IS DEPLETED URANIUM
SAFE?
extract from THE
CATASTROPHE BLAIR, CLINTON AND SADDAM HAVE IN COMMON
by Robert Fisk
The kidney problems, respiratory failures, and cancers now being diagnosed among Allied veterans appear to be identical to those afflicting Iraqis. In most cases, the Iraqi victims were diagnosed only years later - just as 'Gulf War Syndrome' was only grudgingly acknowledged in London and Washington, long after Allied troops had returned home.
I first heard of these symptoms amongst Iraqis in 1997, when an Iraqi opposition leader in Damascus - a Shiite cleric who knew former Iraqi troops seeking refuge in Southern Iran following the 1991 war - told me that many of these ex-soldiers had fallen ill. Most had fought in tank battles Southwest of Basra; their armour was being bombarded with depleted uranium shells by the US 1st Infantry Division. American troops were exposed to the same dust when they moved forward after the battles and helped destroy the contaminated wreckage of the Iraqi armoured units.
In Southern Iraq, the battlefields West of Basra include some of the city's best farmland; its' inhabitants continue to eat tomatoes, onions, potatoes and meat from fields that were certainly drenched in uranium dust. The same toxic residues must have drained into the rivers and sewers of Basra, polluting even further the city's water supplies. This, at least, is the opinion of Basra's cancer surgeons. The implication is terrifying.
No wonder, then, that no-one really wants to find out the cause of this sickness. American Veterans groups have accused the US Defence Department of "...a deliberate attempt to avoid responsibility for consciously allowing widespread exposure of hundreds of thousands of servicemen and women." The Ministry of Defence in London, investigating depleted uranium as part of a 'Gulf War Syndrome' inquiry, still claims there is no evidence of the metal being responsible for any abnormal diseases.
Western aid agencies inside Iraq are equally cavalier. UNICEF has sought no details of child cancer deaths related to the war, though it admits to hearing of the reports. Even more shameful is our own failure - that of the UN and all those involved in the sanctions imposition - to provide enough of the medicine that could cure Iraqi child leukemia victime who are otherwise going to die. To deny the existence of 'Gulf War Syndrome' is maybe sin enough. To deny medicine to its' Iraqi civilian victims is shameful.
There is an obvious response to this. Why should we - the British, the Americans, the West - do anything when we do not know for sure what is blighting the people of Southen Iraq, as well as our own military veterans? Saddam is to blame - write that out 100 times. But there is an equally obvious retort: open a UN investigation into the pestilence that is sweeping through those who fought in 1991 and those who live there now but who were unborn at the time.
UN inspectors inside Iraq can paw through palaces and offices of the highest Iraqi officials in their hunt for evidence of bio-chemical warfare. So why can not the UN carry out an equally intrusive - equally humanitarian - inquiry into the cancers, kidney failures and deaths that accompanied the creation of the 'New World Order.'
BRITISH MEDICAL
JOURNAL
August 14th 1999
For full article, click on link: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/319/7207/401/a
GULF WAR LEAVES LEGACY OF CANCER (excerpt)
by Malcolm Aitken, London
The incidence of cancer and congenital
defects has increased significantly in Iraq after the Allied use of depleted uranium
bullets during the Gulf war, a recent conference in London was told. Declassified US
documents suggest that the American military used about 944,000 rounds of depleted uranium
bullets in Iraq and Kuwait during the war in 1991.
The UK Ministry of Defence has declined to comment to the BMJ on the health implications
of exposure to depleted uranium during the Gulf war.
An Iraqi oncology specialist, Dr Mona Kammas, presented a report compiled by Iraq’s
Committee for Pollution Impact by Aggressive Bombing. Rates of cancer and congenital
anomalies had almost doubled since the war, the report said. In areas that were
particularly badly hit in southern Iraq, notably Misan and Thi-Qar, cancer incidence was
as much as five times higher than in 1989. The report notes that the increase in cases of
cancer and their geographical distribution in the provinces of Iraq coincides with
bombardment and military operations and the intensity of these. Of the 667 cases of cancer
in the sample group, the report notes, the increasing prevalence was most striking in
cases of leukaemia, lung cancer, bronchial cancer, cancer of the bladder, skin cancer,
stomach cancer for males, and breast cancer in females.
Dr. Gunther showed slides of Iraqi children born with ears, eyes, fingers, and limbs
missing and similar abnormalities among the children of Western Gulf war veterans. There
was also a consensus that the lack of nutritionally healthy food and minimal medical
provision under United Nations sanctions, combined with exposure to depleted uranium,
contributed to widespread immunodeficiency and sizeable increases in the prevalence of
polio, tuberculosis, hepatitis, whooping cough, and diphtheria.
THE INDEPENDENT
(UK)
January 8th 2001
THE TRUTH ABOUT DEPLETED URANIUM
by Robert Fisk
JUST FOURTEEN months ago, on a bleak, frosty
afternoon, I stopped my car beside an old Ottoman bridge in southern Kosovo. It
was here, scarcely half a year earlier, that Nato jets had bombed a convoy of
Albanian refugees, ripping scores of them to pieces in the surrounding fields.
Their jets, I knew, had been firing depleted uranium rounds. And now, on the very
spot east of Djakovica where a bomb had torn apart an entire refugee family in a
tractor, five Italian Kfor soldiers had built a little checkpoint. Indeed, their
armoured vehicle was actually standing on part of the crater in the road.
