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Depleted Uranium Is Not "Depleted"
By James
Denver:
A Dirty
Tyson
'Depleted'
uranium is in many ways a misnomer. For '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)
See Images of
U.S. Conquest
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 leukaemia
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. 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. 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.
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.'
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.
Liberty
For Life Comment: James Denver addresses solutions to repairing the
damage, however, the cause needs to be addressed first. The
United States of America needs to be disarmed and the war criminals
who imitated these crimes against humanity must be brought to trial
and punished. see U.S.A & War
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.
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