerous until the slow natural decay of the material took place ... for average terrain no decontaminating methods are known. No effective protective clothing for personnel seems possible of development. ... Reservoirs or wells would be contaminated or food poisoned with an effect similar to that resulting from inhalation of dust or smoke."
Internal Exposure:
"... Particles smaller than 1µ [micron] are more likely to be deposited in the alveoli where they will either remain indefinitely or be absorbed into the lymphatics or blood. ... could get into the gastro-intestinal tract from polluted water, or food, or air. ... may be absorbed from the lungs or G-I tract into the blood and so distributed throughout the body."
CLIP Extensive carpet bombing, grid bombing, and the frequent use of missiles and depleted uranium bullets on buildings in densely populated areas has occurred in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. The discovery that bomb craters in Yugoslavia in 1999 were radioactive, and that an unexploded missile in 1999 contained a depleted uranium warhead, implies that the total amount of depleted uranium used since 1991 has been greatly underestimated. Of even greater concern, is that 100 per cent of the depleted uranium in bombs and missiles is aerosolized upon impact and immediately released into the atmosphere. This amount can be as much as 1.5 tons in the large bombs. In bullets and cannon shells, the amount aerosolized is 40-70 per cent, leaving pieces and unexploded shells in the environment, to provide new sources of radioactive dust and contamination of the groundwater from dissolved depleted uranium metal long after the battles are over, as reported in a 2003 report by the UN Environmental Program on Yugoslavia. Considering that the US has admitted using 34 tons of depleted uranium from bullets and cannon shells in Yugoslavia, and the fact that 35,000 NATO bombing missions occurred there in 1999, potentially the amount of depleted uranium contaminating Yugoslavia and transboundary drift into surrounding countries is staggering.
Because of mysterious illnesses and post-war birth defects reported among Gulf War veterans and civilians in southern Iraq, and radiation related illnesses in UN Peacekeepers serving in Yugoslavia, growing concerns about radiation effects and environmental damage has stirred up international outrage about the use of radioactive weapons by the US after 1991. At the 2003 meeting of parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, discussing the U.S. desire to maintain its nuclear weapons stockpile, the Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi AKIBA stated, "It is incumbent upon the rest of the world ... to stand up now and tell all of our military leaders that we refuse to be threatened or protected by nuclear weapons. We refuse to live in a world of continually recycled fear and hatred".
CLIP - Read the rest at
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOR407A.html
RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH NEWS
788
http://www.rachel.org
April 1, 2004
DEPLETED URANIUM WEAPONS OF WAR
Uranium is a naturally-occurring element that is both weakly radioactive and a toxic heavy metal. Naturally-occurring uranium contains two main radioactive isotopes: U-238 (99.3%), and U-235 (0.7%). When uranium is "enriched" to make an A-bomb (which requires lots of U-235), the leftover "depleted uranium" (DU) is 99.8% U-238 and retains about 60% of the radioactivity that was present in the original natural uranium.[1, pg. 3]
Depleted uranium is created by "uranium enrichment" plants that process natural uranium to extract the U-235, but those same plants also may process spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power reactors. For this reason, some DU is known to be contaminated with very low levels of some of the most dangerous radioactive substances known to science: Plutonium-238, Plutonium-239, Plutonium-240, Americium-241, Neptunium-237 and Technicium-99.[1, pg. 6]
Radioactive decay is a natural process. Radioactive elements spontaneously emit energetic particles or rays, and in the process they change from one element into another. When U-238 spontaneously undergoes radioactive decay, it emits alpha particles (and turns into Thorium- 234). You can think of an alpha particle as something like a tiny cannon ball -- it does not travel very far (a few centimeters in air), but if it hits a living cell, the damage can be enormous. Sometimes cells damaged by alpha particles die immediately, but sometimes they start to multiply uncontrollably, causing cancer. (The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has identified "internally deposited radionuclides that emit alpha particles" as Group I carcinogens, meaning substances known to cause cancer in humans.[1, pg. 85])
So, DU's alpha particles won't penetrate the outermost (dead) layer of your skin, but if you get DU inside you -- say, in your lungs -- it can have deadly consequences. Several studies of workers in uranium enrichment plants show that they get lung cancer at higher-than-normal rates.[1, pg. 86]
The half-life of U-238 is 4.5 billion years, which tells us that it does not decay rapidly and therefore that it does not emit many alpha particles per second. However, "many" is a relative term. In absolute numbers, a microgram of DU (a millionth of a gram, and there are 28 grams in an ounce) will emit slightly more than 12 alpha particles per second or 390 million alpha particles each year.[1, pg. 6] So one microgram of DU lodged in your lungs will have more than a million opportunities EACH DAY to start a cancer growing in your cells. Obviously, the hazard is greater for children because they have a longer lifetime ahead of them during which alpha particles will have an opportunity to start a cancer, plus they are very likely more sensitive to harm than adults (because they are growing, so more of their cells are dividing).
In recent decades, as we have manufactured more atomic bombs and therefore more depleted uranium, there has been growing pressure to find new uses for our huge stockpile of depleted uranium.[1, pg. 26] In my opinion, the psychology behind this is pretty simple: as it becomes crystal clear that subsidizing nuclear technologies was one of the dumbest mistakes humans have ever made, there is enormous pressure to show that something good can come from it. It is the psychology of the optimist, whom Ronald Reagan defined as the man who enters a room full of horse manure and says, "There must be a pony in here somewhere."
Because it is almost twice as dense as lead and not very radioactive, DU has been used as shielding for medical devices and in casks for transporting spent fuel from nuclear power plants. Because it is so dense (and therefore heavy), DU has also been used as ballast -- weights or counterwights -- on ships, satellites and aircraft. For example, each Boeing 747 jumbo-jet requires about 1500 pounds of ballast (or counterweights), and as many as 15,000 DU weights were manufactured for this purpose. In recent years, DU has been replaced by tungsten in aircraft ballast, perhaps to avoid questions about the wisdom of flying radioactive materials around in planes. A plane that crashed into a row of apartments in Amsterdam in 1992 was carrying 282 kg (620 pounds) of DU as ballast, and a Boeing-747 that crashed in England in 2000 was carrying 1500 kg (3,300 pounds) of DU. [1, pg. 26]
In the Amsterdam crash, some 152 kilograms (334 pounds) of DU were never found, and the Dutch commission of inquiry concluded that the fiery crash may have released some of the DU in the form of a radioactive fume or dust, just as you would expect it might. DU is pyrophoric, meaning that it catches fire under some circumstances and turns into a very fine radioactive fume or dust, which can blow around.[1, pg. 44]
In the past 20 years, DU has found its way into weapons of war -- both for heavy tank armor and for armor-piercing projectiles -- again, because it is plentiful and cheap (thanks to government subsidies) and almost twice as dense as lead. As noted above, it is also pyrophoric, meaning that under some circumstances it catches on fire.
When a DU projectile strikes an armored target, such as a tank, it does not flatten on contact but instead penetrates and "self sharpens" as it passes through the armor. This occurs because as the DU projectile is penetrating its target, its outer layer catches fire, creating a very fine radioactive dust, essentially lubricating the remaining projectile, helping it penetrate further. The result is a very clean hole in the target -- which looks as if it had been drilled -- and a great deal of radioactive dust. Somewhere between 10% and 70% of a DU projectile is transformed into radioactive dust when it strikes a sufficiently hard target.[1, pg. 46]
This dust creates special problems. As noted above, if DU dust gets into your lungs, it can cause lung cancer.
DU dust is heavy and so it settles to earth within a few hundred yards of where it was created -- unless it is picked up again and moved by the wind.
To help get the health threat into perspective, in discussing DU, I prefer to express the amount of DU in micrograms, on the assumption that a few hundred micrograms (perhaps less) is a dangerous amount of DU dust. It is important to remember that not all (or even most) DU munitions strike hard targets that would cause them to catch fire and emit radioactive fumes (dust).
Ground-attack airplanes like the A-10 Warthog fire 30 mm projectiles at the rate of 70 projectiles per second, and each 30-mm projectile contains 0.27 kg (9.5 ounces, or 270 million micrograms) of DU. Heavy tanks fire 120 mm rounds, each containing 4.85 kg (10.6 pounds, or 4.8 billion micrograms) of DU.
It was reported in 1995 that U.S. arms manufacturers had produced more than 55 million 30-mm DU penetrators and 1.6 million DU penetrators for tank ammunition.[1, pg. 27] No doubt more have been manufactured since then.
The U.S. has acknowledged using DU weapons during the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991, and NATO has acknowledged using DU weapons during the Kosovo conflict of 1999. DU munitions have extensively contaminated U.S. military proving grounds and firing ranges such as the ones at Yuma, Arizona, Aberdeen, Maryland, Jefferson, Indiana, and Viecques, Puerto Rico.[1, pg. 50]
Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have been fooling around with DU for 60 years, during which time they have dumped an estimated 38.5 tons of DU into a mountain canyon out back, behind the lab.[1, pg. 49]
During wartime, the greatest civilian threat from DU is assumed to involve children, who have been photographed in Kosovo and Iraq playing on burned-out military vehicles including tanks disabled by DU projectiles.[1, pg. 49] Much of this equipment is heavily contaminated, inside and out, with radioactive dust.
Many children also eat dirt (9 to 96 mg/day) as a normal part of growing up, and soil contaminated with DU dust presents a special hazard in such cases, according to the World Health Organization.[1, pg. 38]
However, U.S. military officials deny that children -- or any other civilians -- are at risk from DU.[2] The Pentagon says only soldiers are at risk. It is clear that the Pentagon considers DU plenty hazardous to soldiers -- an Army training manual says that anyone who comes within 25 meters of any DU-contaminated equipment or terrain must wear respiratory and skin protection (because DU might enter the body through a scratch or other open wound).[3]
Once you get DU in your lungs, much of it will stay there for a long time, irradiating lung cells, and the World Health Organization says, "The risk of lung cancer appears to be proportional to the radiation dose received."[1, pg. 85] (In other words, the only way to have zero risk is to have zero exposure.) The British Royal Society studied DU and concluded that its use was not risk-free for anyone involved.[4] The truth is, DU has been studied remarkably little, given that we blast tons of it into areas inhabited by civilian populations for the avowed purpose of helping them. No one has studied the effects of DU on the immune system, the metabolic system, the nervous system, the reproductive system, the endocrine system (and other biological signaling mechanisms), and growth, development, and behavior. It's amazing what we don't know about DU and that -- in the face of such ignorance -- anyone could claim to know that it is safe for use near civilians.
Unfortunately, even many crucial details about the lung cancer hazard remain missing. Although they have been making and studying DU since 1940, military scientists still don't know exactly how long inhaled DU is retained in the lung. They say that somewhere between 57% and 76% of inhaled DU stays in the lung with a half-life of "longer than 100 days" but how much longer they seem not to know.[1, pg. 64] The half-life is the amount of time it takes for half of a substance to go away. It is also not clear where inhaled DU goes after it leaves the lungs. Is it coughed up and excreted, or does it dissolve, enter the blood stream and then the urine? Or does it lodge elsewhere in the body? In male rats intentionally contaminated, uranium collects in the brain and the testicles.[1, pg. 65]
Military specialists like to point out that DU munitions that miss their target simply bury themselves in the ground. But the World Health Organization is not so sure the story ends there:
"However, in some instances the levels of contamination in food and ground water could rise after some years and should be monitored and appropriate measures taken where there is reasonable possibility of significant quantities of depleted uranium entering the food chain... Areas with very high concentrations of depleted uranium may need to be cordoned off until they are cleaned up."[1, pg. vi] Cleanup of DU- contaminated areas has not occurred in Kosovo or Iraq.
Who ever thought that DU in the ground would always stay put? Between 1970 and 1997, the Starmet Corporation, a military contractor making DU weapons, dumped DU into an unlined pit in the ground in downtown Concord, Mass. Now soil in Concord is contaminated with DU as far as a mile from the dump, and local wells are contaminated because DU has moved into groundwater. Who would have expected any other outcome? Nevertheless, we should acknowledge that the directors of Starmet are not as dumb as they might appear. Shortly before their radioactive dump was added to the national Superfund list, Starmet officials took precautionary action and declared bankruptcy. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accepted Starmet's bankruptcy without a peep, so U.S. taxpayers are now paying for the difficult cleanup.[5]
The U.S. Navy stores DU in San Diego, Calif.; Seal Beach, Calif.; Crane, Indiana; Indian Head, Md.; Colts Neck, N.J.; Hawthorne, Nev.; McAlister, Ok.; Charlestown, S.C.; Tooele, Utah; Dahlgren, Va.; Norfolk, Va.; Sewells Point, Va.; and Yorktown, Va., and large quantities are reportedly stored at ten other locations. When the military ships DU around the country, the containers are not marked "radioactive" even though the cargo is definitely radioactive as well as explosive. (See ACTION ALERT, below.)
In addition to being radioactive, DU is toxic; specifically it is known to be toxic to the genes of humans.[1, pg. 75] Studies of Gulf War vets living with DU shrapnel in their bodies (from "friendly fire" during the Gulf War) show evidence of genetic damage.[6] At least one military scientist -- Alexandra Miller a radiobiolgist with the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Md. says DU may be more dangerous than previously believed because its chemical toxicity and its radioactivity may combine in unexpected ways to cause harm.[7]
Miller also points out that genetic damage (from chemical toxicity or radioactivity, or both) can be inherited and passed along to successive generations, so harm may not become apparent until many generations after the event that caused it.[7] This puts DU munitions squarely into the class of weapons known as "weapons of mass destruction or indiscriminate effect."
U.S. planes, under NATO command, fired 10 tons (9 trillion micrograms) of DU projectiles at targets in Kosovo in 1999. During the Gulf War of 1991 against Iraq, the U.S. fired projectiles containing somewhere between 300 and 338 tons of DU (or 272 trillion to 302 trillion micrograms).[1, pg. 45]
The total quantity of DU munitions expended during the Iraq War of 2003 has been estimated to be 100 to 200 tons (90 trillion to 180 trillion micrograms).[8] Much of it was expended in or near urban areas where civilian populations live, work, play, draw water, and sell food.
It seems clear, then, that DU weapons produce special, continuing hazards to civilians, especially children, and that the harm from these weapons may be passed to future generations. No doubt this is why a United Nations subcommission in 1996 named DU munitions as "weapons of mass destruction or indiscrimate effect" and recommended that their use be outlawed.[9]
Tungsten alloy weapons can kill tanks and other hardened targets as effectively as DU, so continued use of DU weapons by the U.S. seems unnecessary and a slap in the face to the principles of public health, international law, world opinion, and common decency. --Peter Montague
NOTES and REFERENCES
[1] Department of Protection of the Human Environment, World Health Organization, Depleted Uranium; Sources, Exposure and Health Effects (Geneva, Switzerland, April 2001). Available at
http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/pub_meet/ir_pub/en/ .
[2] Matthew D. Sztajnkrycer and Edward J. Otten, "Chemical and Radiological Toxicity of Depleted Uranium," Military Medicine Vol. 169, No. 3 (2004), pgs. 212-216.
[3] Army manual quoted in Larry Johnson, "Activists want depleted- uranium munitions labeled; military's exemption is challenged," Seattle (Wa.) Post-Intelligencer Dec. 4, 2003.
[4] Susan Mayor, "Report suggests small link between depleted uranium and cancer," British Medical Journal Vol. 322 (June 23, 2001), pg. 1508.
[5] Ed Ericson, "Dumping on History: A Radioactive Nightmare in Concord, Massachusetts," E/The Environmental Magazine Mar. 5, 2004.
[6] Melissa A. McDiarmid and others, "Health Effects of Depleted Uranium on Exposed Gulf War Veterans: A 10-Year Follow-up," Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A, Vol. 67 (2004), pgs. 277- 296.
[7] Duncan Graham-Rowe, "Depleted uranium casts a shadow over peace in Iraq," New Scientist Vol. 178, No. 2391 (April 19, 2003), pg. 4.