I tried to warn them that I thought the crater might be contaminated.
I told them about depleted uranium and the cancers that had blossomed among the
children of Iraq who had - or whose parents had - been close to DU explosions. One of the
young soldiers laughed at me. He’d heard the stories, he said. But Nato had
assured its troops that there was no danger from depleted uranium. I begged to
differ. "Don’t worry about us," the soldier replied.
They should have known better. Only a few weeks earlier, a team of UN scientists - sent to
Kosovo under the set of UN resolutions that brought Kfor into the province - had demanded
to know from Nato the location of DU bombings in Kosovo. Nato refused to tell them. Nor
was I surprised. From the very start of the alliance bombing campaign against Serbia, Nato
had lied about depleted uranium. Just as the American and British governments still lie
about its effects in southern Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. US and British tanks had
fired hundreds of rounds - thousands in the case of the Americans - at Iraqi vehicles,
using shells whose depleted uranium punches through heavy armour and then releases an
irradiated aerosol spray.
In the aftermath of that war, I revisited the old battlefields around the Iraqi city of
Basra. Each time, I came across terrifying new cancers among those who lived there. Babies
were being born with no arms or no noses or no eyes. Children were bleeding internally or
suddenly developing grotesque tumours. UN sanctions, needless to say, were delaying
medicines from reaching these poor wretches. Then I found Iraqi soldiers who seemed to be
dying of the same "Gulf War syndrome" that was already being identified among
thousands of US and British troops.
At the time, The Independent was alone in publicising this sinister new weapon and its
apparent effects. Government ministers laughed the reports off. One replied to Independent
readers who drew the Ministry of Defence’s attention to my articles that, despite my
investigations, he had seen no "epidemiological data" proving them true. And of
course there was none.
Because the World Health Organisation, invited by Iraq to start research into the cancers,
was dissuaded from doing so even though it had sent an initial team to Baghdad to start
work. And because a group of Royal Society scientists told by the British authorities to
investigate the effects of DU declined to visit Iraq.
Documents that proved the contrary were dismissed as "anecdotal". A US military
report detailing the health risks of DU and urging suppression of this information was
dutifully ignored. When two years ago I wrote about a British government report detailing
the extraordinary lengths to which the authorities went at DU shell test-firing ranges in
the UK - the shells are fired into a tunnel in Cumbria and the resulting dust sealed into
concrete containers which are buried - I know for a fact that the first reaction from one
civil servant was to ask whether I might be prosecuted for revealing this.
One ex-serviceman, sick since the Gulf War, actually had his house raided by the British
police in an attempt to track down "secret" documents.
(My note: this was UK veteran Ray Bristow, who at the time was
visiting Iraq to attend a conference about DU in Baghdad.)
More honourable policemen might have searched for papers that proved DU’s dangers -
and which might form the basis of manslaughter charges against senior officers. But of
course the police were trying to find the source of the leak, not the source of dying
men’s cancers.
During the Kosovo war, I travelled from Belgrade to Brussels to ask about Nato’s use
of depleted uranium. Luftwaffe General Jerz informed me that it was "harmless"
and was found in trees, earth and mountains. It was a lie.
Only uranium - not the depleted variety that comes from nuclear waste - is found in the
earth. James Shea, Nato’s spokesman, quoted a Rand Corporation report that supposedly
proved DU was not harmful, knowing full well - since Mr Shea is a careful reader and not a
stupid man - that the Rand report deals with dust in uranium mines, not the irradiated
spray from DU weapons.
And so it went on. Back in Kosovo, I was told privately by British officers that the
Americans had used so much DU in the war against Serbia that they had no idea how many
locations were contaminated. When I tracked down the survivors of the Albanian refugee
convoy, one of them was suffering kidney pains. Despite a promise by Shea that the attack
would be fully investigated, not a single Nato officer had bothered to talk to a survivor.
Nor have they since. A year ago, I noted in The Independent that foreign secretary Robin
Cook had admitted in the House of Commons that Nato was refusing to give DU locations to
the UN. "Why?" I asked in the paper. "Why cannot we be told where these
rounds were fired?"
During the war, defence correspondents - the BBC’s Mark Laity prominent among them -
bought the Nato line that DU was harmless. Laity was still peddling the same nonsense at
an Edinburgh Festival journalists’ conference some months later. Laity - who is now,
of course, an official spokesman for Nato - was last week reduced to saying that "the
overwhelming consensus of medical information" is that health risks from DU are
"very low". But the growing consensus of medical information is quite the
opposite. Which is why a British report to the UK embassy in Kuwait referred to the
"sensitivity" of DU because of its health risks.
And still the Americans and the British try to fool us. The Americans are now brazenly
announcing that their troops in Kosovo have suffered no resultant leukemias - failing to
mention that most of their soldiers are cooped up in a massive base (Fort Bondsteel) near
the Macedonian border where no DU rounds were fired by Nato. Needless to say, there was
also no mention of the tens of thousands of US troops - women as well as men - who believe
they were contaminated by DU in the Gulf.
