Depleted
Uranium - A Way Out?
By Felicity Arbuthnot
19 September, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The
term "Gulf War Syndrome" is now known world-wide – but
- after the 1991 Iraq war, as formerly A1 fit soldiers fell ill with
debilitating symptoms, in their thousands, the cause was, for two years,
a "mystery".
It was in 1993, when a group
of twenty-four affected soldiers approached Professor Asav Durakovic,
one of the world's leading experts in the effects of radiation, that
a cause came to light.
They had many times the "safe"
level of chemically toxic and radioactive depleted uranium (DU) in their
bodies. Duracovic, although a senior officer in the US army during the
first Gulf war, had been unaware that the weapons used had contained
depleted uranium.
"I was horrified",
he said: "I was a soldier, but above all I am a doctor." By
1997, it was estimated that ninety thousand US
veterans were suffering from Gulf War Syndrome.
Durakovic, who is also medical
consultant for the Children of Chernobyl project at Hadassah University,
Jerusalem, lost his job as Chief of Nuclear Medicine at the Veteran's
Administration Medical Facility at Wilmington, Delaware, as a direct
result of his work with Gulf war veterans contaminated with radiation,
he states.
Two other physicians, Dr
Burroughs and Dr Slingerland of Boston VA also lost their jobs when
they asked for more sensitive equipment to better diagnose the soldiers
referred to them by Professor Durakovic.
Oddly, all the records pertaining
to the sick soldiers at the Delaware VA went missing, a syndrome of
another kind which has become familiar, both sides of the Atlantic.
Two years before Durakovic's
discovery, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) "self
initiated" a Report warning the government that if fifty tonnes
of the residual dust, from the explosions of the weapons on impact,
was left "in the region", they estimated it would generate
"half a million" extra cancer deaths by the end of the century
(2000.)
Iraq's cancers and birth
deformities have become an anomaly, compared to those in the Pacific
Islands and amongst British troops after the nuclear testing in the
1950's.
Further, "depleted"
is a misnomer. These weapons are made from waste from the nuclear fuel
cycle and thus contain the whole lethal nuclear cocktail. DU weapons
(sold to seventeen countries that are known and possibly others - why
let poisoning the planet and its population get in the way of numerous
millions of quick bucks) are equivalent to spreading the contents of
a nuclear reactor around the globe.
And far from fifty tonnes
and that chilling warning, in Iraq several thousand tonnes now cover
this ancient, Biblical land and with the bombs raining daily, the audit
rises nearly hour by hour. The US is currently by far the largest user
of DU weapons. Over the past decade, they have brought more than sixteen
million DU shells and bullets from Alliant Tech Systems alone. (Source:
Janes.)
Strangely, this time, there
have been few reports of soldiers with the terrible effects of 1991,
where they were only in the region for a few weeks. Although troops
now remain for months or a year, Gulf War Syndrome mark 2 seems not
an issue. Perhaps it is because, reportedly, doctors treating returning
troops have been threatened with jail and or hefty fines if they say
anything regarding DU-related symptoms.
The implication regarding
compensation to countries affected by this poisoned legacy (DU's lethality
lasts for four and a half billion years) and troops is financially stratospheric.
Since the 2003 invasion, US troops are denied entry to the International
Atomic Energy Authority or any radiation experts to test ground and
air levels.
In Bosnia and the former
Yugoslavia where DU weapons were used (with missiles also dropped accidentally
in neighbouring countries, by the US, to whom all the world's lives
are seemingly cheap) the "Iraq Syndrome" became quickly apparent.
Even European peacekeepers
on relatively short tours of duty became ill, developed leukaemia’s
and other cancers and a number died. A five man film crew from BBC Scotland
all tested DU positive after filming for less than a week there.
Afghanistan too was "liberated"
in 2001, by uranium weapons, which continue to be routinely used, condemning
generations yet to be born to deformities and the living - the new born
and under fives the most susceptible - to cancers and other horrific
DU-related conditions.
Durakovic also found high
levels of uranium in hospital patients there, as there will undoubtedly
be in the occupying forces. He also found identical conditions to Iraq
amongst the young: "Children born with no limbs, no eyes, or with
tumours protruding from their mouths and eyes."
The latest country to fall
victim to uranium weapons is Lebanon - but with a Difference; it transpires.
Dr Chris Busby*, founder of the Low Level Radiation Campaign and Green
Audit, is Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation
Risk and also sits on the (UK) Ministry of Defence Uranium Oversight
Board.
Israel is one of the countries
with uranium weapons and: "The first evidence that the IDF (Israeli
Defence Force) were using them" (in the July-August 2006 Israeli
bombardment) "was a Getty Picture Library image of an Israeli soldier
carrying a DU anti-tank shell", says Busby.
He then noted a report in
Lebanon's Daily Star, that Dr Khobeisi, a scientist, had measured gamma
radiation in a bomb crater at Khiam in the south of the country, at
ten to twenty times higher (samples taken from different locations in
crater) than naturally occurring background radiation.
