Depleted Uranium for Dummies
The Most Toxic Battle In Western Military History
by Irving Wesley Hall
Source:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=2269
At the beginning of George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, 1991 Operation
Desert Storm vets suffering from Gulf War Illness were praying that United
Nations weapons inspectors were right and that Bush and Cheney were lying about
Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). After all, the
ailing vets were casualties of those weapons even though the Pentagon maintains
that Iraq never used them.
How could that be?
First, on the issue of weapons of mass destruction, the United States government
is not a reliable source, as you know if you have been paying attention for the
past six years. This is also the case with the causes of Gulf War Illness.
Second, Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in 1991. Many were illegally
supplied by the Reagan-Bush administration, in which both Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld served. Dr. Doug Rokke was a health physicist for the US Army. He was
part of the professional team on the ground training the troops to protect
themselves from WMDs. He is prominently featured in the DVD, Beyond Treason.
In a recent interview he informed me that Iraq employed WMDs on a limited basis
via sprayers, a few missiles and land mines. But most of Iraq’s chemical,
biological, and nuclear substances were delivered to our troops by their own
government.
Under the direction of Secretary of Defense Cheney, the 1991 Gulf War began with
a “shock and awe” bombing campaign that destroyed large biological laboratories,
chemical plants, and nuclear enrichment facilities, most of them around Baghdad.
As the supplier, the United States government knew the
locations.
Biological, chemical and nuclear weapons damage the bodies of soldiers in
distinct ways. The first employs deadly bacteria and viruses to cause known
illnesses. The second uses poisonous, or toxic, substances to attack the body’s
chemistry. Nuclear weapons, such as depleted uranium (DU), were unimaginable
before World War II. They attack the body with invisible radioactive energy
that, as you will soon read, produces a wider variety of symptoms that develop
over a longer period of time. Radioactive heavy metal particles embedded in the
body are both radioactive and toxic.
Biological, chemical and nuclear weapons can potentially “blow back.” Once they
are released, they can kill and maim civilians as well as enemy soldiers. Hence
all three have been banned by international treaties which the United States
signed.
They also blow back on the army that uses them. The practical danger to
America’s own troops prevented the widespread use of WMD’s until the atomic
bombs in World War II and the chemical herbicide Agent Orange in Vietnam.
Hundreds of thousands of American troops suffered and died because of the
testing and use of these weapons.
When George Bush Sr., Cheney, and Rumsfeld supplied brutal tyrant Saddam Hussein
with these substances in the 1980’s they showed disregard for the lives of folks
living in the Middle East. When they ordered the 1991 aerial destruction of
stockpiles of these weapons, they showed a deadly contempt for their own
citizen-soldiers.
Those early bombing attacks sent clouds of miniscule toxic and radioactive
particles into the air that floated over the future battlefield and bivouac
camps where hundreds of thousands of American troops were awaiting the invasion.
Bush Sr.’s February 1991 ground war was even shorter than Bush Jr.’s 2003
“Mission Accomplished” operation. The former lasted only 100 hours. Afterwards
105 sites stockpiling dangerous chemical and biological weapons were destroyed,
contaminating everything around them. In March, a huge weapons storage dump in
Khamisiyah was blown up by American engineers, sending a second huge toxic cloud
over troops preparing to depart for home.
Sgt. Dan Topolski, of the 87th Engineer Battalion, participated in the
Khamisiyah demolition. He speculates in Beyond Treason that the hasty action,
without prior inspection, inventory, or proper safety precautions, was
political. Topolski suggests this stupid order was motivated by Bush Sr.’s
desperate desire to hide the United States origin of that weaponry from United
Nations inspectors and the American people.
Years later, ailing vets would force the government to admit that CIA satellites
had tracked the movement of the mass of Khamisiyah contaminants in real time.
The size and path of the cloud explains the otherwise inexplicable incidences of
Gulf War illness among Navy personnel and pilots on battleships in the Persian
Gulf downwind.
Demolition at Khamisiyah
During the early aerial bombardment and later tank war, President Bush and
Secretary Cheney authorized the use of massive amounts of depleted uranium
armaments for the first time in the history of warfare. This material is
produced only by the United States and had been used experimentally in Vietnam
and the 1973 Israel-Arab War. Internal Department of Defense reports had warned
since 1943 about its use, and accurately predicted its poison gas effects on our
troops.
The Most Toxic Battle In Western Military History
In his article, “The Gulf War Was The Most Toxic Battle In Western Military
History,” Dr. Malcolm Hooper, emeritus professor of medicinal chemistry at the
University of Sunderland UK, attributes the symptoms of mysterious “Gulf War
Illness” among American and coalition troops to a combination of toxic
substances to which they were subjected.