So it goes on. British veterans are dying of unexplained cancers from the Gulf. So are US
veterans. Nato troops from Bosnia and now Kosovo - especially Italians - are dying from
unexplained cancers. So are the children in the Basra hospitals, along with their parents
and uncles and aunts. Cancers have now been found among Iraqi refugees in Iran who were
caught in Allied fire on the roads north of Kuwait. Bosnian authorities investigating an
increase in cancers can get no information from Nato. This is not a scandal.
It is an outrage.
Had we but known. On those very same Iraqi roads, I too prowled through the contaminated
wreckage of Iraqi armour in 1991. And - I recall with growing unease - back in Kosovo in
1999, only a day after the original attack, I collected pieces of the air-fired rounds
that hit the Albanian refugee convoy. Their computer codes proved Nato had bombed
the convoy - not the Serbs, as Nato tried to claim. I also remember that I carried those
bits of munition back to Belgrade - in my pocket. There are times, I must admit, when I
would like to believe Nato’s lies.
When a United Nations agency announced that NATO
had officially confirmed using depleted-uranium munitions in Kosovo, the story hit the
world’s media, then quickly faded. The agency went on record as saying that there was
too little information for firm conclusions but no cause for serious concern. The Pentagon
officially echoed this, and attention shifted elsewhere.
For those following the story, this was another episode in a game of
hide-and-don’t-tell that the U.S. government has been playing for years, both at home
and abroad. But as the game continues, there is cause for serious concern.
The U.S. government denies there is anything harmful about depleted uranium that would
prevent its use in battle situations anywhere. (The high-density metal, a waste product
from nuclear power reactors, is used in armor-piercing shells and in tank armor.) Numerous
independent experts say depleted uranium is deadly and will pollute indefinitely those
areas struck by the munitions. They blame it for most of the illnesses of Persian Gulf war
syndrome. The Military Toxics Project, a non-governmental organization that has been
tracking depleted uranium for years, has just published an update. Dan Fahey, its author
and the project’s research director for depleted uranium, draws primarily on
declassified government documents and public statements, building a grim indictment of
irresponsibility that is nothing short of criminal.
Since the first use of depleted uranium in the Iraq war (a use that continues today with
the bombing of the no-fly zones), the controversy has spread into the international arena,
including the United Nations. During the Kosovo war, the Pentagon brought out a RAND
Corporation think tank study to prove once and for all that depleted uranium is harmless.
Independent experts, contesting the use of depleted uranium in Kosovo and Serbia,
protested. Later, in a paper entitled "Fear of Falling," Fahey analyzed the
study in detail, showing it to be a sham. Yet the U.S. government still cites it as a
proof that the depleted uranium problem has been laid to rest.
But NATO’s admission, even unofficial, of depleted uranium use in the Kosovo war
alarmed aid agencies operating there. The World Health Organization was asked to
investigate. The WHO, however, has an agreement with the International Atomic Energy
Agency giving the latter the last word over anything touching public health and radiation.
A fact sheet on depleted uranium, announced as in the works, was canceled. (The Atomic
Energy Agency was set up in ‘50s by the nuclear powers of the time to push the
nuclear industry on a public wary of living with nuclear waste and with radiation in
general. The United States plays a dominant role within it. Holding the only mandate in
the U.N. system to promote a part of the private sector, it has been repeatedly denounced
by non-governmental organizations as incompatible with the ideals expressed in the U.N.
charter.)
An initial U.N. mission to Yugoslavia in May produced a report of serious contamination by
depleted uranium. The report’s sponsor, the United Nations Environment Program’s
director, Klaus Toepfer, suppressed it - under pressure from Washington, according to
inside sources. It nonetheless eventually leaked out. The program’s Balkans Task
Force brought out a major study in October, but the section on depleted uranium had been
whittled down from 72 pages to two on orders from Toepfer, again apparently under pressure
from Washington. The task force had tried to involve the WHO, but the Atomic Energy
Agency, in keeping with the agreement, excluded the WHO from the radiation appraisal.
Measuring was done using Geiger counters incapable of detecting the particular alpha
radiation that depleted uranium emits, and none was found.
Meantime, in August, the WHO had announced it was undertaking a "generic"
(general) study of depleted uranium, but no details were available. In March, it became
known that the study was under the WHO’s Dr. Michael Repacholi, an electro-magnetic
field expert, who, it has since been discovered, has delegated it to Barry Smith, a
consultant in England, who is a geologist. Faced with the Atomic Energy Agency’s
opposition to studying radiation and health, the WHO has opted to study depleted uranium
as a heavy metal pollutant. This is hardly of help to those exposed to tons of virtually
indestructible
radioactive dust particles, including the international aid agencies awaiting an official
pronouncement from the WHO.
The recent NATO confirmation of depleted uranium use in Kosovo, complete with a map,
should have finally sounded the alarm. After being put on hold for six months by NATO, the
task force finally had something specific and official, but the pressure was on to play it
down. The publication of the map in a Geneva daily on the day that the task force was
meeting to decide on strategy forced its hand. When the task force chairman, former
Finnish environmental minister Pekka Haavisto, called a press conference to disclose the
map and its accompanying letter, it was Toepfer’s spokesperson, the man who had cut
out the 70 pages from the October report, not Haavisto’s, who orchestrated the event.
Not surprisingly, Haavisto was kept on a leash. Hence the announced conclusion: no cause
for serious concern.