[8] Dan Fahey, "The Use of Depleted Uranium in the 2003 Iraq War: An Initial Assessment of Information and Policies." Berkeley, Calif., June 24. 2003. Available at
http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/pdf/duiq03.pdf
[9] The United Nations Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities passed a resolution condemning the use of depleted uranium weapons during its 48th session in August, 1996, as described in U.N. Press Release HR/CN/755, "Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities Concludes Forty-Eighth Session." Relevant section available at
http://southmovement.alphalink.com.au/antiwar/UNres.htm
HORROR OF USA'S DEPLETED URANIUM IN IRAQ THREATENS WORLD 29 April 2005
http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/20050429121615724
American use of DU is "A crime against humanity which may, in the eyes of historians, rank with the worst atrocities of all time." US Iraq Military Vets "are on DU death row, waiting to die." "I'm horrified. The people out there - the Iraqis, the media and the troops - risk the most appalling ill health. And the radiation from depleted uranium can travel literally anywhere. It's going to destroy the lives of thousands of children, all over the world. We all know how far radiation can travel. Radiation from Chernobyl reached Wales and in Britain you sometimes get red dust from the Sahara on your car." The speaker is not some alarmist doomsayer. He is Dr. Chris Busby, the British radiation expert, Fellow of the University of Liverpool in the Faculty of Medicine and UK representative on the European Committee on Radiation Risk, talking about the best-kept secret of this war: the fact that by illegally using hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) against Iraq, Britain and America have gravely endangered not only the Iraqis but the whole world. For these weapons have released deadly, carcinogenic and mutagenic, radioactive particles in such abundance that-whipped up by sandstorms and carried on trade winds - there is no corner of the globe they cannot penetrate-including Britain. For the wind has no boundaries and time is on their side: the radioactivity persists for over 4,500,000,000 years and can cause cancer, leukemia, brain damage, kidney failure, and extreme birth defects - killing millions of every age for centuries to come. A crime against humanity which may, in the eyes of historians, rank with the worst atrocities of all time. (...) Since DU darkened the land Iraq has seen birth defects which would break a heart of stone: babies with terribly foreshortened limbs, with their intestines outside their bodies, with huge bulging tumors where their eyes should be, or with a single eye-like Cyclops, or without eyes, or without limbs, and even without heads. Significantly, some of the defects are almost unknown outside textbooks showing the babies born near A-bomb test sites in the Pacific. Doctors report that many women no longer say 'Is it a girl or a boy?' but simply, 'Is it normal, doctor?' Moreover this terrible legacy will not end. The genes of their parents may have been damaged for ever, and the damaging DU dust is ever-present. (...) That the evidence from Iraq and from our troops, and the research findings of such experts, have been ignored may be no accident. A US report, leaked in late 1995, allegedly says, 'The potential for health effects from DU exposure is real; however it must be viewed in perspective... the financial implications of long-term disability payments and healthcare costs would be excessive.' Clearly, with hundreds of thousands gravely ill in Iraq and at least a quarter of a million UK and US troops seriously ill, huge disability claims might be made not only against the governments of Britain and America if the harm done by DU were acknowledged. There might also be huge claims against companies making DU weapons and some of their directors are said to be extremely close to the White House. How close they are to Downing Street is a matter for speculation, but arms sales makes a considerable contribution to British trade. So the massive whitewashing of DU over the past 12 years, and the way that governments have failed to test returning troops, seemed to disbelieve them, and washed their hands of them, may be purely to save money. (...) Britain and America not only used DU in this year's Iraq war, they dramatically increased its use-from a minimum of 320 tons in the previous war to at minimum of 1500 tons in this one. And this time the use of DU wasn't limited to anti-tank weapons-as it had largely been in the previous Gulf war-but was extended to the guided missiles, large bunker busters and big 2000-pound bombs used in Iraq's cities. This means that Iraq's cities have been blanketed in lethal particles-any one of which can cause cancer or deform a child. In addition, the use of DU in huge bombs which throw the deadly particles higher and wider in huge plumes of smoke means that billions of deadly particles have been carried high into the air-again and again and again as the bombs rained down-ready to be swept worldwide by the winds. CLIP
What Is Depleted Uranium? (09 May 2005)
http://www.iconoclast- texas.com/News/19news02.htm
Crawford - The Lone Star Iconoclast last week conducted a test by asking 20 Texans, representing all walks of life and from different territories of the state, "What are your views on depleted uranium?" Nineteen had no clue what the interviewer was talking about. One offered, "Isn't that the stuff that's hauled away from nuclear power plants?" None knew that depleted uranium (DU) is radioactive material being used in military ammunition and none knew that the US military is utilizing weapons to launch these nuclear DU projectiles in Iraq. Likewise, not one of the queried Texans was aware that DU poses significant health threats not only to Iraqis, but to Americans as well, for the radioactivity spreads from continent to continent through the atmosphere and is brought home through soldiers to their families and associates. CLIP
LIFE Photo essay "The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm"
http://www.life.com/Life/essay/gulfwar/gulf01.html
When our soldiers risked their lives in the Gulf, they never imagined that their children might suffer the consequences--or that their country would turn its back on them.
Soaring birth deformities and child cancer rates in Iraq (10 May 2005)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/may2005/iraq-m10.shtml
Iraqi doctors are making renewed efforts to bring to the world's attention the growth in birth deformities and cancer rates among the country's children. The medical crisis is being directly blamed on the widespread use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions by the US and British forces in southern Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, and the even greater use of DU during the 2003 invasion.The rate of birth defects, after increasing ten-fold from 11 per 100,000 births in 1989 to 116 per 100,000 in 2001, is soaring further. CLIP
Explaining How Depleted Uranium Is Killing Civilians, Soldiers, Land - Nano-Particles Pinpointed
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/explaining_how.html
DU Nano Particles Pose Major Health Hazard
Pentagon Brass Suppresses Truth About Toxic Weapons
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/pentagon_brass.html
Poisonous Uranium Munitions Threaten World.
UN Training Iraqis in Jordan to Measure Radiation from Depleted Uranium
By Dale Gavlak The Associated Press Monday 01 June 2005
http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/060205EA.shtml
Amman, Jordan - Concerned about depleted uranium and what they say are increasing cancer rates, Iraqi officials are receiving training from U.N. experts on techniques to measure radiation levels according to international standards, a U.N. official Tuesday.
Pekka Haavisto, chairman of the U.N. Environment Program's Iraq Task Force, said the Iraqis were especially concerned about the southern city of Basra and the surrounding area. He said the Iraqi government approached UNEP for help.
"They did their own studies and found that the cancer risk has increased by two to three times since the 1991 Gulf War," Haavisto told The Associated Press. "These are local studies and have not been internationally verified so it is difficult to say if the picture is so black."
Depleted uranium is a heavy metal used in armor-piercing weapons. The Pentagon maintains that depleted uranium is safe and is about 40 percent less radioactive than natural uranium.
The British government has given UNEP detailed information on locations where it used 1.9 tones of depleted uranium in the south of Iraq, but UNEP says the U.S. government hasn't come forward with the same information despite U.N. requests.
UNEP is instructing 16 officials from the Iraqi Ministry of Health and Environment, including both vice-ministers, in how to detect depleted uranium.
"The UNEP is currently providing training and equipment to Iraqi scientists to measure Beta and Gamma radiation from depleted uranium sources," Haavisto said.
He said UNEP has carried out studies on depleted uranium found in munitions used in Kosovo and the Balkan wars but "due to the security situation in Iraq, we are training Iraqis to conduct the studies themselves."
Haavisto said the UNEP is concerned that "there has been no proper clean up in Iraq since wars in 2003 and 1991. There is still depleted uranium and other chemicals on the ground. Looting has contributed to the problem," he said.
"Usually hazardous materials must be cleaned up as rapidly as possible," he added.
He said the UNEP had several other concerns about Iraq, such as the presence of toxic materials, heavy metals and oil spills that present environmental and health hazards.
UNEP's studies in the Balkans called for monitoring depleted uranium affected areas, cleanup efforts and clearly marking affected sites.
It concluded that that localized contamination can be detected at contaminated sites and so precaution is needed, while in general, levels are so low that they do not pose an immediate threat to human health and the environment.
But the Balkans studies also identified a number of uncertainties requiring further investigation, according to UNEP. These include the extent to which depleted uranium on the ground can filter through the soil and eventually contaminate groundwater, and the possibility that depleted uranium dust could later be re-suspended in the air by wind or human activity, with the risk that it could be breathed in.
UNEP is also involved in environmental management of the Iraqi marshlands.
Depleted Uranium Update From:
http://peaceinspace.blogs.com/peaceinspaceorg/2005/03/peaceinspace_ra.html
peaceinspace radio: Leuren Moret: "Depleted Uranium: Update"
http://www.zi-activism.net/downloads/nonZi/leurenbio.htm
GUEST: Leuren Moret was an Expert Witness at the International Criminal Tribunal For Afghanistan At Tokyo. She is an independent scientist and international expert on radiation and public health issues. She is on the organizing committee of the World Committee on Radiation Risk, an organization of independent radiation specialists, including members of the Radiation Committee in the EU parliament, the European Committee on Radiation Risk. She is an environmental commissioner for the City of Berkeley. Ms. Moret earned her BS in geology at U.C. Davis in 1968 and her MA in Near Eastern studies from U.C. Berkeley in 1978. She has completed all but her dissertation for a PhD in the geosciences at U.C. Davis. She has traveled and conducted scientific research in 42 countries. She wrote a scientific report on depleted uranium for the United Nations sub commission investigating the illegality of depleted uranium munitions. Marian Falk, a former Manhattan Project scientist and retired insider at the Livermore Lab, who is an expert on radioactive fallout and rainout, has trained her on radiation issues.
International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan written opinion of Judge N. Bhagwat : also at
http://www.traprockpeace.org/tokyo_trial_13march04.doc
HOST: Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD, MEd
http://www.truthout.org/cgi- bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/4/5878
Depleted Uranium: Dirty Bombs, Dirty Missiles, Dirty Bullets
http://shininglight.us/mt/archives/2005/03/details_on_depl.html
more
Details on Depleted Uranium
The details about Depleted Uranium are emerging from the deep hole the US Department of Defense has put them. Rumor has it that the BBC will break the story over the next few days. If that happens, US mainstream media will likely pick up the story.
What I want to know is why its taken so long. Who put the blackout on US Media? I've found internet links to documents produced by the government as early as 1990 on DU and its potential consequences. There are extensive resources on-line on DU. There are also government commissioned studies that minimize it's risks. The Federation of American Scientists has a good set of links.
Remember all the discussion about Anthrax powder? The CDC describes how small particles of Anthrax the size of 5-10 micrometers can easily become airborne again when disturbed:
Although resuspension of certain settled particles requires substantial amounts of energy, lower energy activities (e.g., paper handling, foot traffic, mail handling, and patting of chairs) can reaerosolize settled B. anthracis spores (9,10). The clinical and epidemiologic presentations of anthrax after an intentional release vary by the population targeted, the characteristics of the spores, the mode and source of exposure, and other characteristics.
The size of the particles of DU are nanometers and therefore even easier to disturb and stay airborne for longer periods. The problem with even Rands conclusions are based on the assumption of episodic exposures where the body can purge itself of the particles as it do with natural occuring uranium. I can imagine battlefields that are occupied indefinitely producing continuous exposure that builds up in the body. I recall discussions of dust always in the air in Iraq. I can imagine a gradually increasing continuous exposure to DU in certain locations. With troops rotating in and out of hot areas, they receive continuous exposure while there. The numbers exposed would be very high.
DU along with the exposure of many troops to the traces of chemical weapons in southern Iraq early in the invasion when a munitions dump was burned probably accounts for much of the 56% disability rate in Gulf War II Veterans.
Explaining How
"The numbers are overwhelming, but the potential horrors only get worse," Robert C. Koehler of the Chicago-based Tribune Media Services wrote in an article about DU weapons entitled "Silent Genocide."
"DU dust does more than wreak havoc on the immune systems of those who breathe it or touch it; the substance also alters one's genetic code," Koehler wrote. "The Pentagon's response to such charges is denial, denial, denial. And the American media is its moral co-conspirator."
The U.S. government has known for at least 20 years that DU weapons produce clouds of poison gas on impact. These clouds of aerosolized DU are laden with billions of toxic sub-micron sized particles. A 1984 Department of Energy conference on nuclear airborne waste reported that tests of DU anti-tank missiles showed that at least 31 percent of the mass of a DU penetrator is converted to nano-particles on impact. In larger bombs the percentage of aerosolized DU increases to nearly 100 percent, Fulk told AFP.
DU is harmful in three ways, according to Fulk: "Chemical toxicity, radiological toxicity and particle toxicity." [...] "Exposure pathways for depleted uranium can be through the skin, by inhalation, and ingestion," Moret wrote. "Nano-particles have high mobility and can easily enter the body. Inhalation of nano-particles of depleted uranium is the most hazardous exposure, because the particles pass through the lung-blood barrier directly into the blood.
"When inhaled through the nose, nano-particles can cross the olfactory bulb directly into the brain through the blood brain barrier, where they migrate all through the brain," she wrote. "Many Gulf era soldiers exposed to depleted uranium have been diagnosed with brain tumors, brain damage and impaired thought processes. Uranium can interfere with the mitochondria, which provide energy for the nerve processes, and transmittal of the nerve signal across synapses in the brain.
"Damage to the mitochondria, which provide all energy to the cells and nerves, can cause chronic fatigue syndrome, Lou Gehrig's disease, Parkinson's disease and Hodgkin's disease."
CLIP
Dear Friends Gulf War syndrome turns out to be no mystery: it's depleted uranium poisoning. It is a death sentence. The US is accelerating its use of these horrible weapons in the Iraq War. It is now in the process of slowly killing millions of civilians as well as combatants by poisoning the Middle East environment.
This is a scandal that needs airing! Please pass it on. Paul H. Ray
In a message dated 2/24/05 9:15:29 AM, circ2@mindspring.com writes: Subject: Scandal Over Depleted Uranium
Heads roll at Veterans Administration Mushrooming depleted uranium (DU) scandal blamed by Bob Nichols Project Censored Award Winner 2/2/05 S.F. Bay View
http://www.sfbayview.com/012605/headsroll012605.shtml
Considering the tons of depleted uranium used by the U.S., the Iraq war can truly be called a nuclear war.
Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter charged Monday that the reason Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi stepped down earlier this month was the growing scandal surrounding the use of uranium munitions in the Iraq War.
Writing in Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter No. 169, Arthur N. Bernklau, executive director of Veterans for Constitutional Law in New York, stated, "The real reason for Mr. Principi's departure was really never given, however a special report published by eminent scientist Leuren Moret naming depleted uranium as the definitive cause of the 'Gulf War Syndrome' has fed a growing scandal about the continued use of uranium munitions by the US Military."
Bernklau continued, "This malady (from uranium munitions), that thousands of our military have suffered and died from, has finally been identified as the cause of this sickness, eliminating the guessing. The terrible truth is now being revealed."
He added, "Out of the 580,400 soldiers who served in GW1 (the first Gulf War), of them, 11,000 are now dead! By the year 2000, there were 325,000 on Permanent Medical Disability. This astounding number of 'Disabled Vets' means that a decade later, 56% of those soldiers who served have some form of permanent medical problems!" The disability rate for the wars of the last century was 5 percent; it was higher, 10 percent, in Viet Nam.
"The VA Secretary (Principi) was aware of this fact as far back as 2000," wrote Bernklau. "He, and the Bush administration have been hiding these facts, but now, thanks to Moret's report, (it) ... is far too big to hide or to cover up!"
"Terry Jamison, Public Affairs Specialist, Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Department of Veterans Affairs, at the VA Central Office, recently reported that 'Gulf Era Veterans' now on medical disability, since 1991, number 518,739 Veterans," said Berklau.
"The long-term effects have revealed that DU (uranium oxide) is a virtual death sentence," stated Berklau. "Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist, who retired from the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, and was also involved with the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in the soldiers (from the 2003 Iraq War) as 'spectacular -- and a matter of concern!'"
When asked if the main purpose of using DU was for "destroying things and killing people," Fulk was more specific: "I would say it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people!"
Principi could not be reached for comment prior to deadline.
References
1. Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets: A death sentence here and abroad" by Leuren Moret,
http://www.sfbayview.com/081804/Depleteduranium081804.shtml
2. Veterans for Constitutional Law, 112 Jefferson Ave., Port Jefferson NY 11777, Arthur N. Bernklau, executive director, (516) 474-4261, fax 516-474-1968.
3. Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter. Email Gary Kohls, gkohls@cpinternet.com, with Subscribe" in the subject line.
Email Bob Nichols at bobnichols@cox.net.
