[NYTr] Depleted uranium -- a way out?

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Francis Boyle

Mehr News Agency (Iran) - Nov 20, 2007
http://www.mehrnews.com/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=589688

Opinion

Depleted uranium -- a way out?

by Felicity Arbuthnot
Tehran Times 

It was in 1993, when a group of twenty-four affected soldiers
approached Professor Asaf Durakovic, one of the world's leading experts
on 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. Durakovic, although
a senior officer in the U.S. Army during the first Persian 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 U.S. veterans
were suffering from Persian 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 Persian Gulf
War veterans contaminated with radiation, he states.

Two other physicians, Dr. Burroughs and Dr. Slingerland of the 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
on 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 tons 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 1950s.

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 tons and that chilling warning, in Iraq several
thousand tons now cover this ancient Biblical land, and with the bombs
raining daily, the audit rises nearly hour by hour. The U.S. is
currently by far the largest user of DU weapons. Over the past decade,
they have bought 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, Persian 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, U.S. troops have denied entry to International Atomic Energy
Agency inspectors and all other radiation experts seeking to test
ground and air levels.

In Bosnia and the other parts of the former Yugoslavia where DU weapons
were used (with missiles also dropped accidentally in neighboring
countries, by the U.S., to whom all the world's lives are seemingly
cheap) the "Iraq Syndrome" quickly became apparent.

Even European peacekeepers on relatively short tours of duty became ill
and developed leukemia 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 newborn 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 tumors 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 that possess uranium weapons. "The first
evidence that the IDF (Israeli Defense 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 saying 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 the crater) than naturally
occurring background radiation.

The following month, independent researcher Dai Williams 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 smoke
screen for the wider use of depleted uranium, as the final
contamination "when all gets mixed up after the war has a natural
isotopic signature" (i.e.: 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 isolated. 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 totaled £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.

"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,
leukemia, 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? Furthermore, Israel is not only decimating those she perceives as
her enemies, but her own people, neighboring 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 contaminate agricultural land, the potentially deadly
wave of invisible particles traveled on the wind from Iraq. "We are all
(Persian) 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 NGOs
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 armor
plate and all other uranium weapons." A request should be made that the
letter be 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, "As the Land Mines Treaty demonstrates, it
is possible for a coalition of determined activists and NGOs, 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 outlawed uranium weapons
earlier this year. 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.


[Busby is the author of Wings of Death and of Wolves of Water (2007)
essential reading on radiation's horrors, published by Green Audit
(admin at greenaudit.org). Busby is also involved in Radioactive Times,
the journal of the Low Level Radiation Campaign, a detailed quarterly
update on nuclear industry shenanigans at http://www.llrc.org

See also http://www.eoslifework.co.uk for a wealth of DU related
material.]

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