But there are indications that not everybody agrees. The U.N.’s High Commissioner for
Refugees, the main coordinator of aid to Kosovo, has quietly decided to refrain from
sending pregnant staff to Kosovo, to offer those assigned there the option of going
elsewhere and to put a note into the personnel files of those sent there - to facilitate
compensation claims for illnesses that might develop from depleted uranium contamination.
The German and Dutch governments, whose occupation zones coincide with the areas hardest
hit by depleted uranium, according to NATO’s map, have ordered their soldiers not to
eat anything outside their post mess halls, especially not from the surrounding
countryside. This echoes independent experts’ claims that the dust has entered the
food chain of the region. Dutch soldiers stationed last fall in part of the same heavily
hit area (around Prizren) had to hand in all clothing and equipment, which was then
shipped back to the Netherlands sealed in heavy-duty plastic. The government claimed
asbestos contamination, but a Dutch military source points to depleted uranium, noting
that the vehicles, also sent back, ended up in a radiation decontamination plant.
Fahey’s "Don’t Look, Don’t Find" discusses a U.S. Army report
issued well before the Gulf War: "Though no anti-DU movement existed at the time, the
Army predicted that depleted uranium munitions might be removed from the arsenal by
political force once the health and environmental impacts of DU were widely known."
Although the U.S. government seems intent on keeping those impacts unknown, the public is
finding out.
AGENCE FRANCE PRESS
January 11th 2001
10 YEARS ON, IRAQ
FEELS VINDICATED BY BALKANS SYNDROME
On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the Gulf War, Iraq feels its long-ignored
protests over America’s use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons may finally be given a
hearing thanks to the Yugoslav conflict.
In the dock itself over weapons of mass destruction and with its credibility in tatters
ever since the war over Kuwait, Baghdad has turned the tables by demanding Washington and
London both face a war crimes tribunal.
Amid the clamour in Europe over a rash of cancer deaths among soldiers who served in the
Balkans, NATO on Wednesday bowed to demands for an investigation into the health effects
of DU munitions. NATO chief George Robertson said the calls for a probe into the US use of
DU in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999 were "legitimate demands", but added he
was "confident that there is little risk in NATO ammunitions."
DU munitions are able to penetrate heavy armour, and experts say, the danger comes not
from the low-level radiation they emit, but from pulverised dust created on impact.
Iraq has long argued that US and British use of DU weapons a decade ago caused
"irreparable damage" to its people and environment, pointing to previously
unknown congenital deformities among Iraqi infants. Dr. Sami al-Araji, a scientist on a
government panel studying the war’s aftermath, has said radioactivity levels in
bombed areas of southern Iraq were 10 times higher than the rest of the country.
Contamination from at least 300 tonnes of DU weapons fired at or dropped on Iraq, mostly
by the US military, has entered the food and water chains, causing "indiscriminate
harm to non-combatants," according to Iraqi doctors.
Ahead of a international conference on DU munitions which was hosted by Baghdad in
December 1998, Britain rejected as "baseless" Iraqi charges that contamination
from DU shells had polluted Iraq. UN cancer statistics for 1989-1994 in southern areas
like Missan and Thi-Qar show up to seven-fold increases in cancer over the five-year
period. In Thi-Qar, cases rose from 72 in 1989 to 489 in 1994.
"Iraq requests the creation of an international tribunal to put US and British
officials on trial for crimes against humanity and the genocide carried out by the
Americans and British in Iraq and Yugoslavia," the foreign ministry said Wednesday.
Baghdad, which itself has been condemned for using chemical weapons during a
1980-1988 war against Iran, has called for compensation.
With the Balkans Syndrome, Europe is now paying the price for having ignored the Gulf War
Syndrome, Iraq’s ruling Baath party’s newspaper, Ath-Thawra, said earlier this
week. "It’s the turn of the Europeans to pay the price for their
follow-the-leader attitude towards the American bull," it said. Ath-Thawra said the
symptoms in Europe were "no more serious than the damage inflicted by the Americans
and the British on the Iraqi people" during the war of January-February 1991.
COUNTERPUNCH MAGAZINE
February 2001
DU: RADIOACTIVE WAR - CANCER AS A WEAPON
by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
At the close of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was
denounced as a ferocious villain for ordering his retreating troops to destroy Kuwaiti oil
fields, clotting the air with poisonous clouds of black smoke and saturating the ground
with swamps of crude. It was justly called an environmental war crime.
But months of bombing of Iraq by US and British planes and cruise missiles has left behind
an even more deadly and insidious legacy: tons of shell casings, bullets and bomb
fragments laced with depleted uranium. In all, the US hit Iraqi targets with more than 970
radioactive bombs and missiles. More than 10 years later, the health consequences from
this radioactive bombing campaign are beginning to come into focus. And they are dire,
indeed.
Iraqi physicians call it "the white death"- leukemia. Since 1990, the incident
rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600 percent. The situation is compounded
by Iraq’s forced isolations and the sadistic sanctions regime, recently described by
UN secretary general Kofi Annan as "a humanitarian crisis", that makes detection
and treatment of the cancers all the more difficult.
"We have proof of traces of DU in samples taken for analysis and that is really bad
for those who assert that cancer cases have grown for other reasons," says Dr. Umid
Mubarak, Iraq’s health minister. Mubarak contends that the US’s fear of facing
the health and environmental consequences of its DU bombing campaign is partly behind its
failure to follow through on its commitments under a deal allowing Iraq to sell some of
its vast oil reserves in return for food and medical supplies.