Published on Thursday, May 22, 2003 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer U.S. Weapons will be Taking Their Toll Long After War by Conn Hallinan
When the Bush administration totals up the cost of the war in Iraq it better be prepared to tack on billions of dollars more to clean up the toxic residue left over from this conflict, specifically its widespread use of cluster weapons and Depleted Uranium (DU). While the shooting may be winding down, the consequences of the United States using these controversial weapons will be around for a long time to come, with clusters taking a steady toll on the unwary and DU poisoning the air and water. Cluster munitions bombs, shells and rockets that release highly explosive canisters that shred everything from people to tanks have been an environmental nightmare since the war in Southeast Asia. Some 90 million cluster munitions were dropped on tiny Laos from 1964 to 1973, of which 30 percent failed to explode. The result is a national minefield that has killed and maimed more than 12,000 people, and which continues to exact a yearly toll of 100 to 200. The United States used more than 50 million clusters in the 1991 Gulf War. In the two years following the conflict, unexploded bomblets killed 1,400 Kuwaiti civilians. This deadly legacy continues, while there are no figures on the number of cluster weapons or DU ammunition used, they were deployed in the first Gulf War, Kosovo and Afghanistan and it is assumed they were used in Gulf War II. For example, the British humanitarian Mines Advisory Group reported in late April that unexploded munitions caused 52 deaths and 63 injuries in one week after the "liberation" of the Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Almost as deadly, Depleted Uranium is ubiquitous on any recent American battlefield. The United States used 320 tons of it during the first Gulf War, and 10 tons of it in Kosovo. Its resistance to enemy projectiles and its ability to turn hardened armour into margarine gives the United States an enormous advantage over any opponent who lacks it. Anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent of DU turns into tiny dust particles, which may travel as far as 40 kilometres. DU is not very radioactive -- about the same as naturally occurring uranium -- but if ingested, according to the U.S. Environmental Policy Institute, it "has the potential to generate significant medical consequences." DU has long been a suspect in Gulf War Syndrome, the mélange of physical woes afflicting up to 30 percent of the veterans from the 1991 conflict. The Department of Defence doesn't consider low-level radiation a threat, but a recent study by the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute may force a re-evaluation. "People have always assumed low doses are not much of a problem," Alexandra Miller of the Institute told The Guardian (a British newspaper), "but they can cause more damage than people think." The study indicates that DU damages bone marrow chromosomes. Another worry are DU "misses," where the enormous weight and speed of DUs drive them as deep as 24 inches into the ground. "A major concern of the potential environmental effects by intact (DU) penetrators or large penetrator fragments," notes the World Health Organisation, "is the potential contamination of ground water after weathering." Besides being radioactive, DU also is a toxic metal that can damage kidneys and livers. That's a poor legacy to leave behind in a country we are trying to win the hearts and minds of. Cluster bomb and DU cleanup is likely to be enormously expensive, and who pays for it is an open question. The Bush administration is depending on Iraqi oil sales to foot most of the bill, but the figures don't add up. At most, Iraqi oil could bring in $18 billion a year, barely enough to feed the 60 percent of the population dependent on food handouts. Nor does this even address rebuilding the country's infrastructure, ravaged by 12 years of sanctions and the recent war. The price tag, according to PFC Energy, a Washington consulting firm, will probably run in excess of $300 billion. Iraq also has a debt burden that may be as high as $383 billion, and no one seems to be stepping forward to write it off. Unlike in Gulf War I, where the allies picked up most the tab, the Bush administration's "Coalition of the Willing" is flat broke, and the White House has only allotted $2.4 billion to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. On top of that, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have been hesitant to step in without United Nations authority. In the end it likely will be Iraqi civilians and U.S. occupation troops who pay the price for the way we choose to use radioactive weapons and cluster bombs when we wage war. Conn Hallinan is the provost at the University of California at Santa Cruz and an analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus. ©1996-2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
IRAQ'S REAL WMD CRIME
By Lawrence Smallman in Baghdad 17 March 2004
http://tinyurl.com/6br6m
There are weapons of mass destruction all over Iraq and they were used this past year. Iraqi children continue to find them every day.
They have ruined the lives of just under 300,000 people during the last decade - and numbers will increase.
The reason is simple. Two hundred tonnes of radioactive material were fired by invading US forces into buildings, homes, streets and gardens all over Baghdad.
The material in question is depleted uranium (DU). Left over after natural uranium has been enriched, DU is 1.7 times denser than lead - effective in penetrating armoured objects such as tanks.
After a DU-coated shell strikes, it goes straight through before exploding into a burning vapour which turns to dust.
"Depleted uranium has a half life of 4.7 billion years - that means thousands upon thousands of Iraqi children will suffer for tens of thousands of years to come. This is what I call terrorism,"says Dr Ahmad Hardan.
As a special scientific adviser to the World Health Organisation, the United Nations and the Iraqi Ministry of Health, Dr Hardan is the man who documented the effects of depleted uranium in Iraq between 1991 and 2002.
"This has caused a health crisis that has affected almost a third of a million people." Dr Ahmad Hardan, scientific adviser to the World Health Organisation
But the war and occupation has doubled his workload.
Terrible history repeated
"American forces admit to using over 300 tonnes of depleted uranium weapons in 1991. The actual figure is closer to 800.
"This has caused a health crisis that has affected almost a third of a million people. As if that was not enough, America went on and used 200 tonnes more in Baghdad alone (last) April. I don't know about other parts of Iraq, it will take me years to document that."
Hardan is particularly angry because he says there is no need for this type of weapon - US conventional weapons are quite capable of destroying tanks and buildings.
"In Basra, it took us two years to obtain conclusive proof of what DU does, but we now know what to look for and the results are terrifying."
Leukaemia has already become the most common type of cancer in Iraq among all age groups, but is most prevalent in the under-15 category. It has increased way above the percentage of population growth in every single province of Iraq without exception.
Women as young as 35 are developing breast cancer. Sterility among men has increased tenfold.
Barely human
Depleted uranium has caused severe deformities in babies
But by far the most devastating effect is on unborn children. Nothing can prepare anyone for the sight of hundreds of preserved foetuses - barely human in appearance.
There is no doubt that DU is to blame.
"All children with congenital anomalies are subjected to karyotyping and chromosomal studies with complete genetic back-grounding and clinical assessment. Family and obstetrical histories are taken too. These international studies have produced ample evidence to show that DU has disastrous consequences."
Not only are there 200 tonnes of uranium lying around in Baghdad, the containers which carried the ammunition were discarded. For months afterwards, many used them to carry water - others used them to sell milk publicly.
It is already too late to reverse the effects.
After his experience in Basra, Hardan says within the next two years he expects to see significant rises in congenital cataracts, anopthalmia, microphthalmia, corneal opacities and coloboma of the iris - and that is just in people's eyes.
Add to this foetal deformities, sterility in both sexes, an increase in miscarriages and premature births, congenital malformations, additional abnormal organs, hydrocephaly, anencephaly and delayed growth.
"A world famous German cancer specialist agreed to come, only to be told later that he would not be given permission to enter Iraq"
Dr Ahmad Hardan, scientific adviser to the World Health Organisation
Soaring cancer rates
"I had hoped the lessons of using DU would have been learnt - especially as it is affecting American and British troops stationed in Iraq as we speak, they are not immune to its effects either."
If the experience of Basra is played out in the rest of the country, Iraq is looking at an increase of more than 300% in all types of cancer over the next decade.
The signs are already here in Baghdad - the effects are starting to be seen. Every form of cancer has jumped up at least 10% with the exception of bone tumours and skin cancer, which have only risen 2.6% and 9.3% respectively.
Another tragic outcome is the delayed growth of children. Skeletal age comparisons between boys from southern Iraq and boys from Michigan show Iraqi males are 26 months behind in their development by the time they are 12-years-old and girls are almost half a year behind.
"The effects of ionising radiation on growth and development are especially significant in the prenatal child", adds Dr Hardan. "Embryonic development is especially affected."
Action needed
Those who have seen the effects of DU hope the US and its allies will never use these weapons again - but it seems no such decision is likely in the foreseeable future.
Many affected foetuses are so deformed they cannot survive
"I arranged for a delegation from Japan's Hiroshima hospital to come and share their expertise in the radiological related diseases we are likely to face over time," says Hardan. "The delegation told me the Americans had objected and they had decided not to come.
"Similarly, a world famous German cancer specialist agreed to come, only to be told later that he would not be given permission to enter Iraq."
Moreover, Hardan believes the authorities need to produce precise information about what was used and where, and there needs to be a clean- up operation and centres for specialist cancer treatment and radiation- related illnesses.
Iraq only has two hospitals that specialise in DU-related illnesses, one in Basra and one in Mosul - this needs to change and soon.
"I'm fed up of delegations coming and weeping as I show them children dying before their eyes. I want action and not emotion. The crime has been committed and documented - but we must act now to save our children's future."
Cancer Spreads Like Wildfire in Iraq
http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2004-07/28/article02.shtml
Both are public relations men for the Israeli lobby's neo-conservative network, with strong ties to Rupert Murdoch. Kissinger also has ties to this network and the Carlyle Group, who, one could say, have facilitated these omnicidal wars beginning from the time former President Bush took office. It would be easy to say that we are recycling World Wars I and II, with the same faces.
When I asked Vietnam Special Ops Green Beret Capt. John McCarthy, who could have devised this omnicidal plan to use DU to destroy the genetic code and genetic future of large populations of Arabs and Moslems in the Middle East and Central Asia - just coincidentally the areas where most of the world's oil deposits are located - he replied: "It has all the handprints of Henry Kissinger."
In Zbignew Brzezinski's book "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives," the map of the Eurasian chessboard includes four regions strategic to U.S. foreign policy. The "South" region corresponds precisely to the regions now contaminated permanently with radiation from U.S. bombs, missiles and bullets made with thousands of tons of DU.
A Japanese professor, Dr. K. Yagasaki, has calculated that 800 tons of DU is the atomicity equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. The U.S. has used more DU since 1991 than the atomicity equivalent of 400,000 Nagasaki bombs. Four nuclear wars indeed, and 10 times the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere from atmospheric testing!
No wonder our soldiers, their families and the people of the Middle East, Yugoslavia and Central Asia are sick. But as Henry Kissinger said after Vietnam when our soldiers came home ill from Agent Orange, "Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used for foreign policy."
Unfortunately, more and more of those soldiers are men and women with brown skin. And unfortunately, the DU radioactive dust will be carried around the world and deposited in our environments just as the "smog of war" from the 1991 Gulf War was found in deposits in South America, the Himalayas and Hawaii.
In June 2003, the World Health Organization announced in a press release that global cancer rates will increase 50 percent by 2020. What else do they know that they aren't telling us? I know that depleted uranium is a death sentence ... for all of us. We will all die in silent ways.
---
To learn more:
Sources used in this story that readers are encouraged to consult: American Free Press four-part series on DU by Christopher Bollyn. Part I: "Depleted Uranium: U.S. Commits War Crime Against Iraq, Humanity,"
http://www.americanfreepress.net/depleted_uranium.html - Part II: "Cancer Epidemic Caused by U.S. WMD: MD Says Depleted Uranium Definitively Linked,"
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/cancer_epidemic_.html
August 2004 World Affairs Journal. Leuren Moret: "Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War,"
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/DU-Trojan-Horse1jul04.htm
August 2004 Coastal Post Online. Carol Sterrit: "Marin Depleted Uranium Resolution Heats Up - GI's Will Come Home To A Slow Death,"
http://www.coastalpost.com/04/08/01
World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference, Hamburg, Germany, October 16- 19, 2004:
http://www.worlduraniumweaponsconference.de/speakers/speakers.htm
International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan. Written opinion of Judge Niloufer Baghwat:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Afghanistan- Criminal-Tribunal10mar04.htm
"Discounted Casualties: The Human Cost of Nuclear War" by Akira Tashiro, foreword by Leuren Moret,
http://www.chugoku- np.co.jp/abom/uran/index_e.html
Leuren Moret is a geoscientist who has worked around the world on radiation issues, educating citizens, the media, members of parliaments and Congress and other officials. She became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab after experiencing major science fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project. An environmental commissioner in the City of Berkeley, she can be reached at leurenmoret@yahoo.com. ---
See also:
High Uranium Levels Found in Troops and Civilians
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/4.html
Civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq and occupying troops have been contaminated with astounding levels of radioactive depleted and non- depleted uranium as a result of post-9/11 United States' use of tons of uranium munitions. Researchers say surrounding countries are bound to feel the effects as well. In 2003 scientists from the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) studied urine samples of Afghan civilians and found that 100% of the samples taken had levels of non-depleted uranium (NDU) 400% to 2000% higher than normal levels. The UMRC research team studied six sites, two in Kabul and others in the Jalalabad area. The civilians were tested four months after the attacks in Afghanistan by the United States and its allies. NDU is more radioactive than depleted uranium (DU), which itself is charged with causing many cancers and severe birth defects in the Iraqi population-especially children-over the past ten years. Four million pounds of radioactive uranium was dropped on Iraq in 2003 alone. CLIP
The Bush Administration knows about the health and the environmental consequences of using depleted uranium but it doesn't care.
By Mick Youther
When I first heard the term "depleted uranium", I thought it must be uranium after the radioactivity was gone. I was wrong.
- "Depleted uranium (DU) is the highly toxic and radioactive byproduct of the uranium enrichment process.... Depleted uranium is roughly 60% as radioactive as naturally occurring uranium, and has a half life of 4.5 billion years. As a result of 50 years of enriching uranium for use in nuclear weapons and reactors, the U.S. has in excess of 1.1 billion pounds of DU waste material."-- Dan Fahey, "Metal of Dishonor" (1997)
- "More ordinance was rained down on Iraq during the six weeks of the Gulf War than during the whole of the Second World War. Unknown to the public or the Allied troops at the time, much of it was coated with depleted uranium (DU)"-- Felicity Arbuthnot, New Internationalist, September 1999
- "The Pentagon and the United Nations estimate that the U.S. and Britain used 1,100 to 2,200 tons of armor-piercing shells made of depleted uranium during attacks on Iraq in March and April [2003]--far more than the 375 tons used in the 1991 Gulf War."-- Seattle Post Intelligencer, 8/4/03
- "Since the U.S. military's widespread use of DU in the Gulf became known in 1991, the Pentagon has struggled to suppress mounting evidence that DU munitions are simply too toxic to use. It has cashiered or attempted to discredit its own experts, ignored their advice, impeded scientific research into DU's health effects and assembled a disinformation campaign to confuse the issue."-- Environmental Magazine, May/Jun 2003
- "When I spoke out within the military about how bad [depleted uranium] was, my life ended, my career ended. I received threats, warnings, sent to the reserve from full active duty."-- Dr. Doug Rokke, former Army Major, who was in charge of the military's environmental clean-up following the first Gulf War, ABC News, 5/5/03 (Thirty members of Rokke‚s cleanup team have already died, and he has 5,000 times the acceptable level of radiation in his body, resulting in damage to his lungs and kidneys, brain lesions, skin pustules, chronic fatigue, continual wheezing and painful fibromyalgia. After the Gulf War, Rokke was assigned to make a training video to teach soldiers how to handle depleted uranium. It was a never shown to the troops.)
- "...General Calvin Waller told NBC's ŒDateline‚ that neither he nor General Norman Schwartzkopf were ever told about the health hazards of DU."-- Military Toxics Project's Depleted Uranium Citizens' Network, 1/16/96
- "Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy."-- Henry Kissinger, quoted by Bob Woodward in "The Final Days" (1976)
- "Our studies indicate that more than forty percent of the population around Basra will get cancer. We are living through another Hiroshima"-- Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, an oncologist and member England's Royal Society of Physicians, quoted by islamonline.net, 5/15/03
- "The leukemia rate in Sarajevo, pummeled by American bombs in 1996, has tripled in the last five years. But it's not just the Serbs who are ill and dying. NATO and UN peacekeepers in the region are also coming down with cancer."-- Baltimore Chronicle, 12/5/01
- "Drought-stricken Afghanistan's underground water supply is now contaminated by these nuclear weapons. Experts with the Uranium Medical Research Center report that urine samples of Afghanis show the highest level of uranium ever recorded in a civilian population."-- Amy Worthington, Idaho Observer, April 2003
- "By now, half of all the 697,000 U.S. soldiers involved in the 1991 war have reported serious illnesses. According to the American Gulf War Veterans Association, more than 30 percent of these soldiers are chronically ill and are receiving disability benefits from the Veterans Administration."-- Sara Flounders and John Catalinotto, Swans Commentary, 2/2/04
- "Gulf War Syndrome not only killed, maimed, and made soldiers sick, they brought it home. In a study of 251 Gulf War veterans' families in Mississippi, 67 percent of their children were born without eyes, ears or a brain, had fused fingers, blood infections, respiratory problems or thyroid and other organ malformations."-- Leuren Moret, environmental geologist, San Francisco Bay View, 11/7/01
- "In America, war means money - lots of it - and to the corporations which profit from war, our soldiers are nothing more than an expendable item. The Pentagon and the military corporations clearly consider contamination of their own soldiers as an acceptable cost."-- S.R. Shearer, The End Times Network, 5/10/99 How can we do this to our soldiers, their families and the other victims of war? How can anyone think this is a good idea?
Web site:
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file= article&sid=720
Mick Youther is an Instructor in the Department of Physiology at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, IL. You can email your comments to Mick@interventionmag.com
Comment : Iraqi kids play on radio active burnt out tanks day in and day out.
POISONED? SHOCKING REPORT REVEALS LOCAL TROOPS MAY BE VICTIMS OF AMERICA'S HIGH-TECH WEAPONS By Juan Gonzalez New York Daily News April 2, 2004
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/180333p-156685c.html
Four soldiers from a New York Army National Guard company serving in Iraq are contaminated with radiation likely caused by dust from depleted uranium shells fired by U.S. troops, a Daily News investigation has found.
They are among several members of the same company, the 442nd Military Police, who say they have been battling persistent physical ailments that began last summer in the Iraqi town of Samawah.
"I got sick instantly in June," said Staff Sgt. Ray Ramos, a Brooklyn housing cop. "My health kept going downhill with daily headaches, constant numbness in my hands and rashes on my stomach."
A nuclear medicine expert who examined and tested nine soldiers from the company says that four "almost certainly" inhaled radioactive dust from exploded American shells manufactured with depleted uranium.
Laboratory tests conducted at the request of The News revealed traces of two manmade forms of uranium in urine samples from four of the soldiers.
If so, the men -- Sgt. Hector Vega, Sgt. Ray Ramos, Sgt. Agustin Matos and Cpl. Anthony Yonnone -- are the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict.