These included, in addition to weapons of mass destruction, experimental
vaccines, anti-nerve gas tablets, aerosolized pesticides, and smoke from
hundreds of burning oil wells. Some of the vaccines were not approved by the FDA
and had never been used on human subjects. No one had studied the interactive
effects of as many as seventeen vaccines administered at the same time. Many
soldiers became violently ill immediately after receiving the battery of shots
and others developed a variety of symptoms later. Strangely, the normally
bureaucratic military kept no records of who received what shots and when.
However, most researchers cite radioactive poisoning from depleted uranium
shells as the deadliest element in the Gulf War Illness “cocktail.” In the 1991
war the Pentagon fired more than 340 tons of DU projectiles at targets in Iraq
and Kuwait. More than a half million Gulf era veterans are on medical
disability.
At last count, more than 1,000 tons have been used in Afghanistan and more than
3,000 tons in Iraq. Significantly, most Gulf War tours of duty were short. Three
quarters of today’s troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have served multiple tours:
26% are on their first tour of duty, 45% are on their second tour, and 29% are
in Iraq for a third time or more. Some are now being ordered to a fourth tour of
duty.
Simple math suggests that depleted uranium may eventually prove a hundred times
more deadly to our forces than all the Iraqi resistance fighters’ improvised
explosive devices (IED’s) and rocket propelled grenades (RPG’s) combined.
Leonard Dietz is a retired physicist from the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in
upstate New York. Dietz, who pioneered the technology to measure uranium
isotopes, is quoted as saying, “Anybody, civilian or soldier, who breathes these
particles has a permanent dose, and it’s not going to decrease very much over
time. . .In the long run. . .veterans exposed to ceramic uranium oxide have a
major problem.”
The Double Whammy Cocktail
A DU shell bursts into flames as soon as it leaves the delivery device. When it
hits a target, as much as 70 percent burns on impact at a high temperature,
releasing into the air billions of invisible radioactive particles. This
infinitesimally fine dust of aerosolized uranium oxide consists of metallic
micro-particles that are smaller than viruses or bacteria.
All of our bodies contain tiny amounts of natural uranium because it is found in
water and in the food supply. But natural uranium is quickly and harmlessly
excreted by the body. However the velocity and heat of the impact of D.U
munitions convert the poisonous uranium oxide from a heavy metal into a ceramic
heavy metal that makes it insoluble and therefore difficult to excrete.
Where does depleted uranium come from? It doesn’t occur in nature. Natural
uranium has to be “processed” to remove less than one half of one percent of a
special kind of uranium called U-235. Bomb makers use U-235 to make
thermonuclear bombs that can explode with a force equivalent to 100 million tons
of TNT.
U-235 is also used to make fuel rods for nuclear reactors. Used fuel rods are
extremely radioactive for many years and will kill any person near them in ten
seconds. No one on earth knows what to do with used fuel rods. Tons of deadly,
radioactive used fuel rods have been in temporary storage for more than 50
years.
DU is “depleted” only in the sense that more highly radioactive forms of uranium
have been partially removed. What’s left, depleted uranium, mainly U-238, is
still highly radioactive and dangerous. It is used to make military bullets,
shells, land mines, armor plating, missiles and bombs.
As we are all taught in elementary school, radioactivity is dangerous because it
causes cancer. That’s why your dentist covers your body with a lead apron before
your X-ray.
According to a June 2002 National Radiological Protection Board report,
“All uranium, whether natural, depleted or enriched, is a toxic radiological
element. Each differs from the other in atomic structure by less than one
percent. DU emits three types of ionizing radiation: alpha and beta particles
and photons. Alpha particles are blocked by objects as light as a sheet of
paper and humans exposed to them are naturally protected by their skin. Beta
particles (high speed electrons) can penetrate human skin to a depth of one
centimeter while photons (x-rays and gamma rays) are more penetrating and can
pass completely through a human body.”
Although blocked by the skin, alpha radiation can be inhaled, ingested, and
absorbed into the blood stream through scratches and wounds. It is highly
dangerous internally. In addition to being physically radioactive it is also
chemically toxic. This explains the “double whammy” effect. Soldiers who are
exposed can become immediately ill from the toxicity, recover, and then suffer
severe additional symptoms from the radioactivity years or decades later.
A study in the April 2003 New Scientist magazine suggested that DU toxicity
combines synergistically with its radioactivity to produce more serious effects.