"The desert dust carries death," said Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, an oncologist and member
England’s Royal Society of Physicians. "Our studies indicate that more than
forty percent of the population around Basra will get cancer. We are living through
another Hiroshima." Most of the leukemia and cancer victims aren’t soldiers.
They are civilians. And many of them are children.
The US-dominated Iraqi Sanctions Committee in New York has denied Iraq’s repeated
requests for cancer treatment equipment and drugs, even painkillers such as morphine. As a
result, the overflowing hospitals in towns such as Basra are left to treat the
cancer-stricken with aspirin.
This is part of a larger horror inflicted on Iraq that sees as many as 180 children dying
every day, according to mortality figures compiled by UNICEF, from a catalogue of diseases
from the 19th century: cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis, e. coli, mumps,
measles, influenza. Iraqis and Kuwaitis aren’t the only ones showing signs of uranium
contamination and sickness. Gulf War veterans, plagued by a variety of illnesses, have
been found to have traces of uranium in their blood, feces, urine and semen.
Depleted uranium is a rather benign sounding name for uranium-238, the trace elements left
behind when the fissionable material is extracted from uranium-235 for use in nuclear
reactors and weapons. For decades, this waste was a radioactive nuisance, piling up at
plutonium processing plants across the country. By the late 1980s there was nearly a
billion tons of the material.
Then weapons designers at the Pentagon came up with a use for the tailings: they could be
molded into bullets and bombs. The material was free and there was plenty at hand. Also
uranium is a heavy metal, denser than lead. This makes it perfect for use in
armor-penetrating weapons, designed to destroy tanks, armored-personnel carriers and
bunkers.
When the tank-busting bombs explode, the depleted uranium oxidizes into microscopic
fragments that float through the air like carcinogenic dust, carried on the desert winds
for decades. The lethal dust is inhaled, sticks to the fibers of the lungs, and eventually
begins to wreck havoc on the body: tumors, hemorrhages, ravaged immune systems, leukemias.
In 1943, the doomsday men associated with the Manhattan Project speculated that uranium
and other radioactive materials could be spread across wide swaths of land to contain
opposing armies. Gen. Leslie Grove, head of the project, asserted that uranium weapons
could be expected to cause "permanent lung damage."
In the late 1950s Al Gore’s father, the senator from Tennessee, proposed dousing the
demilitarized zone in Korea with uranium as a cheap failsafe against an attack from the
North Koreans. After the Gulf War, Pentagon war planners were so delighted with the
performance of their radioactive weapons that ordered a new arsenal and under Bill
Clinton’s orders fired them at Serb positions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia. More than
a 100 of the DU bombs have been used in the Balkans over the last six years.
Already medical teams in the region have detected cancer clusters near the bomb sites. 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. As of January 23, eight
Italian soldiers who served in the region have died of leukemia.
The Pentagon has shuffled through a variety of rationales and excuses. First, the Defense
Department shrugged off concerns about Depleted Uranium as wild conspiracy theories by
peace activists, environmentalists and Iraqi propagandists. When the US’s
NATO allies demanded that the US disclose the chemical and metallic properties of its
munitions, the Pentagon refused. It has also refused to order testing of US soldiers
stationed in the Gulf and the Balkans. If the US has been keeping silent, the Brits
haven’t been. A 1991 study by the UK Atomic Energy Authority predicted that if less
than 10 percent of the particles released by depleted uranium weapons used in Iraq and
Kuwait were inhaled it could result in as many as "500,000 probable deaths."
The British estimate assumed that the only radioactive ingredient in the bombs dropped on
Iraq was depleted uranium. It wasn’t. A new study of the materials inside these
weapons describes them as a "nuclear cocktail," containing a mix of radioactive
elements, including plutonium and the highly radioactive isotope uranium-236. These
elements are 100,000 times more dangerous than depleted uranium.
Typically, the Pentagon has tried to dump the blame on the Department of Energy’s
sloppy handling of its weapons production plants. This is how Pentagon spokesman Craig
Quigley described the situation in chop-logic worthy of the pen of Joseph Heller.:
"The source of the contamination as best we can understand it now was the plants
themselves that produced the Depleted uranium during the 20 some year time frame when the
DU was produced."
Indeed, the problems at DoE nuclear sites and the contamination of its workers and
contractors have been well-known since the 1980s. A 1991 Energy Department memo reports:
"during the process of making fuel for nuclear reactors and elements for nuclear
weapons, the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant... created depleted uranium potentially
containing neptunium and plutonium."
But such excuses in the absence of any action to address the situation are growing very
thin indeed. Doug Rokke, the health physicist for the US Army who oversaw the partial
clean up of depleted uranium bomb fragments in Kuwait, is now sick. His body registers
5,000 times the level of radiation considered "safe". He knows where to place
the blame.
"There can be no reasonable doubt about this," Rokke recently told British
journalist John Pilger. "As a result of heavy metal and radiological poison of DU,
people in southern Iraq are experiencing respiratory problems, kidney problems, cancers.
Members of my own team have died or are dying from cancer."
Depleted uranium has a half-life of more than 4 billion years, approximately the age of
the Earth. Thousand of acres of land in the Balkans, Kuwait and southern Iraq have been
contaminated forever. If George Bush Sr., Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Bill Clinton are
still casting about for a legacy, there’s grim one that will stay around for an
eternity.