The 442nd, made up for the most part of New York cops, firefighters and correction officers, is based in Orangeburg, Rockland County. Dispatched to Iraq last Easter, the unit's members have been providing guard duty for convoys, running jails and training Iraqi police. The entire company is due to return home later this month.
"These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were military police not exposed to the heat of battle," said Dr. Asaf Duracovic, who examined the G.I.s and performed the testing that was funded by The News.
"Other American soldiers who were in combat must have more depleted uranium exposure," said Duracovic, a colonel in the Army Reserves who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
While working at a military hospital in Delaware, he was one of the first doctors to discover unusual radiation levels in Gulf War veterans. He has since become a leading critic of the use of depleted uranium in warfare.
Depleted uranium, a waste product of the uranium enrichment process, has been used by the U.S. and British military for more than 15 years in some artillery shells and as armor plating for tanks. It is twice as heavy as lead.
Because of its density, "It is the superior heavy metal for armor to protect tanks and to penetrate armor," Pentagon spokesman Michael Kilpatrick said.
The Army and Air Force fired at least 127 tons of depleted uranium shells in Iraq last year, Kilpatrick said. No figures have yet been released for how much the Marines fired.
Kilpatrick said about 1,000 G.I.s back from the war have been tested by the Pentagon for depleted uranium and only three have come up positive -- all as a result of shrapnel from DU shells.
But the test results for the New York guardsmen -- four of nine positives for DU -- suggest the potential for more extensive radiation exposure among coalition troops and Iraqi civilians.
Several Army studies in recent years have concluded that the low-level radiation emitted when shells containing DU explode poses no significant dangers. But some independent scientists and a few of the Army's own reports indicate otherwise.
As a result, depleted uranium weapons have sparked increasing controversy around the world. In January 2003, the European Parliament called for a moratorium on their use after reports of an unusual number of leukemia deaths among Italian soldiers who served in Kosovo, where DU weapons were used.
I keep getting weaker. What is happening to me?
The Army says that only soldiers wounded by depleted uranium shrapnel or who are inside tanks during an explosion face measurable radiation exposure.
But as far back as 1979, Leonard Dietz, a physicist at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory upstate, discovered that DU-contaminated dust could travel for long distances.
Dietz, who pioneered the technology to isolate uranium isotopes, accidentally discovered that air filters with which he was experimenting had collected radioactive dust from a National Lead Industries Plant that was producing DU 26 miles away. His discovery led to a shutdown of the plant.
"The contamination was so heavy that they had to remove the topsoil from 52 properties around the plant," Dietz said.
All humans have at least tiny amounts of natural uranium in their bodies because it is found in water and in the food supply, Dietz said. But natural uranium is quickly and harmlessly excreted by the body.
Uranium oxide dust, which lodges in the lungs once inhaled and is not very soluble, can emit radiation to the body for years.
"Anybody, civilian or soldier, who breathes these particles has a permanent dose, and it's not going to decrease very much over time," said Dietz, who retired in 1983 after 33 years as nuclear physicist. "In the long run ... veterans exposed to ceramic uranium oxide have a major problem."
Critics of DU have noted that the Army's view of its dangers has changed over time.
Before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a 1990 Army report noted that depleted uranium is "linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage."
It was during the Gulf War that U.S. A-10 Warthog "tank buster" planes and Abrams tanks first used DU artillery on a mass scale. The Pentagon says it fired about 320 tons of DU in that war and that smaller amounts were also used in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
In the Gulf War, Army brass did not warn soldiers about any risks from exploding DU shells. An unknown number of G.I.s were exposed by shrapnel, inhalation or handling battlefield debris.
Some veterans groups blame DU contamination as a factor in Gulf War syndrome, the term for a host of ailments that afflicted thousands of vets from that war.
Under pressure from veterans groups, the Pentagon commissioned several new studies. One of those, published in 2000, concluded that DU, as a heavy metal, "could pose a chemical hazard" but that Gulf War veterans "did not experience intakes high enough to affect their health."
Pentagon spokesman Michael Kilpatrick said Army followup studies of 70 DU-contaminated Gulf War veterans have not shown serious health effects.
"For any heavy metal, there is no such thing as safe," Kilpatrick said. "There is an issue of chemical toxicity, and for DU it is raised as radiological toxicity as well."
But he said "the overwhelming conclusion" from studies of those who work with uranium "show it has not produced any increase in cancers."
Several European studies, however, have linked DU to chromosome damage and birth defects in mice. Many scientists say we still don't know enough about the long-range effects of low-level radiation on the body to say any amount is safe.
Britain's national science academy, the Royal Society, has called for identifying where DU was used and is urging a cleanup of all contaminated areas.
"A large number of American soldiers [in Iraq] may have had significant exposure to uranium oxide dust," said Dr. Thomas Fasey, a pathologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center and an expert on depleted uranium. "And the health impact is worrisome for the future."
As for the soldiers of the 442nd, they're sick, frustrated and confused. They say when they arrived in Iraq no one warned them about depleted uranium and no one gave them dust masks.
Experts behind News probe
As part of the investigation by the Daily News, Dr. Asaf Duracovic, a nuclear medicine expert who has conducted extensive research on depleted uranium, examined the nine soldiers from the 442nd Military Police in late December and collected urine specimens from each.
Another member of his team, Prof. Axel Gerdes, a geologist at Goethe University in Frankfurt who specializes in analyzing uranium isotopes, performed repeated tests on the samples over a week-long period. He used a state-of-the art procedure called multiple collector inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry.
Only about 100 laboratories worldwide have the same capability to identify and measure various uranium isotopes in minute quantities, Gerdes said.
Gerdes concluded that four of the men had depleted uranium in their bodies. Depleted uranium, which does not occur in nature, is created as a waste product of uranium enrichment when some of the highly radioactive isotopes in natural uranium, U-235 and U-234, are extracted.
Several of the men, according to Duracovic, also had minute traces of another uranium isotope, U-236, that is produced only in a nuclear reaction process.
"These men were almost certainly exposed to radioactive weapons on the battlefield," Duracovic said.
He and Gerdes plan to issue a scientific paper on their study of the soldiers at the annual meeting of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine in Finland this year.
When DU shells explode, they permanently contaminate their target and the area immediately around it with low-level radioactivity.
DEPLETED MORALITY The first signs of uranium sickness surface in troops returning from Iraq By Frida Berrigan
Sergeant Mark Callihan (right) and Staff Sergeant Sean Bach inventory 25mm depleted uranium rounds at their base in Tikrit, Iraq.
It‚s a year into the occupation and U.S. troops are being killed at a rate of more than four a day. These deaths from roadside bombs, suicide attackers, anti-U.S. militia and mobs of angry civilians make headlines. More quietly, American soldiers also are beginning to suffer injuries from a silent and pernicious weapon material of U.S. origin˜depleted uranium (DU).
DU weaponry is fired by U.S. troops from the Abrams battle tank, A-10 Warthog and other systems. It is pyrophoric, burning spontaneously on impact, and extremely dense, making DU munitions ideal for penetrating an enemy‚s tank armor or reinforced bunker. It also is the toxic and radioactive byproduct of enriched uranium, the fissile material in nuclear weapons.
When a DU shell hits its target, it burns, losing anywhere from 40 percent to 70 percent of its mass and dispersing a fine toxic radioactive dust that can be carried long distances by winds or absorbed into the soil and groundwater. The U.S. Army and Air Force have fired 127 tons of DU munitions in Iraq in the last year, says Michael Kilpatrick, the Pentagon‚s director of the Deployment Health Support Directorate.
At the beginning of April˜the deadliest month of the war and occupation so far˜a New York Daily News investigation found that four National Guardsmen have been contaminated by radioactive dust.
The men were part of the 442nd Military Police Company based in Orangeburg, New York, which went to Iraq last summer to guard convoys and prisons and train the new Iraqi police. While the whole company is due back in the United States by the end of April, a number of soldiers were sent home early, suffering from persistent headaches and fatigue, nausea and dizziness, joint pain and excessive urination.
They sought medical attention and testing from the Army but were ignored. Nine of the returned soldiers, frustrated with this treatment, sought independent testing and examination from a uranium expert contracted by the New York Daily News. The independent expert‚s tests showed four of the soldiers had high levels of depleted uranium in their systems.
Asaf Durakovic, a physician and nuclear medicine expert with the Uranium Medical Research Center based in Washington, examined the GIs and performed the testing. The Daily News quoted him as saying: „These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were military police not exposed to the heat of battle. Other American soldiers who were in combat must have more depleted uranium exposures.‰
Second Platoon Sergeant Hector Vega tested positive for DU exposure. He is a 48-year-old retired postal worker from the Bronx and has served in the National Guard for 27 years. After being stationed in Iraq last year, he suffers from insomnia and constant headaches.
Durakovic found that Vega and three of his fellow Guardsmen are the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict. These cases raise the specter of much more widespread radiation exposure among coalition soldiers and Iraqi civilians than the Pentagon predicted.
Pentagon spokesmen consistently have maintained that depleted uranium is safe for U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. In May 2003, the Associated Press quoted Lt. Col. Michael Sigmon, deputy surgeon for the U.S. Army‚s V Corps, saying, „There is not really any danger, at least that we know about, for the people of Iraq.‰ Sigmon asserted that children playing with expended tank shells would have to eat and then practically suffocate on DU residue to cause harm.
Yet, according to a 1998 report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the inhalation of DU particles can lead to symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath, lymphatic problems, bronchial complaints, weight loss and an unsteady gait. These symptoms match those of sick veterans of the Gulf and Balkan wars. In November 1999, NATO sent its commanders the following warning: „Inhalation of insoluble depleted uranium dust particles has been associated with long-term health effects, including cancers and birth defects.‰ A study that same year found that depleted uranium can stay in the lungs for up to two years. „When the dust is breathed in, it passes through the walls of the lung and into the blood, circulating through the whole body,‰ wrote Dr. Rosalie Bertell, a Canadian epidemiologist. When inhaled, she concluded, DU „represents a serious risk of damaged immune systems and fatal cancers.‰
A four-year study released last year by the Defense Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also found „significantly higher prevalences‰ of heart and kidney birth defects in the children of Gulf War veterans, though it did not mention DU specifically.
The Pentagon‚s professions of DU‚s safety also is directly contradicted by the Army‚s training manual, which acknowledges the hazards of DU, requiring that anyone who comes within 25 meters of DU-contaminated equipment or terrain wear respiratory and skin protection. The manual warns: „Contamination will make food and water unsafe for consumption.‰
The men of the 442nd Company said they had never heard of depleted uranium and they were not issued dust masks or other protective gear.
Responding to the New York Daily News article, and calls for testing from Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer New York, an army spokeswoman told the Associated Press that „the military would test any soldier that expressed concerns about uranium exposure.‰ At the request of Representatives Ciro Rodriguez (D-Texas) and Robert Filner (D- Calif.), the General Accounting Office (GAO) now is investigating whether the Pentagon has ignored the medical consequences of depleted uranium armaments. Based on the GAO‚s findings, Filner and Rodruguez are considering the introduction of legislation to extend service benefits to veterans who develop health conditions that can plausibly be caused by depleted uranium exposure.
These are steps in the right direction. But the men of the 442 and the 131,000 U.S. and 24,000 Coalition soldiers serving in Iraq deserve more. They deserve a ban on Depleted Uranium.
Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets A death sentence here and abroad
http://www.sfbayview.com/081804/Depleteduranium081804.shtml
by Leuren Moret
S.F. BAY VIEW.COM
At an April press conference, a group of New York Army National Guard vets raised their hands when asked if they have health problems. The soldiers, all from the 442nd Military Police Company, are complaining of headaches and fatigue after what they think is exposure to depleted uranium during their recent tour in Iraq.
"Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy." - Henry Kissinger, quoted in "Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POW's in Vietnam"
Vietnam was a chemical war for oil, permanently contaminating large regions and countries downriver with Agent Orange, and environmentally the most devastating war in world history. But since 1991, the U.S. has staged four nuclear wars using depleted uranium weaponry, which, like Agent Orange, meets the U.S. government definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Vast regions in the Middle East and Central Asia have been permanently contaminated with radiation.
And what about our soldiers? Terry Jemison of the Department of Veterans Affairs reported this week to the American Free Press that "Gulf-era veterans" now on medical disability since 1991 number 518,739, with only 7,035 reported wounded in Iraq in that same 14-year period.
This week the American Free Press dropped a "dirty bomb" on the Pentagon by reporting that eight out of 20 men who served in one unit in the 2003 U.S. military offensive in Iraq now have malignancies. That means that 40 percent of the soldiers in that unit have developed malignancies in just 16 months.
Since these soldiers were exposed to vaccines and depleted uranium (DU) only, this is strong evidence for researchers and scientists working on this issue, that DU is the definitive cause of Gulf War Syndrome. Vaccines are not known to cause cancer. One of the first published researchers on Gulf War Syndrome, who also served in 1991 in Iraq, Dr. Andras Korényi-Both, is in agreement with Barbara Goodno from the Department of Defense's Deployment Health Support Directorate, that in this war soldiers were not exposed to chemicals, pesticides, bioagents or other suspect causes this time to confuse the issue.
This powerful new evidence is blowing holes in the cover-up perpetrated by the Pentagon and three presidential administrations ever since DU was first used in 1991 in the Persian Gulf War. Fourteen years after the introduction of DU on the battlefield in 1991, the long-term effects have revealed that DU is a death sentence and very nasty stuff.
Scientists studying the biological effects of uranium in the 1960s reported that it targets the DNA. Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist retired from the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab and formerly involved with the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in soldiers from the 2003 war as "spectacular - and a matter of concern."
This evidence shows that of the three effects which DU has on biological systems - radiation, chemical and particulate - the particulate effect from nano-size particles is the most dominant one immediately after exposure and targets the Master Code in the DNA. This is bad news, but it explains why DU causes a myriad of diseases which are difficult to define.
In simple words, DU "trashes the body." When asked if the main purpose for using it was for destroying things and killing people, Fulk was more specific: "I would say that it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people."
Soldiers developing malignancies so quickly since 2003 can be expected to develop multiple cancers from independent causes. This phenomenon has been reported by doctors in hospitals treating civilians following NATO bombing with DU in Yugoslavia in 1998-1999 and the U.S. military invasion of Iraq using DU for the first time in 1991. Medical experts report that this phenomenon of multiple malignancies from unrelated causes has been unknown until now and is a new syndrome associated with internal DU exposure.
Just 467 U.S. personnel were wounded in the three-week Persian Gulf War in 1990-1991. Out of 580,400 soldiers who served in Gulf War I, 11,000 are dead, and by 2000 there were 325,000 on permanent medical disability. This astounding number of disabled vets means that a decade later, 56 percent of those soldiers who served now have medical problems.
The number of disabled vets reported up to 2000 has been increasing by 43,000 every year. Brad Flohr of the Department of Veterans Affairs told American Free Press that he believes there are more disabled vets now than even after World War II.
They brought it home
Not only were soldiers exposed to DU on and off the battlefields, but they brought it home. DU in the semen of soldiers internally contaminated their wives, partners and girlfriends. Tragically, some women in their 20s and 30s who were sexual partners of exposed soldiers developed endometriosis and were forced to have hysterectomies because of health problems.
In a group of 251 soldiers from a study group in Mississippi who had all had normal babies before the Gulf War, 67 percent of their post-war babies were born with severe birth defects. They were born with missing legs, arms, organs or eyes or had immune system and blood diseases. In some veterans‚ families now, the only normal or healthy members of the family are the children born before the war.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has stated that they do not keep records of birth defects occurring in families of veterans.
How did they hide it?
Before a new weapons system can be used, it must be fully tested. The blueprint for depleted uranium weapons is a 1943 declassified document from the Manhattan Project.
Harvard President and physicist James B. Conant, who developed poison gas in World War I, was brought into the Manhattan Project by the father of presidential candidate John Kerry. Kerry's father served at a high level in the Manhattan Project and was a CIA agent.
Conant was chair of the S-1 Poison Gas Committee, which recommended developing poison gas weapons from the radioactive trash of the atomic bomb project in World War II. At that time, it was known that radioactive materials dispersed in bombs from the air, from land vehicles or on the battlefield produced very fine radioactive dust which would penetrate all protective clothing, any gas mask or filter or the skin. By contaminating the lungs and blood, it could kill or cause illness very quickly.
They also recommended it as a permanent terrain contaminant, which could be used to destroy populations by contaminating water supplies and agricultural land with the radioactive dust.
The first DU weapons system was developed for the Navy in 1968, and DU weapons were given to and used by Israel in 1973 under U.S. supervision in the Yom Kippur war against the Arabs.
The Phalanx weapons system, using DU, was tested on the USS Bigelow out of Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in 1977, and DU weapons have been sold by the U.S. to 29 countries.
Military research report summaries detail the testing of DU from 1974- 1999 at military testing grounds, bombing and gunnery ranges and at civilian labs under contract. Today 42 states are contaminated with DU from manufacture, testing and deployment.