Dr Keith Baverstock, a senior radiation advisor to the World Health
Organization, is quoted as saying, “The radiation and the chemical toxicity of
DU could also act together to create a ‘cocktail effect’ that further increases
the risk of cancer.”
Hence Gulf War vets were served a cocktail inside a cocktail.
More troubling still is another study of the materials inside the DU weapons
used in Iraq and Afghanistan. That report found that in addition to U-238,
today’s munitions contain plutonium, neptunium, and the highly radioactive
uranium isotope U-236. An isotope is one of several slightly different atomic
structures within the same element, in this case uranium. According to a 1991
study by the UK Atomic Energy Authority, these elements are 100,000 times more
dangerous than the U-238 in so-called depleted uranium.
U-236 is another man-made metal. It is created inside operating nuclear reactors
and is intensely radioactive. U-236 has been found in the urine of sick
Afghan and Iraqi villagers and on the ground next to bomb craters.
Geologist Leuren Moret is an independent scientist and internationally
recognized expert on radiation, DU, and public health. She estimates that “one
millionth of a gram [of depleted uranium] accumulating in a person’s body would
be fatal. There are no known methods of treatment.”
Quiet and Invisible Guests That Never Leave
Why the wide variety of illnesses?
Depleted uranium contamination causes virtually every known illness from acute
skin rashes, severe headaches, muscle and joint pain, and general fatigue, to
major birth defects, infection, depression, cardiovascular disease, brain
tumors, and every other type of cancer. Uranium replaces calcium, destroying
teeth and bones.
DU is causing permanent disability and death for hundreds of thousands of
American veterans who served in the Middle East.
For more information, every military family should watch Beyond Treason, and
every high school should play the DVD for students subjected to military
recruitment. According to experts interviewed on the DVD, some soldiers return
home contaminated with billions of radioactive ceramic particles.
Let’s follow the journey of these microscopic invaders after they are inhaled.
They attach first to the trachea and stick to lung tissue. The heavy metal
ceramic specks are practically insoluble; so they so don’t easily dissolve into
the bloodstream. They cling to the respiratory system for years, even
decades, and irradiate the surrounding tissues, damaging neighboring organs.
Gradually they pass through the lung-blood membranes into the bloodstream and
lymphatic system, causing illnesses and damage to the entire body. Radiation
mutates cells, causing cancers, leukemia, lymphoma, congenital disorders, and
birth defects.
Here’s what happens when these microscopic radioactive particles are ingested
through the mouth or penetrate the body through buried DU shrapnel or open
wounds. They enter the bloodstream and circulate freely throughout the body,
emitting radiation as they travel. Some concentrate in the lymph nodes and cause
lymphatic cancer. DU also damages the immune system by hastening the death of
white blood cells, and impairing their ability to attack bacteria.
Other ceramic particles cause “low-level” cell irradiation in the bone marrow
and the stem cells that the body creates there. Stem cells are the progenitors
of all the other cells that the body manufactures in order to renew itself.
Dr. Asaf Durakovic, formerly in charge of Nuclear Medicine Service at the
Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, was ailing veteran Terry
Riordan’s doctor whom we cited in the March 8 installment. Dr. Durakovic is now
the Director of the Uranium Medical Research Institute.
“Stem cells are very vulnerable,” he says. “Bombarded with alpha particles,
their DNA will fall apart, potentially affecting every organ.”
The process is similar to building a house with defective materials or cooking a
meal with spoiled ingredients. If malfunctioning stem cells become new liver
cells, then the liver will malfunction. Hence defective stem cells cause many
veterans to suffer kidney failure, brain damage, and poorly functioning joints
and muscles.
DU may transform semen into a caustic alkali, which explains Terry and Susan
Reardon’s experiences during lovemaking that we described the March 8
installment. This explains the severe urinary problems among veterans just back
from Iraq to be described in the April 18 installment. Dr. Malcolm Hooper, at
the University of Sunderland, is familiar with 4,000 such cases among UK Gulf
War veterans.
Radiation expert Leuren Moret calls D.U, “The Trojan Horse of nuclear war . . .
There’s no way to clean it up, and no way to turn it off because it continues to
decay into other radioactive isotopes. . .”
42nd Infantry Division soldiers in Iraq
As far back as 1979, Leonard Dietz, the retired New York State physicist,
discovered that aerosolized DU particles less than a millionth of a meter in
diameter can travel long distances. Some months ago, Leuren Moret told Dr. Elias
Akleh, an Arab-American writer, “DU dust is now everywhere. A minimum of 500
tons to 600 tons now litter Afghanistan, and several times that amount are
spread across Iraq.” As you will read April 18, a serious level of depleted
uranium particles reached the UK nine days after the United States’ 2003 “Shock
and Awe” bombing of Iraq. It’s likely that I am inhaling them as I peck on my
keyboard, and so are you as you read my words.