International Institute of Concern
for Public Health Toronto
27th November 1997
Depleted Uranium is a Chemical and
Radiological Warfare Agent Used Extensively in the Gulf War
by Dr. Rosalie Bertell
As tensions again heat up in the Gulf, there is a broad international consensus that biological, chemical and nuclear weapons kill indiscriminately, continue to kill and injure after a war is over, and ought to be outlawed. Because of this, the United Nations inspection of Iraq is supported in so far as it claims to be uncovering, with the purpose of destroying and preventing further production of, such warfare materials. Clearly, there is also some universal discomfort at the length of time this is taking and the fact that sanctions against the Iraqi People, including restrictions on food and medicine, continue during this search process. Another important factor in public perception is the taunting way Saddam Hussein deals with the United States and the United Nations, and the Iraqi controlled news media portrayal of the crisis to the Iraqi People. This provokes anger and a desire to force compliance and proclaim moral authority in the battle for perception and public opinion.
The missing factor in the saber rattling is the fact that even though it is almost seven years since the cessation of hostility, there are at least 80,000 Gulf War service men and women with an unknown illness. The Gulf War syndrome, as it is known, still has no generally accepted etiology, diagnosis, or treatment. There are a number of factors which may be implicated in this sickness, at least of some proportion of the cases, and it is important to assess the impact of each of these factors, should hostility be resumed in the Gulf. After all, the Iraqi people, children, women and men civilians, also appear to be suffering from Gulf War syndrome, according to Dr. Siegwart-Horst Gunther, an Austrian physician who has been working there. Making civilians sick does not demonstrate high moral action. There are grave questions about restrictions on food and medicine destined for Iraq, but deliberately causing chronic debilitating illness and deformed offspring among civilians constitutes direct biological, chemical and/or radiological warfare and is totally unacceptable.
Many probable cause of Gulf War syndrome have been proposed. First, there were the vaccines intended as protection against nerve and biological warfare agents. Use of these can be stopped. There was also the intense smoke and chemical pollutants released by the continuous oil well fires. Hopefully, with "precision" bombing and no fleeing army, this danger would mitigated. The Old World Leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease transmitted by the bite of sand flies indigenous to the region also is not now a problems with no troops on the ground. The widespread use of pesticides and insecticides by the ground troops during the war is also not likely to be repeated. None of these potential causes would fully account for Gulf War syndrome, including severely deformed children in Iraq. None would be expected to be involved in military "punishment" of Saddam Hussein.
However, two of the likely causes of Gulf War illness are still serious problems, and they continue to threaten UN military, and civilians in Iraq should hostilities break out again. These hazards include the bombing of Iraqi chemical or biological stockpiles, creating clouds of toxic materials, and the use of depleted uranium ordnance and armor by the United States.
If the places where the suspected Iraqi arsenals are kept is unknown to the United Nations, then the bombing of such a site cannot be easily ruled out. This outcome is in the realm of "possible". However, the use of depleted uranium ordnance by the United States appears to be certain and such use is very problematic. History is likely to judge this military use of depleted uranium (DU) as the use of chemical and radiological warfare agents nominally to prevent Iraq from using them.
Depleted uranium is essentially the same as natural uranium, which is considered to be chemically toxic and radioactive. It occurs naturally in soil and is present in trace quantities in food, and is not considered under these circumstances to be unusually hazardous. It is called depleted because it is the waste from uranium processing, designed to remove the isotope U 238 from the natural mixture so as to concentrate the more fissionable U 235 atoms. Removing the U 235 from natural uranium does little to change its nature since that isotope is normally less than 1% of the mixture. Uranium is radioactive and decays spontaneously into other radioactive elements. Depleted uranium also contains radioactive thorium, protactinium, and other radionuclides. This concentrated mixture of radionuclides can deliver a significant dose of radiation to handlers and those in near proximity to there place of storage.
Uranium war usage capitalizes on its pyrophoric property. When heated in air at 500 degrees Centigrade it oxidizes slowly, sustaining combustion and forming respirable aerosols. These aerosols of uranium are very light and can travel more than 42 kilometers (26 miles) from the release point. This was discovered in 1979 by workers at the Knolls Atomic Laboratory north of Albany, New York. While investigating the National Lead Industries (NL), reportedly fabricating DU penetrators for 30 mm canon rounds and airplane counter weights, they found DU contamination on their own air filters 42 km from the factory. According to Dr. Leonard Deitz, of Ynolls, "this is by no means the maximum fallout distance for DU aerosol particles". The NL was closed down, decontaminated and dismantled in 1983 for emitting more than 150 microcurie (387 grams) of DU. The aerosol is much more hazardous than naturally occurring uranium particles in soil or food. One GAU-8/A penetrator in an aircraft 30 mm canon round contains 272 grams of DU.