Women living around these facilities have reported increases in endometriosis, birth defects in babies, leukemia in children and cancers and other diseases in adults. Thousands of tons of DU weapons tested for decades by the Navy on four bombing and gunnery ranges around Fallon, Nevada, is no doubt the cause of the fastest growing leukemia cluster in the U.S. over the past decade. The military denies that DU is the cause.
The medical profession has been active in the cover-up - just as they were in hiding the effects from the American public - of low level radiation from atmospheric testing and nuclear power plants. A medical doctor in Northern California reported being trained by the Pentagon with other doctors, months before the 2003 war started, to diagnose and treat soldiers returning from the 2003 war for mental problems only.
Medical professionals in hospitals and facilities treating returning soldiers were threatened with $10,000 fines if they talked about the soldiers or their medical problems. They were also threatened with jail.
Reporters have also been prevented access to more than 14,000 medically evacuated soldiers flown nightly since the 2003 war in C-150s from Germany who are brought to Walter Reed Hospital near Washington, D.C.
Dr. Robert Gould, former president of the Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), has contacted three medical doctors since February 2004, after I had been invited to speak about DU. Dr. Katharine Thomasson, president of the Oregon chapter of the PSR, informed me that Dr. Gould had contacted her and tried to convince her to cancel her invitation for me to speak about DU at Portland State University on April 12. Although I was able to do a presentation, Dr. Thomasson told me I could only talk about DU in Oregon "and nothing overseas - nothing political."
Dr. Gould also contacted and discouraged Dr. Ross Wilcox in Toronto, Canada, from inviting me to speak to Physicians for Global Survival (PGS), the Canadian equivalent of PSR, several months later. When that didn‚t work, he contacted Dr. Allan Connoly, the Canadian national president of PGS, who was able to cancel my invitation and nearly succeeded in preventing Dr. Wilcox, his own member, from showing photos and presenting details on civilians suffering from DU exposure and cancer provided to him by doctors in southern Iraq.
Dr. Janette Sherman, a former and long-standing member of PSR, reported that she finally quit some time after being invited to lunch by a new PSR executive administrator. After the woman had pumped Dr. Sherman for information all through lunch about her position on key issues, the woman informed Dr. Sherman that her last job had been with the CIA.
How was the truth about DU hidden from military personnel serving in successive DU wars? Before his tragic death, Sen. Paul Wellstone informed Joyce Riley, R.N., B.S.N., executive director of the American Gulf War Veterans Association, that 95 percent of Gulf War veterans had been recycled out of the military by 1995. Any of those continuing in military service were isolated from each other, preventing critical information being transferred to new troops. The "next DU war" had already been planned, and those planning it wanted "no skunk at the garden party."
The US has a dirty (DU) little (CIA) secret
A new book just published at the American Free Press by Michael Collins Piper, "The High Priests of War: The Secret History of How America's Neo- Conservative Trotskyites Came to Power and Orchestrated the War Against Iraq as the First Step in Their Drive for Global Empire," details the early plans for a war against the Arab world by Henry Kissinger and the neo-cons in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That just happens to coincide with getting the DU "show on the road" and the oil crisis in the Middle East, which caused concern not only to President Nixon. The British had been plotting and scheming for control of the oil in Iraq for decades since first using poison gas on the Iraqis and Kurds in 1912.
The book details the creation of the neo-cons by their "godfather" and Trotsky lover Irving Kristol, who pushed for a "war against terrorism" long before 9/11 and was lavishly funded for years by the CIA. His son, William Kristol, is one of the most influential men in the United States.
Both are public relations men for the Israeli lobby's neo-conservative network, with strong ties to Rupert Murdoch. Kissinger also has ties to this network and the Carlyle Group, who, one could say, have facilitated these omnicidal wars beginning from the time former President Bush took office. It would be easy to say that we are recycling World Wars I and II, with the same faces.
When I asked Vietnam Special Ops Green Beret Capt. John McCarthy, who could have devised this omnicidal plan to use DU to destroy the genetic code and genetic future of large populations of Arabs and Moslems in the Middle East and Central Asia - just coincidentally the areas where most of the world's oil deposits are located - he replied: "It has all the handprints of Henry Kissinger."
In Zbignew Brzezinski's book "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives," the map of the Eurasian chessboard includes four regions strategic to U.S. foreign policy. The "South" region corresponds precisely to the regions now contaminated permanently with radiation from U.S. bombs, missiles and bullets made with thousands of tons of DU.
A Japanese professor, Dr. K. Yagasaki, has calculated that 800 tons of DU is the atomicity equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. The U.S. has used more DU since 1991 than the atomicity equivalent of 400,000 Nagasaki bombs. Four nuclear wars indeed, and 10 times the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere from atmospheric testing!
No wonder our soldiers, their families and the people of the Middle East, Yugoslavia and Central Asia are sick. But as Henry Kissinger said after Vietnam when our soldiers came home ill from Agent Orange, "Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used for foreign policy."
Unfortunately, more and more of those soldiers are men and women with brown skin. And unfortunately, the DU radioactive dust will be carried around the world and deposited in our environments just as the "smog of war" from the 1991 Gulf War was found in deposits in South America, the Himalayas and Hawaii.
In June 2003, the World Health Organization announced in a press release that global cancer rates will increase 50 percent by 2020. What else do they know that they aren't telling us? I know that depleted uranium is a death sentence - for all of us. We will all die in silent ways.
To learn more
Sources used in this story that readers are encouraged to consult:
American Free Press four-part series on DU by Christopher Bollyn.
Part I: "Depleted Uranium: U.S. Commits War Crime Against Iraq, Humanity,"
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/depleted_uranium.html
Part II: "Cancer Epidemic Caused by U.S. WMD: MD Says Depleted Uranium Definitively
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/cancer_epidemic_.html
Part III: "DU Syndrome Stricken Vets Denied Care: Pentagon Hides DU Dangers to Deny Medical Care to Vets"
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/du_syndrome.html
Part IV: "Pentagon Brass Suppresses Truth About Toxic Weapons: Poisonous Uranium Munitions Threaten World"
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/pentagon_brass.html
"Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War"
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/DU-Trojan-Horse1jul04.htm
Depleted Uranium Resolution Heats Up - GI's Will Come Home To A Slow Death
http://www.coastalpost.com/04/08/01.htm
World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference, Hamburg, Germany, October 16- 19, 2004
http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de/speakers.htm
International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan. Written opinion of Judge Niloufer Baghwat:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Afghanistan-Criminal- Tribunal10mar04.htm
"Discounted Casualties: The Human Cost of Nuclear War" by Akira Tashiro, foreword by Leuren Moret,
http://www.chugoku- np.co.jp/abom/uran/index_e.html
Leuren Moret is a geoscientist who has worked around the world on radiation issues, educating citizens, the media, members of parliaments and Congress and other officials. She became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab after experiencing major science fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project. An environmental commissioner in the City of Berkeley, she can be reached at leurenmoret@yahoo.com
From:
http://www.sfbayview.com/081804/Depleteduranium081804.shtml
Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets
A death sentence here and abroad by Leuren Moret
Vietnam was a chemical war for oil, permanently contaminating large regions and countries downriver with Agent Orange, and environmentally the most devastating war in world history. But since 1991, the U.S. has staged four nuclear wars using depleted uranium weaponry, which, like Agent Orange, meets the U.S. government definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Vast regions in the Middle East and Central Asia have been permanently contaminated with radiation.
And what about our soldiers? Terry Jemison of the Department of Veterans Affairs reported this week to the American Free Press that "Gulf-era veterans" now on medical disability since 1991 number 518,739, with only 7,035 reported wounded in Iraq in that same 14-year period.
This week the American Free Press dropped a "dirty bomb" on the Pentagon by reporting that eight out of 20 men who served in one unit in the 2003 U.S. military offensive in Iraq now have malignancies. That means that 40 percent of the soldiers in that unit have developed malignancies in just 16 months.
Since these soldiers were exposed to vaccines and depleted uranium (DU) only, this is strong evidence for researchers and scientists working on this issue, that DU is the definitive cause of Gulf War Syndrome. Vaccines are not known to cause cancer. One of the first published researchers on Gulf War Syndrome, who also served in 1991 in Iraq, Dr. Andras Korényi-Both, is in agreement with Barbara Goodno from the Department of Defense's Deployment Health Support Directorate, that in this war soldiers were not exposed to chemicals, pesticides, bioagents or other suspect causes this time to confuse the issue.
This powerful new evidence is blowing holes in the cover-up perpetrated by the Pentagon and three presidential administrations ever since DU was first used in 1991 in the Persian Gulf War. Fourteen years after the introduction of DU on the battlefield in 1991, the long-term effects have revealed that DU is a death sentence and very nasty stuff.
Scientists studying the biological effects of uranium in the 1960s reported that it targets the DNA. Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist retired from the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab and formerly involved with the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in soldiers from the 2003 war as "spectacular ... and a matter of concern."
This evidence shows that of the three effects which DU has on biological systems - radiation, chemical and particulate - the particulate effect from nano-size particles is the most dominant one immediately after exposure and targets the Master Code in the DNA. This is bad news, but it explains why DU causes a myriad of diseases which are difficult to define.
In simple words, DU "trashes the body." When asked if the main purpose for using it was for destroying things and killing people, Fulk was more specific: "I would say that it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people."
Soldiers developing malignancies so quickly since 2003 can be expected to develop multiple cancers from independent causes. This phenomenon has been reported by doctors in hospitals treating civilians following NATO bombing with DU in Yugoslavia in 1998-1999 and the U.S. military invasion of Iraq using DU for the first time in 1991. Medical experts report that this phenomenon of multiple malignancies from unrelated causes has been unknown until now and is a new syndrome associated with internal DU exposure.
Just 467 U.S. personnel were wounded in the three-week Persian Gulf War in 1990-1991. Out of 580,400 soldiers who served in Gulf War I, 11,000 are dead, and by 2000 there were 325,000 on permanent medical disability. This astounding number of disabled vets means that a decade later, 56 percent of those soldiers who served now have medical problems.
The number of disabled vets reported up to 2000 has been increasing by 43,000 every year. Brad Flohr of the Department of Veterans Affairs told American Free Press that he believes there are more disabled vets now than even after World War II.
They brought it home
Not only were soldiers exposed to DU on and off the battlefields, but they brought it home. DU in the semen of soldiers internally contaminated their wives, partners and girlfriends. Tragically, some women in their 20s and 30s who were sexual partners of exposed soldiers developed endometriosis and were forced to have hysterectomies because of health problems.
In a group of 251 soldiers from a study group in Mississippi who had all had normal babies before the Gulf War, 67 percent of their post-war babies were born with severe birth defects. They were born with missing legs, arms, organs or eyes or had immune system and blood diseases. In some veterans' families now, the only normal or healthy members of the family are the children born before the war.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has stated that they do not keep records of birth defects occurring in families of veterans.
How did they hide it?
Before a new weapons system can be used, it must be fully tested. The blueprint for depleted uranium weapons is a 1943 declassified document from the Manhattan Project.
Harvard President and physicist James B. Conant, who developed poison gas in World War I, was brought into the Manhattan Project by the father of presidential candidate John Kerry. Kerry's father served at a high level in the Manhattan Project and was a CIA agent.
Conant was chair of the S-1 Poison Gas Committee, which recommended developing poison gas weapons from the radioactive trash of the atomic bomb project in World War II. At that time, it was known that radioactive materials dispersed in bombs from the air, from land vehicles or on the battlefield produced very fine radioactive dust which would penetrate all protective clothing, any gas mask or filter or the skin. By contaminating the lungs and blood, it could kill or cause illness very quickly.
They also recommended it as a permanent terrain contaminant, which could be used to destroy populations by contaminating water supplies and agricultural land with the radioactive dust.
The first DU weapons system was developed for the Navy in 1968, and DU weapons were given to and used by Israel in 1973 under U.S. supervision in the Yom Kippur war against the Arabs.
The Phalanx weapons system, using DU, was tested on the USS Bigelow out of Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in 1977, and DU weapons have been sold by the U.S. to 29 countries.
Military research report summaries detail the testing of DU from 1974- 1999 at military testing grounds, bombing and gunnery ranges and at civilian labs under contract. Today 42 states are contaminated with DU from manufacture, testing and deployment.
Women living around these facilities have reported increases in endometriosis, birth defects in babies, leukemia in children and cancers and other diseases in adults. Thousands of tons of DU weapons tested for decades by the Navy on four bombing and gunnery ranges around Fallon, Nevada, is no doubt the cause of the fastest growing leukemia cluster in the U.S. over the past decade. The military denies that DU is the cause.
The medical profession has been active in the cover-up - just as they were in hiding the effects from the American public - of low level radiation from atmospheric testing and nuclear power plants. A medical doctor in Northern California reported being trained by the Pentagon with other doctors, months before the 2003 war started, to diagnose and treat soldiers returning from the 2003 war for mental problems only.
Medical professionals in hospitals and facilities treating returning soldiers were threatened with $10,000 fines if they talked about the soldiers or their medical problems. They were also threatened with jail.
Reporters have also been prevented access to more than 14,000 medically evacuated soldiers flown nightly since the 2003 war in C-150s from Germany who are brought to Walter Reed Hospital near Washington, D.C.
Dr. Robert Gould, former president of the Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), has contacted three medical doctors since February 2004, after I had been invited to speak about DU. Dr. Katharine Thomasson, president of the Oregon chapter of the PSR, informed me that Dr. Gould had contacted her and tried to convince her to cancel her invitation for me to speak about DU at Portland State University on April 12. Although I was able to do a presentation, Dr. Thomasson told me I could only talk about DU in Oregon "and nothing overseas ... nothing political."
Dr. Gould also contacted and discouraged Dr. Ross Wilcox in Toronto, Canada, from inviting me to speak to Physicians for Global Survival (PGS), the Canadian equivalent of PSR, several months later. When that didn't work, he contacted Dr. Allan Connoly, the Canadian national president of PGS, who was able to cancel my invitation and nearly succeeded in preventing Dr. Wilcox, his own member, from showing photos and presenting details on civilians suffering from DU exposure and cancer provided to him by doctors in southern Iraq.
Dr. Janette Sherman, a former and long-standing member of PSR, reported that she finally quit some time after being invited to lunch by a new PSR executive administrator. After the woman had pumped Dr. Sherman for information all through lunch about her position on key issues, the woman informed Dr. Sherman that her last job had been with the CIA.
How was the truth about DU hidden from military personnel serving in successive DU wars? Before his tragic death, Sen. Paul Wellstone informed Joyce Riley, R.N., B.S.N., executive director of the American Gulf War Veterans Association, that 95 percent of Gulf War veterans had been recycled out of the military by 1995. Any of those continuing in military service were isolated from each other, preventing critical information being transferred to new troops. The "next DU war" had already been planned, and those planning it wanted "no skunk at the garden party."
The US has a dirty (DU) little (CIA) secret
A new book just published at the American Free Press by Michael Collins Piper, "The High Priests of War: The Secret History of How America's Neo- Conservative Trotskyites Came to Power and Orchestrated the War Against Iraq as the First Step in Their Drive for Global Empire," details the early plans for a war against the Arab world by Henry Kissinger and the neo-cons in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That just happens to coincide with getting the DU "show on the road" and the oil crisis in the Middle East, which caused concern not only to President Nixon. The British had been plotting and scheming for control of the oil in Iraq for decades since first using poison gas on the Iraqis and Kurds in 1912.
Both are public relations men for the Israeli lobby's neo-conservative network, with strong ties to Rupert Murdoch. Kissinger also has ties to this network and the Carlyle Group, who, one could say, have facilitated these omnicidal wars beginning from the time former President Bush took office. It would be easy to say that we are recycling World Wars I and II, with the same faces.
When I asked Vietnam Special Ops Green Beret Capt. John McCarthy, who could have devised this omnicidal plan to use DU to destroy the genetic code and genetic future of large populations of Arabs and Moslems in the Middle East and Central Asia - just coincidentally the areas where most of the world's oil deposits are located - he replied: "It has all the handprints of Henry Kissinger."
In Zbignew Brzezinski's book "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives," the map of the Eurasian chessboard includes four regions strategic to U.S. foreign policy. The "South" region corresponds precisely to the regions now contaminated permanently with radiation from U.S. bombs, missiles and bullets made with thousands of tons of DU.
A Japanese professor, Dr. K. Yagasaki, has calculated that 800 tons of DU is the atomicity equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. The U.S. has used more DU since 1991 than the atomicity equivalent of 400,000 Nagasaki bombs. Four nuclear wars indeed, and 10 times the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere from atmospheric testing!
No wonder our soldiers, their families and the people of the Middle East, Yugoslavia and Central Asia are sick. But as Henry Kissinger said after Vietnam when our soldiers came home ill from Agent Orange, "Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used for foreign policy."
Unfortunately, more and more of those soldiers are men and women with brown skin. And unfortunately, the DU radioactive dust will be carried around the world and deposited in our environments just as the "smog of war" from the 1991 Gulf War was found in deposits in South America, the Himalayas and Hawaii.
In June 2003, the World Health Organization announced in a press release that global cancer rates will increase 50 percent by 2020. What else do they know that they aren't telling us? I know that depleted uranium is a death sentence ... for all of us. We will all die in silent ways.
