When this war
ends, George Bush will have caused the poisoning of
hundreds of thousands more humans than he said Saddam
Hussein poisoned.
By Frederick Sweet
 In
its 110,000 air raids against Iraq, the US A-10 Warthog
aircraft launched 940,000 depleted uranium shells, and
in the land offensive, its M60, M1 and M1A1 tanks fired
a further 4,000 larger caliber also uranium shells. The
Bush administration and the Pentagon said there is no
danger to American troops or Iraqi civilians from
breathing the uranium oxide dust produced in depleted
uranium (DU) weapons explosions.
DU is the waste residue made from the uranium enrichment
process. This radioactive and toxic substance, 1.7 times
as dense as lead, is used to make shells that penetrate
steel armor.
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, an opponent
of DU weapons use since 1996, again raised his call for
a ban on the use of these weapons in 2001. Since then DU
weapons conferences, ironically, in Baghdad in 1999 and
Gijon, Spain in 2000 had demanded a ban on DU use.
"This new outbreak of leukemia among European
[NATO] soldiers has reinforced what we said
before," said Clark from New York in January 2001.
"Is it acceptable by any human standards that we
would permit one shell of depleted uranium to be
manufactured, to be stored, to be used? No! Stop it
now!"
According to a May 2003 article in the Christian Science
Monitor, the first partial Pentagon disclosure of the
amount of DU used in Iraq, a US Central Command
spokesman admitted that A-10 Warthog aircraft -- the
same planes that shot at the Iraqi planning ministry --
fired 300,000 bullets. The normal combat mix for these
30-mm rounds is five DU bullets to 1 -- a mix that had
left about 75 tons of DU in Iraq.
A Monitor reporter had seen only one site where US
troops had put up handwritten warnings in Arabic for
Iraqis to stay away. A 3-foot-long DU warhead from a
120-mm tank shell had been found to produce radiation at
more than 1,300 times background levels.
"If you have pieces or even whole [DU] penetrators
around, this is not an acute health hazard, but it is
for sure above radiation protection dose levels,"
says Werner Burkart, the German deputy director general
for Nuclear Sciences and Applications at the UN's
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.
"The important thing in any battlefield --
especially in populated urban areas -- is somebody has
to clean up these sites."
Many scientists believe that uranium oxide dust inhaled
or ingested by U.S. troops in the Gulf War is the cause,
or a contributing cause, of the "Gulf-War
Syndrome." Of the approximately 697,000 U.S. troops
stationed in the Gulf during the war, more than 100,000
veterans are now chronically ill. Cancer rates in
southern Iraq have increased dramatically. For example
ovarian cancer in Iraqi women of the southern region has
fully increased by 16-fold.
More recently, the Bush administration's reassurances
were vigorously challenged by nuclear physicists and
physicians at a scientific meeting, the World DU/Uranium
Weapons Conference held in Hamburg, Germany during
October 2003. The data presented in Hamburg of the
long-term medical effects from DU exposures during the
1990s in Kosovo, Sarajevo, southern Iraq, and from
American veterans of the Gulf War, reveal a frightening
reality.
According to the Conference, the mobility of the ceramic
uranium oxide particles from DU weapons explosions is
due to their re-suspension in dry weather. Measuring
isotope ratios of U-238 and Pa-234m/Th-234 in water and
air measurements by UNEP in Kosovo, Bosnia and
Montenegro has showed this. Uranium oxide particles are
available for inhalation long after the war is over.
Anyone in the general area of their prior use is at
risk, several years after their use or contamination.
This had been proven by urine measurements in Kosovo in
2001. All of the people sampled showed contamination
from DU. This was also shown by urine tests of Gulf War
veterans made 10 years after their exposure.
Conference scientists criticized as decades obsolete the
Pentagon models used for reassuring the public about the
long-term effects of inhaling uranium oxide particles
from DU weapons. Citing the Pentagon model, the official
2003 Conference Statement concluded: "The knowledge
on which this [Pentagon] model is based is faulty and
outdated. This is like comparing [someone] sitting in
front of a fire with [them] eating a hot coal."
After the Gulf War, Iraqi and international
epidemiological investigations enabled the environmental
pollution due to using this kind of weapon to be
associated with the appearance of new, very difficult to
diagnose diseases (serious immunodeficiencies, for
instance) and the spectacular increase in congenital
malformations and cancer. This had been found both in
the Iraqi population and also among several thousands of
American and British veterans and in their children, a
clinical condition now called Gulf War Syndrome. Similar
symptoms to those of the Gulf War have been described
for a thousand children living in Bosnia where American
aviation similarly used DU bombs in 1996, the same as in
the NATO intervention against Yugoslavia in 1999.
It is estimated that already about 300 tons of
radioactive debris from DU weapons were deposited in
target areas during the 2003 Iraq War, affecting over
250,000 Iraqis. By comparison, Saddam Hussein -- who
Bush had called an evil murderer -- gassed about 5,000
Iraqi Kurds in 1988. But by Bush launching his war on
Iraq with DU weapons of mass destruction, he multiplied
the casualties to the Iraqis, and also to American
troops, by factors of hundreds relative to the infamous
gassing of the Kurds.
By the time American troops finally pull out of Iraq,
Bush will have poisoned hundreds of thousands more
humans with depleted uranium than he has accused Saddam
Hussein of poisoning with gas.
Frederick Sweet is Professor of Reproductive Biology in
Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University
School of Medicine in St. Louis. You can email your
comments to Fred@interventionmag.com
Posted Wednesday, January 6. 2003
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