During the Gulf War an estimated 300 metric tons of DU were fired. The friction on reaching target causes it to aerosolize. Using a conservative estimate that only 1% aerosolized, this would have produced 3 million to 6 million grams of DU aerosol. The Doha fire alone, which the US has blamed for much of the Gulf War illness, included the burning of significant amounts of DU. Although the aerosol problem was known, the cleanup crew was not provided respirators or other protections provided for in the military manual (See Department of the 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", September 1990). The Doha fire involved 6 hours of violent explosions, and 18 additional hours of residual fires. More than 9000 pounds (4.1 million grams) of depleted uranium were lost in this fire. This had the potential of producing up to 4.1 million aerosol particles. No service men or women were protected from inhaling and ingesting these aerosol particles along with the other hazardous smoke and fumes of the war, and these deadly aerosols, undetectable to the senses, spread far and wide over the battlefield.
According to a survey of 10,051 Gulf War Veterans conducted by Victor Sylvester of the Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm Association between 1991 and 1995, 82% of the Gulf War veteran handled DU, or entered captured Iraqi vehicles which had been contaminated with DU. Many took DU fragments home as souvenirs. Some of the service personnel, assigned to unload battle damaged tanks destroyed by armor piercing DU shells from friendly fire, reported that such tanks were later declared by a Battle Damage Assessment Team to be "hot", giving off between 2.6 and 10 mSv/hour radiation dose inside. The maximum permissible radiation dose to members of the public is 1 mSv per year. Service men and women received this in less than an hour. The service personnel had not been forewarned and had taken no protective actions.
The expected health effects of chronic lung burdens of depleted uranium include fibrosis of the irradiated lung tissue, lung cancer, eventual entry of the DU into blood over the subsequent years, with effects on liver and kidney, together with incorporation of DU into bone. When in bone, the uranium can irradiation the sensitive stem cells which form the white blood cells, especially the monocytes. Clinical manifestations of this toxicity and irradiation include kidney and liver damage, anemia, depressed cellular immune system and general heavy metal poisoning. Uranium can pass the placenta, causing congenital malformations, and can be carried to the infant in Mother's milk. It can damage the ovum and sperm, causing genetic damage to offspring.
Only 24 of the US Gulf War Syndrome patients have been examined for uranium lung burden. The DU aerosol is insoluble and expected to stay in the lungs for a very long time, delivering a radiation dose to the tissue. Using old equipment, admittedly not very sensitive, Dr. Belton Burroughs and Dr. David Slingerland of the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Boston, were able to identify fourteen of the 24 as having measurable lung burdens of DU. The testing was terminated, and all records have subsequently been "lost". Some urine samples were sent to the US Army Radiochemistry Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland, for testing. Some samples never reached the laboratory, and the results of those that did were supposedly "lost". The Medical Doctor who gave this testimony to the U.S. Congress, Dr. Asaf Durakovic, an internationally recognized expert in internal contamination with radioactivity, has lost his job with the Veterans Administration. The Canadian program of testing does not include DU contamination assessment.
In a 1974 US military report entitled: "Medical and Environmental Evaluation of Depleted Uranium", it is rather boldly stated that although an uncontrolled release of depleted uranium may have a significant impact locally:
"...the problems from the use of DU on the battlefield or at sea are insignificant when compared to other dangers of combat".
On 16 August 1993, the Office of the Surgeon General, US Department of the Army, issued its: "Depleted Uranium (DU) Safety Training" document. In it they stated that the expected effects from exposure include possible increase of cancer (lung and bone) and kidney damage. It recommends.
"That you convene a working group to define competing risks of combat with DU weapons, to identify countermeasures against DU exposure and finally to asses the risks associated with each potential countermeasure. The working group could then optimize the trade-off between DU risk and battlefield countermeasures to maximize the survivability of the soldier. "
"Survivability" means ability to accomplish the soldier's mission in combat, and does not extend to his or her post war life.
Clean up after such a dirty war, including medical care for all combat and civilian personnel, friend and foe, as well as environmental cleanup has proven to be enormous. According to Ltc. Gregory K. Lyle, in an internal memo, the civilian populations of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as well as those of Iraq, were coming increasingly into contact with DU Ordnance. Toxic war souvenirs, post conflict cleanup (by agreement with host nations), uranium oxide dust, and beta particles from fragments and intact DU rounds were all serious health threats. According to this memo,the contact exposure rate from these item might reach 2 mSv per hour. In just 30 minutes, the individual would receive the maximum permissible dose of radiation for one year. Iraqi children who are known to have played with such discarded ordnance are now suffering from leukemia.
Shall the global community, now clearly condemning land mines, ignore a military assault on Iraq and on its own service personnel with more uses of DU? How many separate categories of horror need to be outlawed before war itself is outlawed?
It is time for new approaches to security, new implementation of conflict resolution methodology, and renewed pledge of responsibility to those who have risked their lives in support of democracy and international order. The abandonment of the Gulf War veterans in pursuit of military advantage and arms sales, and the continued threat to civilians and ones own troops posed by biological, chemical and radiological warfare, including the use of depleted uranium, is disgraceful. The United Nations in urged to remove itself from its supportive position for this policy of military force immediately!
Partial Gulf War Depleted Uranium Bibliography:
"Report of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veteran Illness" Draft version reported in the New York Times 3 November 1997. (Contains harsh criticism of the Defense Department)
US House of Representatives subcommittee of government oversight, Chair: Christopher Shay, Republican from Connecticut, Report on Gulf War Illness, approved by the full Committee. (Called the investigations by the Defense Department and Veterans Affairs Department "irreparably flawed" and "plagued by arrogant incuriosity and a preverse myopia that sees a lack of evidence as proof.")