---
To learn more:
Sources used in this story that readers are encouraged to consult: American Free Press four-part series on DU by Christopher Bollyn. Part I: "Depleted Uranium: U.S. Commits War Crime Against Iraq, Humanity,"
http://www.americanfreepress.net/depleted_uranium.html - Part II: "Cancer Epidemic Caused by U.S. WMD: MD Says Depleted Uranium Definitively Linked,"
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/cancer_epidemic_.html
August 2004 Coastal Post Online. Carol Sterrit: "Marin Depleted Uranium Resolution Heats Up - GI's Will Come Home To A Slow Death,"
http://www.coastalpost.com/04/08/01
World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference, Hamburg, Germany, October 16- 19, 2004:
http://www.worlduraniumweaponsconference.de/speakers/speakers.htm
International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan. Written opinion of Judge Niloufer Baghwat:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Afghanistan- Criminal-Tribunal10mar04.htm
"Discounted Casualties: The Human Cost of Nuclear War" by Akira Tashiro, foreword by Leuren Moret,
http://www.chugoku- np.co.jp/abom/uran/index_e.html
Leuren Moret is a geoscientist who has worked around the world on radiation issues, educating citizens, the media, members of parliaments and Congress and other officials. She became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab after experiencing major science fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project. An environmental commissioner in the City of Berkeley, she can be reached at leurenmoret@yahoo.com. ---
See also:
High Uranium Levels Found in Troops and Civilians
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/4.html
Civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq and occupying troops have been contaminated with astounding levels of radioactive depleted and non- depleted uranium as a result of post-9/11 United States' use of tons of uranium munitions. Researchers say surrounding countries are bound to feel the effects as well. In 2003 scientists from the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) studied urine samples of Afghan civilians and found that 100% of the samples taken had levels of non-depleted uranium (NDU) 400% to 2000% higher than normal levels. The UMRC research team studied six sites, two in Kabul and others in the Jalalabad area. The civilians were tested four months after the attacks in Afghanistan by the United States and its allies. NDU is more radioactive than depleted uranium (DU), which itself is charged with causing many cancers and severe birth defects in the Iraqi population-especially children-over the past ten years. Four million pounds of radioactive uranium was dropped on Iraq in 2003 alone. CLIP
HORROR OF USA'S DEPLETED URANIUM IN IRAQ THREATENS WORLD
By James Denver Vive le Canada
Friday 29 April 2005
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/051105K.shtml
American use of DU is "A crime against humanity which may, in the eyes of historians, rank with the worst atrocities of all time." US Iraq Military Vets "are on DU death row, waiting to die."
"I'm horrified. The people out there - the Iraqis, the media and the troops - risk the most appalling ill health. And the radiation from depleted uranium can travel literally anywhere. It's going to destroy the lives of thousands of children, all over the world. We all know how far radiation can travel. Radiation from Chernobyl reached Wales and in Britain you sometimes get red dust from the Sahara on your car."
The speaker is not some alarmist doomsayer. He is Dr. Chris Busby, the British radiation expert, Fellow of the University of Liverpool in the Faculty of Medicine and UK representative on the European Committee on Radiation Risk, talking about the best-kept secret of this war: the fact that by illegally using hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) against Iraq, Britain and America have gravely endangered not only the Iraqis but the whole world.
For these weapons have released deadly, carcinogenic and mutagenic, radioactive particles in such abundance that-whipped up by sandstorms and carried on trade winds - there is no corner of the globe they cannot penetrate-including Britain. For the wind has no boundaries and time is on their side: the radioactivity persists for over 4,500,000,000 years and can cause cancer, leukemia, brain damage, kidney failure, and extreme birth defects - killing millions of every age for centuries to come. A crime against humanity which may, in the eyes of historians, rank with the worst atrocities of all time.
These weapons have released deadly, carcinogenic and mutagenic, radioactive particles in such abundance that there is no corner of the globe they cannot penetrate - including Britain. Yet, officially, no crime has been committed. For this story is a dirty story in which the facts have been concealed from those who needed them most. It is also a story we need to know if the people of Iraq are to get the medical care they desperately need, and if our troops, returning from Iraq, are not to suffer as terribly as the veterans of other conflicts in which depleted uranium was used.
A Dirty Tyson
'Depleted' uranium is in many ways a misnomer. 'Depleted' sounds weak. The only weak thing about depleted uranium is its price. It is dirt cheap, toxic, waste from nuclear power plants and bomb production. However, uranium is one of earth's heaviest elements and DU packs a Tyson's punch, smashing through tanks, buildings and bunkers with equal ease, spontaneously catching fire as it does so, and burning people alive. 'Crispy critters' is what US servicemen call those unfortunate enough to be close. And, when John Pilger encountered children killed at a greater distance he wrote: "The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. I vomited." (Daily Mirror)
The millions of radioactive uranium oxide particles released when it burns can kill just as surely, but far more terribly. They can even be so tiny they pass through a gas mask, making protection against them impossible. Yet, small is not beautiful. For these invisible killers indiscriminately attack men, women, children and even babies in the womb- and do the gravest harm of all to children and unborn babies.
A Terrible Legacy
Doctors in Iraq have estimated that birth defects have increased by 2-6 times, and 3-12 times as many children have developed cancer and leukemia since 1991. Moreover, a report published in The Lancet in 1998 said that as many as 500 children a day are dying from these sequels to war and sanctions and that the death rate for Iraqi children under 5 years of age increased from 23 per 1000 in 1989 to 166 per thousand in 1993. Overall, cases of lymphoblastic leukemia more than quadrupled with other cancers also increasing 'at an alarming rate.' In men, lung, bladder, bronchus, skin, and stomach cancers showed the highest increase. In women, the highest increases were in breast and bladder cancer, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.[1]
On hearing that DU had been used in the Gulf in 1991, the UK Atomic Energy Authority sent the Ministry of Defense a special report on the potential damage to health and the environment. It said that it could cause half a million additional cancer deaths in Iraq over 10 years. In that war the authorities only admitted to using 320 tons of DU-although the Dutch charity LAKA estimates the true figure is closer to 800 tons. Many times that may have been spread across Iraq by this year's war. The devastating damage all this DU will do to the health and fertility of the people of Iraq now, and for generations to come, is beyond imagining.
The radioactivity persists for over 4,500,000,000 years killing millions of every age for centuries to come. This is a crime against humanity which may rank with the worst atrocities of all time.
We must also count the numberless thousands of miscarried babies. Nobody knows how many Iraqis have died in the womb since DU contaminated their world. But it is suggested that troops who were only exposed to DU for the brief period of the war were still excreting uranium in their semen 8 years later and some had 100 times the so-called 'safe limit' of uranium in their urine. The lack of government interest in the plight of veterans of the 1991 war is reflected in a lack of academic research on the impact of DU but informal research has found a high incidence of birth defects in their children and that the wives of men who served in Iraq have three times more miscarriages than the wives of servicemen who did not go there.
Since DU darkened the land Iraq has seen birth defects which would break a heart of stone: babies with terribly foreshortened limbs, with their intestines outside their bodies, with huge bulging tumors where their eyes should be, or with a single eye-like Cyclops, or without eyes, or without limbs, and even without heads. Significantly, some of the defects are almost unknown outside textbooks showing the babies born near A-bomb test sites in the Pacific.
Doctors report that many women no longer say 'Is it a girl or a boy?' but simply, 'Is it normal, doctor?' Moreover this terrible legacy will not end. The genes of their parents may have been damaged for ever, and the damaging DU dust is ever-present.
Blue on Blue
What the governments of America and Britain have done to the people of Iraq they have also done to their own soldiers, in both wars. And they have done it knowingly. For the battlefields have been thick with DU and soldiers have had to enter areas heavily contaminated by bombing. Moreover, their bodies have not only been assaulted by DU but also by a vaccination regime which violated normal protocols, experimental vaccines, nerve agent pills, and organophosphate pesticides in their tents. And yet, though the hazards of DU were known, British and American troops were not warned of its dangers. Nor were they given thorough medical checks on their return-even though identifying it quickly might have made it possible to remove some of it from their body. Then, when a growing number became seriously ill, and should have been sent to top experts in radiation damage and neurotoxins, many were sent to a psychiatrist.
Over 200,000 US troops who returned from the 1991 war are now invalided out with ailments officially attributed to service in Iraq-that's 1 in 3. In contrast, the British government's failure to fully assess the health of returning troops, or to monitor their health, means no one even knows how many have died or become gravely ill since their return. However, Gulf veterans' associations say that, of 40,000 or so fighting fit men and women who saw active service, at least 572 have died prematurely since coming home and 5000 may be ill. An alarming number are thought to have taken their own lives, unable to bear the torment of the innumerable ailments which have combined to take away their career, their sexuality, their ability to have normal children, and even their ability to breathe or walk normally. As one veteran puts it, they are 'on DU death row, waiting to die.'
Whatever other factors there may be, some of their illnesses are strikingly similar to those of Iraqis exposed to DU dust. For example, soldiers have also fathered children without eyes. And, in a group of eight servicemen whose babies lack eyes seven are known to have been directly exposed to DU dust.
They too have fathered children with stunted arms, and rare abnormalities classically associated with radiation damage. They too seem prone to cancer and leukemia. Tellingly, so are EU soldiers who served as peacekeepers in the Balkans, where DU was also used. Indeed their leukemia rate has been so high that several EU governments have protested at the use of DU.
The Vital Evidence
Despite all that evidence of the harm done by DU, governments on both sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly claimed that as it emits only 'low level' radiation DU is harmless. Award-winning scientist, Dr. Rosalie Bertell who has led UN medical commissions, has studied 'low-level' radiation for 30 years. 2 She has found that uranium oxide particles have more than enough power to harm cells, and describes their pulses of radiation as hitting surrounding cells 'like flashes of lightning' again and again in a single second.[2] Like many scientists worldwide who have studied this type of radiation, she has found that such 'lightning strikes' can damage DNA and cause cell mutations which lead to cancer.
Moreover, these particles can be taken up by body fluids and travel through the body, damaging more than one organ. To compound all that, Dr. Bertell has found that this particular type of radiation can cause the body's communication systems to break down, leading to malfunctions in many vital organs of the body and to many medical problems. A striking fact, since many veterans of the first Gulf war suffer from innumerable, seemingly unrelated, ailments.
In addition, recent research by Eric Wright, Professor of Experimental Haematology at Dundee University, and others, have shown two ways in which such radiation can do far more damage than has been thought. The first is that a cell which seems unharmed by radiation can produce cells with diverse mutations several cell generations later. (And mutations are at the root of cancer and birth defects.) This 'radiation-induced genomic instability' is compounded by 'the bystander effect' by which cells mutate in unison with others which have been damaged by radiation- rather as birds swoop and turn in unison. Put together, these two mechanisms can greatly increase the damage done by a single source of radiation, such as a DU particle. Moreover, it is now clear that there are marked genetic differences in the way individuals respond to radiation-with some being far more likely to develop cancer than others. So the fact that some veterans of the first Gulf war seem relatively unharmed by their exposure to DU in no way proves that DU did not damage others.
The Price of Truth
That the evidence from Iraq and from our troops, and the research findings of such experts, have been ignored may be no accident. A US report, leaked in late 1995, allegedly says, 'The potential for health effects from DU exposure is real; however it must be viewed in perspective... the financial implications of long-term disability payments and healthcare costs would be excessive.'[3]
Clearly, with hundreds of thousands gravely ill in Iraq and at least a quarter of a million UK and US troops seriously ill, huge disability claims might be made not only against the governments of Britain and America if the harm done by DU were acknowledged. There might also be huge claims against companies making DU weapons and some of their directors are said to be extremely close to the White House. How close they are to Downing Street is a matter for speculation, but arms sales makes a considerable contribution to British trade. So the massive whitewashing of DU over the past 12 years, and the way that governments have failed to test returning troops, seemed to disbelieve them, and washed their hands of them, may be purely to save money.
The possibility that financial considerations have led the governments of Britain and America to cynically avoid taking responsibility for the harm they have done not only to the people of Iraq but to their own troops may seem outlandish. Yet DU weapons weren't used by the other side and no other explanation fits the evidence. For, in the days before Britain and America first used DU in war its hazards were no secret.[4] One American study in 1990 said DU was 'linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and to] chemical toxicity-causing kidney damage'. While another openly warned that exposure to these particles under battlefield conditions could lead to cancers of the lung and bone, kidney damage, non-malignant lung disease, neuro-cognitive disorders, chromosomal damage and birth defects.[5]
A Culture of Denial
In 1996 and 1997 UN Human Rights Tribunals condemned DU weapons for illegally breaking the Geneva Convention and classed them as 'weapons of mass destruction' 'incompatible with international humanitarian and human rights law.' Since then, following leukemia in European peacekeeping troops in the Balkans and Afghanistan (where DU was also used), the EU has twice called for DU weapons to be banned.
Yet, far from banning DU, America and Britain stepped up their denials of the harm from this radioactive dust as more and more troops from the first Gulf war and from action and peacekeeping in the Balkans and Afghanistan have become seriously ill. This is no coincidence. In 1997, while citing experiments, by others, in which 84 percent of dogs exposed to inhaled uranium died of cancer of the lungs, Dr. Asaf Durakovic, then Professor of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at Georgetown University in Washington was quoted as saying, 'The [US government's] Veterans Administration asked me to lie about the risks of incorporating depleted uranium in the human body.' He concluded, 'uranium does cause cancer, uranium does cause mutation, and uranium does kill. If we continue with the irresponsible contamination of the biosphere, and denial of the fact that human life is endangered by the deadly isotope uranium, then we are doing disservice to ourselves, disservice to the truth, disservice to God and to all generations who follow.' Not what the authorities wanted to hear and his research was suddenly blocked.
During 12 years of ever-growing British whitewash the authorities have abolished military hospitals, where there could have been specialized research on the effects of DU and where expertise in treating DU victims could have built up. And, not content with the insult of suggesting the gravely disabling symptoms of Gulf veterans are imaginary they have refused full pensions to many. For, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the current House of Commons briefing paper on DU hazards says 'it is judged that any radiation effects from possible exposures are extremely unlikely to be a contributory factor to the illnesses currently being experienced by some Gulf war veterans.' Note how over a quarter of a million sick and dying US and UK vets are called 'some.'
The Way Ahead
Britain and America not only used DU in this year's Iraq war, they dramatically increased its use-from a minimum of 320 tons in the previous war to at minimum of 1500 tons in this one. And this time the use of DU wasn't limited to anti-tank weapons-as it had largely been in the previous Gulf war-but was extended to the guided missiles, large bunker busters and big 2000-pound bombs used in Iraq's cities. This means that Iraq's cities have been blanketed in lethal particles-any one of which can cause cancer or deform a child. In addition, the use of DU in huge bombs which throw the deadly particles higher and wider in huge plumes of smoke means that billions of deadly particles have been carried high into the air-again and again and again as the bombs rained down-ready to be swept worldwide by the winds.
The Royal Society has suggested the solution is massive decontamination in Iraq. That could only scratch the surface. For decontamination is hugely expensive and, though it may reduce the risks in some of the worst areas, it cannot fully remove them. For DU is too widespread on land and water. How do you clean up every nook and cranny of a city the size of Baghdad? How can they decontaminate a whole country in which microscopic particles, which cannot be detected with a normal geiger counter, are spread from border to border? And how can they clean up all the countries downwind of Iraq-and, indeed, the world?
So there are only two things we can do to mitigate this crime against humanity. The first is to provide the best possible medical care for the people of Iraq, for our returning troops and for those who served in the last Gulf war and, through that, minimize their suffering. The second is to relegate war, and the production and sale of weapons, to the scrap heap of history-along with slavery and genocide. Then, and only then, will this crime against humanity be expunged, and the tragic deaths from this war truly bring freedom to the people of Iraq, and of the world.
References
[1] The Lancet volume 351, issue 9103, 28 February 1998.
[2] Rosalie Bertell's book Planet Earth the Latest Weapon of War was reviewed in Caduceus issue 51, page 28.
[3] TAB L_Research Report Summaries
[4] The secret official memorandum to Brigadier General L.R. Groves from Drs Conant, Compton and Urey of War Department Manhattan district dated October 1943 is available at the website.
[5] TAB L_Research Report Summaries
Further Information
The Low Level Radiation Campaign hopes to be able to arrange a limited number of private urine tests for those returning from the latest Gulf war. It can be contacted at: The Knoll, Montpelier Park, Llandrindod Wells, LD1 5LW. 01597 824771. Web: LLRC.org.
James Denver writes and broadcasts internationally on science and technology.
WEAPONS OF SELF-DESTRUCTION By David Rose Vanity Fair November 2004 Issue
http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/041115roco04
Is Gulf War syndrome - possibly caused by Pentagon ammunition - taking its toll on GI's in Iraq?
When he started to get sick, Staff Sergeant Raymond Ramos's first instinct was to fight. "I had joint pains, muscle aches, chronic fatigue, but I tried to exercise it out," he says. "I was going for runs, working out. But I never got any better. The headaches were getting more frequent and sometimes lasted all day. I was losing a lot of weight. My overall physical demeanor was bad."