The following month, Dai
Williams,** an independent researcher went to Lebanon on behalf of Green
Audit, to investigate and bring back samples to the UK for testing.
He also brought back an air filter from an ambulance. Tested at the
Harwell UKAEA laboratory: "The results were astonishing."
Both soil and filter contained
enriched uranium with the soil sample containing uranium about nine
times higher than the natural background. (Remember how threatening
the West has become towards Iran's efforts to enrich uranium?)
The soil sample was also
sent to the School of Ocean Sciences, in North Wales for a second test
by a different method for certainty. The results were the same.
Busby asks: "Why use
enriched uranium? It is a bit like shooting your enemy with diamonds."
He contends it is possible that it is a "smokestream" for
the wider use of depleted uranium, as the final contamination "when
all gets mixed up after the war has a natural isotopic signature".
(ie: can be read as uranium
which occurs naturally in nature.) There are two other chilling possibilities
says Busby: a fusion bomb or a thermobaric bomb, both of which would
need enriched uranium. Certainly, doctors were reporting bodies in conditions
they could find in no medical manuals, as in the attack on Falluja,
Iraq.
Lebanese authorities denied
the presence of enriched uranium; Israel denied using it. The bombardment
had ended on the agreement that UN peacekeepers went in. Given their
debilitation and mortality rate in the Balkans, this lethal presence
might well have deterred them. To be certain the incident was not in
isolation. Williams returned to Lebanon and brought back soil and water
samples from Khiam and other sites. Enriched uranium was found in water
samples from two separate craters in Khiam and in one of the soil samples.
Then the money ran out.
The samples tested had already
cost £2,000. Donations from an Arab friend and Swiss supporters
totalled £850 - and Dai Williams had paid the rest out of his
own money. More work is needed, but it is now known that the IDF used
enriched uranium in Lebanon.
And: "Since it is in
the ambulance air filter, it is also in the lungs of the inhabitants
... the Lebanese people have been sacrificed to cancers, leukaemias,
birth defects, like the people of the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq",
says Busby, adding "and it may be worse: since we still do not
know what the weapon was."
And have these weapons been
used on the people of Gaza and the West Bank? Further, Israel is not
alone decimating those she perceives as her enemies, but her own people,
neighbouring countries and even those further afield.
In context, Green Audit studied
airborne uranium at sites in the UK, between 1998 and 2004. There was
only one period in which uranium in the air "significantly"
exceeded the naturally occurring background presence: during the bombing
of Iraq, in March and April, 2003.
As with the radionuclides
from Chernobyl which affected Europe and the globe, and still contaminates
agricultural land, the potentially deadly wave of invisible particles
travelled on the wind from Iraq. "We are all Gulf war victims now",
commented Busby's colleague, Richard Bramhill.
Can anything be done to halt
the use of these genocidal weapons? Francis Boyle, Professor of International
Law at the University of Illinois and author of The Criminality of Nuclear
Deterrence, thinks so. He has launched a campaign for a global pact
against uranium weapons.
Boyle points out that the
1925 Geneva Protocol prohibits: "the use in war of asphyxiating,
poisonous or other gases and of all analogous liquids, materials or
devices". Clearly he says, DU is "analogous" to poison
gas.
The Government of France
is the official depository for the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Boyle contends
that rather than aiming for an international treaty prohibiting the
use of DU, which would probably take years, pressure should be put on
every state to submit a letter to the French government to enforce a
ban.
"All that needs to be
done is for anti-DU citizens, activists and NGO's in every country to
pressure their Foreign Minister to write to their French counterpart,
drawing attention to the "Protocol for the Prohibition of the use
in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases and of Bacteriological
Methods of Warfare", of 17th June 1925, prohibiting uses as above.
The letter should add that
this Protocol is believed to: "already prohibit the use in war
of depleted uranium ammunition, uranium armour plate and all other uranium
weapons". A request should be made that the letter is circulated
to all other High Contracting Parties to the 1925 Protocol and addressed
to:
His Excellency,
The Foreign Minister,
Republic of France,
37, Quai d'Orsay,
75351 Paris, France.
Or Fax: 33-1-43-17-4275
Professor Boyle points out
that: "As the Land Mines Treaty demonstrates, it is possible for
a coalition of determined activists and NGO's, acting in concert with
at least one sympathetic state, to bring into being an international
treaty to address humanitarian concerns."
Such a sympathetic state
exists:
Belgium, last month, outlawed
uranium weapons. If the rest of the world does not follow, what will
happen is what Richard Bramhill calls "a DU-locaust" - of
the children of the countries where these weapons have been used, of
soldiers, of the uranium miners and of the munitions workers, as the
living, dead and deformed prove.
* Author of Wings of Death
and of Wolves of Water (2007) essential reading on radiation's horrors,
published by Green Audit, available direct from [email protected]
Busby is also involved in Radioactive Times, the journal of the Low
Level Radiation Campaign, a detailed quarterly update on nuclear industry
shenanigans ( http://www.llrc.org )
** http://www.eoslifework.co.uk
for a wealth of DU related material.
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