Compare the latest tonnage to the 340 tons used in the Gulf War. Dr. Doug Rokke,
the health physicist for the U.S. Army, who oversaw the partial clean up of
depleted uranium bomb fragments in Kuwait in 1991, reminded Alliance of Atomic
Veterans writer Vincent L. Guarisco that, in Bush and Cheney’s new war, the
massive radioactive arsenal has been used mainly in Iraqi urban centers and
civilian neighborhoods, rather than in desert battlefields.
Over time, the health of all foreign troops will be affected. The health effects
on the natives of Iraq and Afghanistan will be catastrophic. Based on the
increase in cancer rates in the aftermath of the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island
nuclear meltdowns, many Iranians, Saudis, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians and
Israelis will die prematurely thanks to our government’s unprovoked nuclear
attack on Iraq.
As you will read on April 18, because of their more rapid cellular development,
children are the most vulnerable to depleted uranium poisoning.
Radioactive Showers and Chow
In Iraq’s arid climate, sandstorms blow tiny particles of DU away from the blast
epicenter, impacting the surrounding environment without geographical
limitations. It enters the soil, polluting the water table, the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers, and infecting the food chain. Fertile, DU-contaminated
grasslands west of Basra in southern Iraq produce vegetables and grains for
livestock that are consumed by American troops as well as Iraqis.
The New York State National Guard Rainbow Division just returned from six months
stationed in Camp Forward Danger on the Tigris River near Tikrit, north of
Baghdad. Saddam Hussein’s rebellious hometown was the site of major combat using
DU munitions during the initial invasion and for months afterward.
An official June 2005 United States Central Command communiqué reported that
soldiers of the 62nd Quartermaster Company from Fort Hood, Texas were supplying
Camp Forward Danger’s water from the Tigris River. The engineers ran it through
a reverse osmosis water purification unit that dissolved the solids. The water
is purified again and chlorinated. However it seems that it is not tested for
radioactivity.
I have attempted to verify the degree of radioactive poisoning to which the New
York National Guard members were subjected. I had contacts with officers at the
base before this series went on line. However, Pentagon public relations
officers Capt. Bill Roberts and 1st Lt. Tawny M. Dotson, have ignored my request
for email access to Camp Forward Danger. I've appealed to Maj. Richard J.
McNorton, CENTCOM's special officer in charge of helping bloggers obtain
accurate information, but he hasn't responded either. We'll keep you posted Even
if the water were monitored, there is no way, outside a sophisticated nuclear
laboratory, to remove carcinogenic depleted uranium from water, air or food — as
you can understand from the discussion above.
According to a recent interview with Dr, Doug Rokke, formerly the military’s top
expert in this field, the only way to monitor bacteria-sized DU particles would
be to send samples to a specialized laboratory.
Depleted uranium is nasty stuff. Think about this as you read news reports of
the current massive aerial bombing campaign the U.S. is waging around Samarra,
north of Baghdad. You might have thought “insurgents” would be the only
casualties before you read “Depleted Uranium For Dummies.” But you’re not a
“dummy” anymore.
Our men and women of the New York State National Guard have just spent six
months taking radioactive showers and washing small open wounds in a depleted
uranium broth. They’ve eaten over 500 meals with food, plates and silverware
washed with hot water, in two senses of the word. Thanks to George Bush Sr. and
Dick Cheney’s decision to use depleted uranium munitions in 1991, the Tigris
river, the Bible’s Edenic river of life, has become a modern river of death. And
our brothers and sisters are drinking the forbidden water, with knowing
it—despite informational videotapes produced for them by Major Doug Rokke and
his team. The tapes, pamphlets, and bulletin board posters are mandatory, but
how many of our men and woman serving in radioactive areas have seen them?
Our troops inhale depleted uranium with every single breath. Radioactive
particles the size of a virus cannot be filtered outside a laboratory. Even the
800,000 gas masks provided Gulf War troops were useless because the charcoal
filters became inert within days. The only protection is airtight MOPP suits
connected to oxygen tanks.
No place in Iraq is free from radioactive contamination, including today’s
supposedly “safe” Green Zone in Baghdad where top military officers, civilian
occupation authorities, international journalists, and the Iraqi government
leaders live and work.