A 20-year veteran of the New York National Guard, Ramos had been mobilized for active duty in Iraq in the spring of 2003. His unit, the 442nd Military Police company, arrived there on Easter, 10 days before President Bush's mission accomplished appearance on the USS. Abraham Lincoln. A tall, soft-spoken 40-year-old with four children, the youngest still an infant, Ramos was proud of his physique. In civilian life, he was a New York City cop. "I worked on a street narcotics team. It was very busy, with lots of overtime-very demanding." Now, rising unsteadily from his armchair in his thickly carpeted living room in Queens, New York, Ramos grimaces. "The shape I came back in, I cannot perform at that level. I've lost 40 pounds. I'm frail."
At first, as his unit patrolled the cities of Najaf and al-Diwaniyya, Ramos stayed healthy. But in June 2003, as temperatures climbed above 110 degrees, his unit was moved to a makeshift base in an abandoned railroad depot in Samawah, where some fierce tank battles had taken place. "When we first got there, I was a heat casualty, feeling very weak," Ramos says. He expected to recover quickly. Instead, he went rapidly downhill.
By the middle of August, when the 442nd was transferred to Babylon, Ramos says, the right side of his face and both of his hands were numb, and he had lost most of the strength in his grip. His fatigue was worse and his headaches had become migraines, frequently so severe "that I just couldn't function." His urine often contained blood, and even when it didn't he would feel a painful burning sensation, which "wouldn't subside when I finished." His upper body was covered by a rash that would open and weep when he scratched it. As he tells me this, he lifts his shirt to reveal a mass of pale, circular scars. He was also having respiratory difficulties. Later, he would develop sleep apnea, a dangerous condition in which he would stop breathing during sleep.
Eventually, Ramos was medevaced to a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. Doctors there were baffled and sent him on to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. There, Ramos says, one neurologist suggested that his condition could have been caused by some long-forgotten head injury or might just be "signs of aging." At the end of September 2003, the staff at Walter Reed ordered him to report to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where, he says, a captain went through his record and told him, "I was clear to go back to Iraq. I got the impression they thought I was faking it." He was ordered to participate in a long-distance run. Halfway through, he collapsed. Finally, on July 31, 2004, after months of further examinations, Ramos was discharged with a medical disability and sent home.
Symptoms such as Ramos's had been seen before. In veterans of Operation Desert Storm, they came to be called Gulf War syndrome; among those posted to Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, Balkans syndrome. He was not the only member of the 442nd to suffer them. Others had similar urinary problems, joint pains, fatigue, headaches, rashes, and sleep apnea. Today, some scientists believe that all these problems, together with others found in war-zone civilians, can be traced to the widespread use of a uniquely deadly form of ammunition.
In the ongoing Iraq conflict, just as in the Gulf War of 1991 and in the Balkans, American and British forces have fired tens of thousands of shells and cannon rounds made of a toxic and radioactive material called depleted uranium, or DU Because DU is dense-approximately 1.7 times as dense as lead-and ignites upon impact, at a temperature of about 5,400 degrees, it can penetrate armor more effectively than any other material.
It's also remarkably cheap. The arms industry gets its DU for free from nuclear-fuel processors, which generate large quantities of it as a by- product of enriching uranium for reactor fuel. Such processors would otherwise have to dispose of it in protected, regulated sites. DU is "depleted" only in the sense that most of its fissile U-235 isotope has been removed. What's left-mainly U-238-is still radioactive.
Three of the main weapons systems still being used in Iraq-the M-1 Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and the A-10 Warthog attack jet-use DU ammunition. A 120-mm. tank round contains about nine pounds of solid DU When a DU "penetrator" strikes its target, up to 70 percent of the shell's mass is flung into the air in a shower of uranium-oxide fragments and dust, some in the form of aerosolized particles less than a millionth of a meter in diameter. When inhaled, such particles lodge in the lungs and bathe the surrounding tissue with alpha radiation, known to be highly dangerous internally, and smaller amounts of beta and gamma radiation.
Even before Desert Storm, the Pentagon knew that DU was potentially hazardous. Before last year's Iraq invasion, it issued strict regulations designed to protect civilians, troops, and the environment after the use of DU But the Pentagon insists that there is little chance that these veterans' illnesses are caused by DU
The US suffered only 167 fatal combat casualties in the first Gulf War. Since then, veterans have claimed pensions and health-care benefits at a record rate. The Veterans Administration reported this year that it was paying service-related disability pensions to 181,996 Gulf War veterans- almost a third of the total still living. Of these, 3,248 were being compensated for "undiagnosed illnesses." The Pentagon's spokesman, Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of its Deployment Health section, says that Gulf War veterans are no less healthy than soldiers who were stationed elsewhere.
Those returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom are also beginning to report illnesses in significant numbers. In July 2004, the V.A. disclosed that 27,571 of them-16.4 percent of the total-had sought health care. Of that group, 8,134 suffered muscular and skeletal ailments; 3,505 had respiratory problems; and 5,674 had "symptoms, signs and ill-defined conditions." An additional 153 had developed cancers. The V.A. claims that such figures are "typical of young, active, healthcare-seeking populations," but does not offer figures for comparison.
There is also evidence of a large rise in birth defects and unprecedented cancer rates among civilians following the first Gulf War in the Basra region of southern Iraq, where the heaviest fighting took place. Dr. Kilpatrick says, "I think it's very important to try to understand what are the causes of that high rate of cancer and birth defects. There has to be a good look at that, but if you go to the M. D. Anderson hospital, in Houston, Texas, you're going to find a very high rate of cancer. That's because people from all over the country with cancer go there, because it's one of the premier care centers. Basra was the only major hospital in southern Iraq. Are the people there with these different problems people who lived their entire lives in Basra, or are they people who've come to Basra for care?" It is possible, he says, that some other environmental factor is responsible for the illnesses, such as Saddam's chemical weapons or poor nutrition. "I don't think anything should be taken off the table."
In October 2004, an early draft of a study by the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, a scientific panel run by the V.A., was leaked to The New York Times. According to the Times, the panel had concluded that there was a "probable link" between veterans' illnesses and exposure to neurotoxins, including a drug given to troops in 1991 to protect them from nerve gas, and nerve gas itself, which was released when US-led forces destroyed an Iraqi arms depot. Asked why there was no mention of DU in the report, Dr. Lea Steele, the panel's scientific director, says that her group plans to address it in a later report: "We've only just begun work on this topic. We are certainly not ruling it out."
DU's critics, meanwhile, say it's entirely possible that both neurotoxins and DU are responsible for the widespread sickness among veterans.
Members of the 442nd have vivid memories of being exposed to DU Sergeant Hector Vega, a youthful-looking 48-year-old who in civilian life works in a building opposite Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, says he now struggles with chest pains, heart palpitations, headaches, urinary problems, body tremors, and breathlessness-none of which he'd ever experienced before going to Iraq. He recalls the unit's base there: "There were burnt-out Iraqi tanks on flatbed trucks 100 yards from where we slept. It looked like our barracks had also been hit, with black soot on the walls. It was open to the elements, and dust was coming in all the time. When the wind blew, we were eating it, breathing it. It was everywhere." (The Department of Defense, or D.O.D., says that a team of specialists is conducting an occupational and environmental health survey in the area.)
Dr. Asaf Durakovic, 64, is a retired US Army colonel and the former head of nuclear medicine at a veterans' hospital in Wilmington, Delaware. Dr. Durakovic reports finding DU in the urine of 18 out of 30 Desert Storm veterans, sometimes up to a decade after they were exposed, and in his view DU fragments are both a significant cause of Gulf War syndrome and a hazard to civilians for an indefinite period of time. He says that when he began to voice these fears inside the military he was first warned, then fired: he now operates from Toronto, Canada, at the independent Uranium Medical Research Centre.
In December 2003, Dr. Durakovic analyzed the urine of nine members of the 442nd. With funds supplied by the New York Daily News, which first published the results, Durakovic sent the samples to a laboratory in Germany that has some of the world's most advanced mass-spectrometry equipment. He concluded that Ramos, Vega, Sergeant Agustin Matos, and Corporal Anthony Yonnone were "internally contaminated by depleted uranium (DU) as a result of exposure through [the] respiratory pathway."
The Pentagon contests these findings. Dr. Kilpatrick says that, when the D.O.D. conducted its own tests, "our results [did] not mirror the results of Dr. Durakovic." "Background" sources, such as water, soil, and therefore food, frequently contain some uranium. The Pentagon insists that the 442nd soldiers' urinary uranium is "within normal dietary ranges," and that "it was not possible to distinguish DU from the background levels of natural uranium." The Pentagon says it has tested about 1,000 vets from the current conflict and found DU contamination in only five. Its critics insist this is because its equipment is too insensitive and its testing methods are hopelessly flawed.
At a briefing before the Iraq invasion in March 2003, Dr. Kilpatrick tried to reassure reporters about DU by citing the cases of about 20 Desert Storm vets who had DU shrapnel in their bodies. "We have not seen any untoward medical consequences in these individuals," he said. "There has been no cancer of bone or lungs, where you would expect them." It appears that he misspoke on that occasion: one of these veterans had already had an arm amputated for an osteosarcoma, or bone tumor, at the site where the shrapnel entered. Dr. Kilpatrick confirms that the veteran was treated by the V.A. in Baltimore, but says his condition may not have been linked with the shrapnel: "Osteosarcomas are fairly common." Studies have shown that DU can begin to move through the body and concentrate in the lymph nodes, and another of the vets with shrapnel has a form of lymphatic cancer. But this, Dr. Kilpatrick says, has "no known cause." He concedes that research has not proved the negative, that DU doesn't cause cancer. But, he says, "science doesn't in 2004 show that DU causes any cancer."
It does, however, show that it may. Pentagon-sponsored studies at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, have found that, when DU was embedded in animals, several genes associated with human tumors underwent "aberrant activation," and oncoproteins of the type found in cancer patients turned up in their blood. The animals' urine was "mutagenic," meaning that it could cause cells to mutate. Another institute project found that DU could damage the immune system by hastening the death of white blood cells and impairing their ability to attack bacteria.
In June 2004 the US General Accounting Office (G.A.O.) issued a report to Congress that was highly critical of government research into Gulf War syndrome and veterans' cancer rates. The report said that the studies on which federal agencies were basing their claim that Gulf War veterans were no sicker than the veterans of other wars "may not be reliable" and had "inherent limitations," with big data gaps and methodological flaws. Because cancers can take years to develop, the G.A.O. stated, "it may be too early" to draw any conclusions. Dr. Kilpatrick dismisses this report, saying it was "just the opinion of a group of individuals."
Yet another Pentagon-funded study suggested that DU might have effects on unborn children. After finding that pregnant rats transmitted DU to their offspring through the placenta, the study concluded: "Fetal exposure to uranium during critical prenatal development may adversely impact the future behavioral and neurological development of offspring." In September 2004, the New York Daily News reported that Gerard Darren Matthew, who had served in Iraq with the 719th Transportation Company, which is based in Harlem, had tested positive for DU after suffering migraines, fatigue, and a burning sensation when urinating. Following his return, his wife became pregnant, and their daughter, Victoria Claudette, was born missing three fingers.
Ultimately, critics say, the Pentagon underestimates the dangers of DU because it measures them in the wrong way: by calculating the average amount of DU radiation produced throughout the body. When we meet, Dr. Kilpatrick gives me a report the Department of Defense issued in 2000. It concludes that even vets with the highest exposures from embedded shrapnel could expect over 50 years to receive a dose of just five rem, "which is the annual limit for [nuclear industry] workers." The dose for those who inhaled dust from burned-out tanks would be "far below the annual guideline (0.1 rem) for members of the public."
But to measure the effect of DU as a whole-body radiation dose is meaningless, Asaf Durakovic says, because the dose from DU is intensely concentrated in the cells around a mote of dust. The alpha particles DU emits-high-energy clumps of protons and neutrons-are harmless outside the body, because they cannot pass through skin. Inside tissue, however, they wreak a havoc analogous to that of a penetrating shell against an enemy tank, bombarding cell nuclei, breaking chains of DNA, damaging fragile genes. Marcelo Valdes, a physicist and computer scientist who is president of Dr. Durakovic's research institute, says the cells around a DU particle 2.5 microns in diameter will receive a maximum annual radiation dose of 16 rads. If every pocket of tissue in the body were to absorb that amount of radiation, the total level would reach seven trillion rads-millions of times the lethal dosage.
In the potentially thousands of hot spots inside the lungs of a person exposed to DU dust, the same cells will be irradiated again and again, until their ability to repair themselves is lost. In 1991, Durakovic found DU in the urine of 14 veterans who had returned from the Gulf with headaches, muscle and skeletal pain, fatigue, trembling, and kidney problems. "Immediately I understood from their symptoms and their histories that they could have been exposed to radiation," he says. Within three years, two were dead from lung cancer: "One was 33, the other 42. Both were nonsmokers, in previously excellent health."
DU, he says, steadily migrates to the bones. There it irradiates the marrow, where stem cells, the progenitors of all the other cells the body manufactures in order to renew itself, are produced. "Stem cells are very vulnerable," Durakovic says. "Bombarded with alpha particles, their DNA will fall apart, potentially affecting every organ. If malfunctioning stem cells become new liver cells, then the liver will malfunction. If stem cells are damaged, they may form defective tissue."
If DU is as dangerous as its critics allege, it can kill even without causing cancer. At her home in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Susan Riordon recalls the return of her husband, Terry, from the Gulf in 1991. Terry, a security captain, served in intelligence during the war: his service record refers to his setting up a "safe haven" in the Iraqi "theatre." Possibly, Susan speculates, this led him behind enemy lines and exposed him to DU during the long aerial bombing campaign that preceded the 1991 invasion. In any event, "when he came home, he didn't really come home," she says.
At first, Terry merely had the usual headaches, body pain, oozing rash, and other symptoms. But later he began to suffer from another symptom which afflicts some of those exposed to DU: burning semen. "If he leaked a little lubrication from his penis, it would feel like sunburn on your skin. If you got to the point where you did have intercourse, you were up and out of that bed so fast-it actually causes vaginal blisters that burst and bleed." Terry's medical records support her description. In England, Malcolm Hooper, professor emeritus of medicinal chemistry at the University of Sunderland, is aware of 4,000 such cases. He hypothesizes that the presence of DU may be associated with the transformation of semen into a caustic alkali.
"It hurt [Terry] too. He said it was like forcing it through barbed wire," Riordon says. "It seemed to burn through condoms; if he got any on his thighs or his testicles, he was in hell." In a last, desperate attempt to save their sex life, says Riordon, "I used to fill condoms with frozen peas and insert them [after sex] with a lubricant." That, she says, made her pain just about bearable. Perhaps inevitably, he became impotent. "And that was like our last little intimacy gone."
By late 1995, Terry was seriously deteriorating. Susan shows me her journal-she titled it "The Twilight Zone"-and his medical record. It makes harrowing reading. He lost his fine motor control to the point where he could not button his shirt or zip his fly. While walking, he would fall without warning. At night, he shook so violently that the bed would move across the floor. He became unpredictably violent: one terrible day in 1997 he attacked their 16-year-old son and started choking him. By the time armed police arrived to pull him off, the boy's bottom lip had turned blue. After such rages, he would fall into a deep sleep for as long as 24 hours, and awake with no memory of what had happened. That year, Terry and Susan stopped sleeping in the same bedroom. Then "he began to barricade himself in his room for days, surviving on granola bars and cartons of juice."
As he went downhill, Terry was assessed as completely disabled, but there was no diagnosis as to why. His records contain references to "somatization disorder," post-traumatic stress, and depression. In 1995 the army doctors even suggested that he had become ill only after reading of Gulf War syndrome. Through 1998 and 1999, he began to lose all cognitive functions and was sometimes lucid for just a few hours each week.
Even after he died, on April 29, 1999, Terry's Canadian doctors remained unable to explain his illness. "This patient has a history [of] 'Gulf War Syndrome' with multiple motor, sensory and emotional problems," the autopsy report by pathologist Dr. B. Jollymore, of Yarmouth, begins. "During extensive investigation, no definitive diagnosis has been determined.... Essentially it appears that this gentleman remains an enigma in death as he was in life."
Not long before Terry's death, Susan Riordon had learned of Asaf Durakovic, and of the possibility that her husband absorbed DU His urine- test results-showing a high DU concentration eight years after he was presumably exposed-came through on Monday, April 26: "Tuesday he was reasonably cognitive, and was able to tell me that he wanted his body and organs to go to Dr. Durakovic," she remembers. "He knew it was too late to help him, but he made me promise that his body could help the international community. On the Wednesday, I completed the purchase of this house. On Thursday, he was dead.
"It was a very strange death. He was very peaceful. I've always felt that Asaf allowed Terry to go: knowing he was DU-positive meant he wasn't crazy anymore. Those last days he was calm. He wasn't putting the phone in the microwave; he had no more mood swings."
After Riordon's death, Dr. Durakovic and his colleagues found accumulations of DU in his bones and lungs.