"Pentagon Bias on Gulf War Illness", EDITORIAL, The New York Times 3 November 1997.
Metal of Dishonor: Depleted Uranium, the Pentagon's Secret Radioactive War, Editors: S. Flounders and F. Alexander. Includes selections by Rosalie Bertell, Helen Caldicott, Ramsey Clark and Others. Depleted Uranium Education Project, 39 West 14 th Street, New York NY 10011.
"Pentagon Poison: The Great Radioactive Ammo Cover-Up", by Bill Mesler. The Nation, 26 May 1997.
Hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Resources, Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, US House of Representatives. Thursday, June 26, 1997. "Medical Implications of the Gulf War Exposures", by Dr. Asaf Durakovic; "Contamination of Persian Gulf War Veterans and Others by Depleted Uranium", by Dr. Leonard A. Dietz, 19 July 1996; "Statement of Michael J. Stacy", experience of a Gulf War Veteran with Depleted Uranium. June 26, 1997.
"Army Not Adequately Prepared to Deal with Depleted Uranium Contamination", US General Accounting Office Report, January 1993. (GAO/NSIAD-93-90).
"Depleted Uranium (DU) Safety Training", 16 August 1993. Office of the Surgeon General, US Department of the Army.
"Review of Draft Report to Congress - Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium - ACTION MEMORANDUM" 19 August 1993, from Brigadier General Eric K. Shinescki.
International Exhibition of Weapons and Military Technology (IDEX-93) - Advertisement for depleted uranium penetrators, spearheaded by the US and Russian defense industries, included since 1993.
"The Effectiveness of Depleted Uranium Penetrators", Los Alamos Memorandum, I March 199 1, from the US Department of Defense GULFLink web site.
Minutes of the Army Environmental Policy Institute (AEPI), Alexandria, Virginia, 6 January 1993.
US Army Accident Report, Case Number 910711001, 20 September 1991. Details on the fire in the ammunition storage area and motor pool in Doha. The accident report make no mention of the depleted uranium, however the estimated cost of the accident includes loss of 9,056 lbs of depleted uranium penetrators.
US Central Command Log, "11ACR Fire in Doha: Updates from CENTCOM Forward", July 12, 1991. Entry 3 note that: "Depleted uranium rounds are going off." Entry 10 states: "EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) POC (Point of Contact) state "that burning depleted uranium puts off alpha radiation. Uranium Particles when breated can be hazardous. 11ACR (11 th Armored Cavalry Regiment) has been notified to treat the area as though it were a chemical hazard area, i.e. stay upwind and wear protective mask in the vicinity." Based on interviews with the personnel, this warning was not passed on to the soldiers by their commanders.
"Potential Behaviour of Depleted Uranium Penetrators Under Shipping and Bulk Storage Accident Conditions", February 1985, by J. Mishima et al, Pacific Northwest Laboratory, PNL-5415.
"The Effectiveness of Depleted Uranium Penetrators", Memorandum by Lt. Col. M.V. Ziehmn. Los Alamos National Laboratory. I March 1991.
US Federally Sponsored Research on Persian Gulf Veterans' Illnesses reports two projects on Depleted Uranium: (1) Studies of veterans with DU fragments imbedded due to friendly fire. Preliminary reports note: "Fibrous tissue adhere to DU but not Ta (Tantalum control) pellets in situ, but capsule formation is not yet evident. Uranium levels are high and dose-dependent in kidney, bone, and urine, and moderately high in muscle, brain and spleen. Estimated completion of this research is 1998. (2) rodent study to predict carcinogenic effects of long term exposure to imbedded DU fragments in humans. Preliminary results not available. Completion 1998. There are 89 other Federally funded studies, none of which deal with the DU question.
"The Gulf War's New Casualties: Tales of Sickness from the Pentagon's Own Weaponry, made of Depleted Uranium", Feature story in The Nation, 15 July 1997. Available: http://www.thenation.com/issue/970714/0714mesl.htm
"The Gulf War Syndrome - A Country Whose Integrity is in Question" by Peter Hagglestein, formerly DOE-ORO National Security Programs. In the Environmentalist Newsletter, December 1996. (Http://members.aol.com/doewatch/nl296.html)
Friendly Fire: The Link Between
Depleted Uranium Munitions and Human Health Risks, by Damacio A. Lopez, Second Edition
March 1995 Military Toxics Project mtp@igc.apc.org
Geneva Coordinator of Desert Concerns: Philippa Winkler, +44-117-924-8586 (temporary),
assisting with the UN process to ban DU weaponry. Attny: Karen Parker, San Francisco, CA.
Contacts: Leonard Dietz, 1124 Mohegan
Rd., Niskayuna NY 12309-1315. Tel:518-377-8202
Dr. Asaf Durakovic, 3430 Connecticut Ave. 11020, Washington DC 20008, Tel:301-681-8258
Dr. Eric Hoskins, 99 Harbour Square, Apt.2408, Toronto Tel:705-457-1212 (w); 705-489-2438 (h).
Veteran (Doha fire): Michael Flores, 1039 Butterfly Lane, San Angelo, TX 76905, Tel: 915-651-9076
Army Nurse in GW: Carol Picou, Mission Project PO Box 92574, Lafayette LA 70509-2574. Tel: 318-234-1971 or 318-236-3599
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