Dr. Durakovic suspects the military of minimizing the health and environmental consequences of DU weapons, and suggests two reasons it may have for doing so: "to keep them off the list of war criminals, and to avoid paying compensation which could run into billions of dollars." To this might be added a third: depleted uranium, because of its unique armor-penetrating capabilities, has become a defining feature of American warfare, one whose loss would be intolerable to military planners.
In 1991, the US used DU weapons to kill thousands of Iraqis in tanks and armored vehicles on the "highway of death" from Kuwait to Basra. The one- sided victory ushered in a new era of "lethality overmatch"-the ability to strike an enemy with virtual impunity. A Pentagon pamphlet from 2003 states that a central objective of the American military is to "generate dominant lethality overmatch across the full spectrum of operations," and no weapon is better suited to achieving that goal than DU
The value of depleted uranium was spelled out more simply in a Pentagon briefing by Colonel James Naughton of the army's Materiel Command in March 2003, just before the Iraq invasion: "What we want to be able to do is strike the target from farther away than we can be hit back.... We don't want to fight even. Nobody goes into a war and wants to be even with the enemy. We want to be ahead, and DU gives us that advantage."
If the Pentagon is right about the risks of DU, such statements should not be controversial. If it is wrong, says retired army colonel Dr. Andras Korenyi-Both, who headed one of the main field hospitals during Desert Storm and later conducted some of the first research into Gulf War syndrome, the position is less clear-cut. "You'd have to deal with the question of whether it's better not to use DU and have more of your soldiers die in battle or to use DU and lose very few in the field-but have them get sick and die when they get home."
One desert morning in the early spring of 1991, while sitting in his office at the Eskan Village military compound near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Lieutenant Doug Rokke was shown a memorandum. Rokke, a health physicist and training specialist, was a reservist and had recently been ordered to join the Third US Army's depleted-uranium-assessment team, assigned to clean up and move American vehicles hit by friendly fire during Operation Desert Storm. The memo, dated March 1, came from a senior military officer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico.
During the Gulf War, it said, "DU penetrators were very effective against Iraqi armor." However, "there has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of DU on the environment. Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus, be deleted from the arsenal.... I believe we should keep this sensitive issue at mind when after-action reports are written."
Rokke says: "I interpreted the memo to mean: we want this stuff-don't write anything that might make it difficult for us to use it again."
Rokke's assignment was dangerous and unpleasant. The vehicles were coated with uranium-oxide soot, and dust lay in the sand outside. He wore a mask, but it didn't help. "We could taste it and smell it," he says of the DU "It tasted very strong-and unmistakable." Years later, he says, he was found to be excreting uranium at 5,000 times the normal level. Now 55, he pants during ordinary conversation and says he still gets a rash like the one Raymond Ramos of the 442nd suffers from. In addition, Rokke has joint pains, muscle aches, and cataracts.
In 1994, Rokke became director of a Pentagon project designed to learn more about DU contamination and to develop training that would minimize its risks. "I'm a warrior, and warriors want to fulfill their mission," Rokke says. "I went into this wanting to make it work, to work out how to use DU safely, and to show other soldiers how to do so and how to clean it up. This was not science out of a book, but science done by blowing the shit out of tanks and seeing what happens. And as we did this work, slowly it dawned on me that we were screwed. You can't do this safely in combat conditions. You can't decontaminate the environment or your own troops."
Rokke and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments at the US Department of Energy's Nevada nuclear-test site. They set fire to a Bradley loaded with DU rounds and fired DU shells at old Soviet tanks. At his remote, ramshackle farmhouse amid the rural flatlands of central Illinois, Rokke shows me videos of his tests. Most spectacular are those shot at night, which depict the fiery streak of the DU round, already burning before impact, followed by the red cascade of the debris cloud. "Everything we hit we destroyed," he says. "I tell you, these things are just ... fantastic."
The papers Rokke wrote describing his findings are more sobering. He recorded levels of contamination that were 15 times the army's permissible levels in tanks hit by DU, and up to 4.5 times such levels in clothing exposed to DU
The good news was that it was possible, using a special Department of Energy vacuum cleaner designed for sucking up radioactive waste, to reduce contamination from vehicles and equipment to near official limits, and to "mask" the intense radiation around holes left by DU projectiles by sealing them with layers of foam caulking, paint, or cardboard. (Such work, Rokke wrote, would naturally have to be carried out by teams in full radiological-protection suits and respirators.)
When it came to clothes, however, DU particles "became imbedded in the clothing and could not be removed with brushing or other abrasive methods." Rokke found that even after he tried to decontaminate them the clothes were still registering between two and three times the limit. "This may pose a significant logistics impact," Rokke wrote, with some understatement.
The elaborate procedures required to decontaminate equipment, meanwhile, would be almost impossible to implement in combat. "On a real battlefield, it's not like there's any control," Rokke says. "It's chaos. Maybe it's night. Who's going to come along and isolate contaminated enemy tanks? You've got a pile of rubble and mess and you're still coming under fire. The idea that you're going to come out in radiological suits and vacuum up a building or a smashed T-72 [tank]- it's ridiculous."
Large amounts of black DU-oxide dust were readily visible within 50 meters of a tank hit by penetrators and within 100 meters of the DU- packed Bradley that was set on fire. But less obvious amounts were easily detected at much greater distances. Worse, such dust could be "re- suspended" in the atmosphere "upon contact, if wind blew, or during movement." For American troops, that meant that "respiratory and skin protection is warranted during all phases of recovery." For civilians, even ones at considerable distances, it meant they might be exposed to windblown DU far into the future.
After Rokke completed the project, he was appointed head of the lab at Fort McClellan where it had been based. He resigned the staff physicist post he'd held for 19 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign and moved south with his family. Early in 1996, after he began to voice the conclusions he was drawing about the future viability of DU weapons, he was fired. "Then I remembered the Los Alamos memo," he says. "They'd wanted 'proponency' for DU weapons, and I was giving them the opposite." I ask Dr. Kilpatrick, the D.O.D. spokesman on DU, about Rokke's test firings. His reply: "One, he never did that. He was in Nevada as an observer. He was not part of that program at all. At that time he was working in education at an army school, and his assignment was to develop educational materials for troops." Rokke, he says, may have spent a few days observing the tests but did not organize them.
Documents from Rokke's service record tell a different story. His appraisal from December 1, 1995, written by Dr. Ed Battle, then chief of the radiation laboratories at Fort McClellan, describes Rokke's mission as follows: to "plan, coordinate, supervise and implement the US Army ... depleted uranium training development project." He continued: "Captain Rokke has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to function well above his current rank and is as effective as any I have known." He had directly participated in "extremely crucial tests at the Nevada Atomic Test Site," and his achievements had been "absolutely phenomenal."
Rokke was awarded two medals for his work. The citation for one commended him for "meritorious service while assigned as the depleted uranium project leader. Your outstanding achievements have prepared our soldiers for hazards and will have a vast payoff in the health, safety, and protection of all soldiers."
Rokke's work in Nevada helped persuade the military that DU weapons had to be dealt with carefully. On September 16, 2002, General Eric Shinseki, the US Army chief of staff, signed Army Regulation 700-48, which sets forth strict rules for handling items, including destroyed or disabled enemy targets, that have been hit and contaminated by DU "During peacetime or as soon as operational risk permits," it states, local commanders must "identify, segregate, isolate, secure, and label all RCE [radiologically contaminated equipment]. Procedures to minimize the spread of radioactivity will be implemented as soon as possible." Under pre-existing regulations, damaged vehicles should be moved to a collection point or maintenance facility, and "covered and wrapped with canvas or plastic tarp to prevent spread of contaminants," with loose items placed in double plastic bags. Soldiers who carry out such tasks should wear protective equipment.
The burned-out tanks behind the 442nd's barracks in Samawah may not have been the only DU-contaminated pieces of equipment to be left where they lay. In the fall of 2003, Tedd Weyman, a colleague of Dr. Durakovic's, spent 16 days in Iraq, taking samples and observing the response of coalition forces to General Shinseki's directive. "When tanks shot up by DU munitions were removed, I saw no precautions being taken at all," he says. "Ordinary soldiers with no protection just came along and used chains to load them onto flatbeds, towing them away just as they might your car if it broke down on the highway. They took them to bases with British and American troops and left them in the open." Time after time, Weyman recorded high levels of contamination-so high that on his return to Canada he was found to have 4.5 times the normal level of uranium in his own urine.
A Pentagon memo, signed on May 30, 2003, by Dr. William Winkenwerder, an assistant defense secretary, says that any American personnel "who were in, on, or near combat vehicles at the time they were struck by DU rounds," or who entered such vehicles or fought fires involving DU munitions, should be assessed for possible exposure and receive appropriate health care. This category could be said to include any soldier who fought in, or cleaned up after, battles with Iraqi armor.
Still, the Pentagon insists that the risks remain acceptably small. "There isn't any recognized disease from exposure to natural or depleted uranium," Dr. Kilpatrick says. He tells me that America will mount a thorough cleanup in Iraq, disposing of any DU fragments and burying damaged vehicles in unpopulated locations, but that, for the time being, such an operation is impossible. "We really can't begin any environmental assessment or cleanup while there's ongoing combat." Nevertheless, he says, there's no cause for concern. "I think we can be very confident that what is in the environment does not create a hazard for those living in the environment and working in it."
As this article was going to press, the Pentagon published the findings of a new study that, according to Dr. Kilpatrick, shows DU to be a "lethal but safe weapons system."
In his Pentagon briefing in March 2003, Dr. Kilpatrick said that even if DU weapons did generate toxic dust, it would not spread. "It falls to the ground very quickly-usually within about a 50-meter range," he said. "It's heavy. It's 1.7 times as heavy as lead. So even if it's a small dust particle ... it stays on the ground." Evidence that this is not the case comes from somewhere much closer than Iraq-an abandoned DU-weapons factory in Colonie, New York, a few miles from Albany, the state capital.
In 1958, a corporation called National Lead began making depleted- uranium products at a plant on Central Avenue, surrounded by houses and an Amtrak line. In 1979, just as the plant was increasing its production of DU ammunition to meet a new Pentagon contract, a whistle-blower from inside the plant told the county health department that N.L. was releasing large amounts of DU oxide into the environment.
Over the next two years, he and other workers testified before both the New York State Assembly and a local residents' campaign group. They painted a picture of reckless neglect. DU chips and shavings were simply incinerated, and the resulting oxide dust passed into the atmosphere through the chimneys. "I used to do a lot of burning," William Luther told the governor's task force in 1982. "They told me to do it at night so the black smoke wouldn't be seen." Later, many of the workers were found to have inhaled huge doses into their lungs, and some developed cancers and other illnesses at relatively young ages.
In January 1980 the state forced N.L. to agree to limit its radioactive emissions to 500 microcuries per year. The following month, the state shut the plant down. In January alone, the DU-chip burner had released 2,000 microcuries. An official environmental survey produced horrifying results. Soil in the gardens of homes near the plant was emitting radiation at up to 300 times the normal background level for upstate New York. Inside the 11-acre factory site, readings were up to five times higher.
The federal government has been spending tax dollars to clean up the Colonie site for the past 19 years, under a program called fusrap-the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. Today, all that is left of the Colonie plant are enormous piles of earth, constantly moistened with hoses and secured by giant tarpaulins to prevent dispersal, and a few deep pits. In its autumn 2004 bulletin to residents, the fusrap team disclosed that it had so far removed 125,242 tons of contaminated soil from the area, all of which have been buried at radioactive-waste sites in Utah and Idaho. In some places, the excavations are more than 10 feet deep. fusrap had also discovered contamination in the neighboring Patroon Creek, where children used to play, and in the reservoir it feeds, and had treated 23.5 million gallons of contaminated water. The cost so far has been about $155 million, and the earliest forecast for the work's completion is 2008.
Years before fusrap began to dig, there were data to suggest that DU particles-and those emitted at Colonie are approximately the same size as those produced by weapons-can travel much farther than 50 meters. In 1979, nuclear physicist Len Dietz was working at a lab operated by General Electric in Schenectady, 10 miles west of Colonie. "We had air filters all around our perimeter fence," he recalls. "One day our radiological manager told me we had a problem: one of the filters was showing abnormally high alpha radiation. Much to our surprise, we found DU in it. There could only be one source: the N.L. plant." Dietz had other filters checked both in Schenectady and at other G.E. sites. The three that were farthest away were in West Milton, 26 miles northwest, and upwind, of Colonie. All the filters contained pure Colonie DU "Effectively," says Dietz, "the particles' range is unlimited."
In August 2003, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry published a short report on Colonie. On the one hand, it declared that the pollution produced when the plant was operating could have increased the risks of kidney disease and lung cancer. Because the source of the danger had shut down, however, there was now "no apparent public health hazard." Thus there was no need to conduct a full epidemiological study of those who had lived near and worked at the factory-the one way to produce hard scientific data on what the health consequences of measurable DU contamination actually are.
The people of Colonie have been trying to collect health data of their own. Sharon Herr, 45, lived near the plant for nine years. She used to work 60 hours a week at two jobs-as a clerk in the state government and as a real-estate agent. Now she too is sick, and suffers symptoms which sound like a textbook case of Gulf War syndrome: "Fourteen years ago, I lost my grip to the point where I can't turn keys. I'm stiff, with bad joint and muscle pain, which has got progressively worse. I can't go upstairs without getting out of breath. I get fatigue so intense there are days I just can't do much. And I fall down-I'll be out walking and suddenly I fall." Together with her friend Anne Rabe, 49, a campaigner against N.L. since the 1980s, she has sent questionnaires to as many of the people who lived on the streets close to the plant as possible. So far, they have almost 400 replies.
Among those who responded were people with rare cancers or cancers that appeared at an unusually young age, and families whose children had birth defects. There were 17 cases of kidney problems, 15 of lung cancer, and 11 of leukemia. There were also five thyroid cancers and 16 examples of other thyroid problems-all conditions associated with radiation. Other people described symptoms similar to Herr's. Altogether, 174 of those in the sample had been diagnosed with one kind of cancer or another. American women have about a 33 percent chance of getting cancer in their lifetimes, mostly after the age of 60. (For men, it's nearly 50 percent.) Some of the Colonie cancer victims are two decades younger. "We have what look like possible suspicious clusters," says Rabe. "A health study here is a perfect opportunity to see how harmful this stuff really is."
On June 14, 2004, the army's Physical Evaluation Board, the body that decides whether a soldier should get sickness pay, convened to evaluate the case of Raymond Ramos of the 442nd Military Police company. It followed the Pentagon's approach, not Dr. Durakovic's. The board examined his Walter Reed medical-file summary, which describes his symptoms in detail, suggests that they may have been caused by serving in Iraq, and accepts that "achieving a cure is not a realistic treatment objective." But the summary mentions no physical reason for them at all, let alone depleted uranium.
Like many veterans of the first Gulf War, Ramos was told by the board that his disability had been caused primarily by post-traumatic stress. It did not derive "from injury or disease received in the line of duty as a direct result of armed conflict." Instead, his record says, he got "scared in the midst of a riot" and was "emotionally upset by reports of battle casualties." Although he was too sick to go back to work as a narcotics cop, he would get a disability benefit fixed at $1,197 a month, just 30 percent of his basic military pay.
On the day we meet, in September 2004, his symptoms are hardly alleviated. "I'm in lots of pain in my joints. I'm constantly fatigued-I can fall asleep at the drop of a dime. My wife tells me things and I just forget. It's not fair to my family."
For the time being, the case against DU appears to remain unproved. But if Asaf Durakovic, Doug Rokke, and their many allies around the world are right, and the Pentagon wrong, the costs-human, legal, and financial- will be incalculable. They may also be widespread. In October, the regional health authority of Sardinia, Italy, began hearings to investigate illnesses suffered by people who live near a US firing range there that tests DU weapons.
In 2002 the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights declared that depleted uranium was a weapon of mass destruction, and its use a breach of international law. But the difference between DU and the W.M.D. that formed the rationale for the Iraqi invasion is that depleted uranium may have a boomerang effect, afflicting the soldiers of the army that fires it as well as the enemy victims of "lethality overmatch."
The four members of the 442nd who tested positive all say they have met soldiers from other units during their medical treatment who complain of similar ailments, and fear that they too may have been exposed. "It's bad enough being sent out there knowing you could be killed in combat," Raymond Ramos says. "But people are at risk of bringing something back that might kill them slowly. That's not right."
David Rose is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. His book Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights is an in-depth investigation of the atrocities taking place at the Cuban prison.
Go to Original
Editor's Note: The following interviews were published this week by The Lone Star Iconoclast. This is the little paper in Crawford, Texas, that has been shunned by town boosters for criticizing President Bush. The interviews address a terribly alarming issue that is little known or studied: the widespread use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons by the US and Britain in Iraq and elsewhere.
Because DU has not been well studied, it is hard to verify every claim made in these interviews. However it is very clear that the federal government and US military do not want to know more about DU and its effects and are suppressing information. You will find details about this suppression in the second article below by David Rose, published in the November 2004 issue of Vanity Fair.
At the very minimum, US soldiers returning from Iraq should be routinely tested for DU exposure and health effects. Several bills mandating such testing are now moving through various State Houses. -kw
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"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." Albert Einstein
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