Saddam Hussein’s former palace is now the middle of the Green Zone. It was
bombarded with DU munitions before and during the invasion. So has greater
Baghdad ever since. So Green Zone residents inhale and ingest depleted uranium
every day. Perhaps that’s why, during President Bush’s Thanksgiving visit, he
was served a plastic turkey.
UPI reported last December that Wilder Gutierrez Rubio, 38, had died a few hours
after returning home to Lima, Peru. He had been diagnosed by doctors at Ibn Sina
Hospital in Baghdad with severe leukemia, which they attributed to depleted
uranium exposure, even though he had served in Baghdad only a short time.
Gutierrez was part of a contingent of Latin Americans recruited by a U.S.
company to provide security for Baghdad’s Green Zone.
Tragically, Major Matt Tully and his celebrated comrades of the New York State
National Guard Rainbow Division are home from Camp Forward Danger, but not home
free from danger.
After Dick Cheney sprayed the entire Army, Army Reserves, and National Guard
with God-zillions of time-release miniscule radioactive ceramic buckshot, why
should he feel guilty about shooting a few dozen ordinary pellets into one Texas
lawyer?
Is Poisoning Your Entire Army an Impeachable Offence?
Can you understand why a majority of Americans polled agree that Bush and Cheney
should be impeached if they lied to Congress and the American people in order to
launch this war? According to the latest poll, a plurality of Americans say that
it’s time for impeachment, period.
The troops want to come home.
Last month’s Zogby poll of troops on the ground in Iraq reported that 29% of the
respondents, serving in various branches of the armed forces, said the U.S.
should leave Iraq “immediately.” And 89% of the reserves and 82% of those in the
National Guard said the U.S. should leave Iraq within a year.
And most of these folks have yet to read about the depleted uranium lodged
throughout their bodies.
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Your financial support is necessary if we are to continue to warn the troops,
despite the government cover up, and to inform the voters, despite the
corporate media blackout.
Irving Wesley Hall
P.O. Box 281
Harpersfield, NY 13786
The 2006 election is nine months away. Are you registered to vote? Have you
called your congressperson, senator or local opposition candidates?
We did — earlier this month. We e-mailed all five candidates for New York’s 24th
District seat now held by U.S Rep. Sherwood Boehlert. We also reached both
Democratic contenders for New York’s 20th district seat now held by U.S. Rep.
John Sweeney.
We urged that they check out this website and our sources.
Four out of seven responded promptly — with thanks. These were Michael A. Arcuri,
Kirsten Gillibrand, Leon Koziol and Les Roberts, all Democrats. Like the
overwhelming majority of citizens, they were not fully informed about depleted
uranium. Their positions on eliminating DU and promptly withdrawing the troops
will be announced here. Now that you understand DU, you can oppose the position
of many “Bush-lite” Democrats who want to withdraw some troops but to increase
the tonnage of DU bombs dropped in civilian areas. Only ignorance prevents them
from realizing this policy will kill more American troops than Iraqi resistance
fighters.
Contact your representative about We’re Not in Kansas Anymore. Let us know their
responses. Call your current representative, toll free, in Washington, D.C., at
1-800-426-8073. Warn them about the devastating effects on our troops, and the
residents of the Middle East if Cheney launches a nuclear attack on Iran’s
nuclear facilities. Such an action is a death warrant for most of our loved ones
serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Please don’t just sit in your chair while a million men and women — who
volunteered to defend your freedoms — are exposed to a triple whammy of deadly
radiation and condemned to a slow and agonizing death like a half million Gulf
War vets.
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Selected Bibliography
“Depleted Uranium: What Happened to the Test-Tube Paradigm?”
by Dennis Kyne, San Francisco Bayview, Feb. 23, 2005.
(Strong on simple logic and science by a veteran-advocate with Gulf War
Illness.)
“Depleted Uranium — A Hidden Looming Worldwide Calamity”
by Stephen Lendman, GlobalResearch.ca, Jan. 19, 2006.
(Broadest scope of the urgent international danger and how it is affecting you
now.)
“Vet’s Ills Mounting Fast”
by Juan Gonzalez, New York Daily News, Feb. 7, 2006.
(Must read for latest statistics of escalating casualties among Iraq War
veterans.)
An Interview with Bob Smith
“Depleted Uranium: States Take Action to Protect Their Soldiers and Veterans,”
by Kevin Zeese, Counterpunch, July 12, 2005.
(Excellent activist's advice on making a successful case for mandatory testing
to legislators. Present progress on the state level.)
“Radioactive Tank No. 9 comes limping home”
by Bob Nichols, San Francisco Bayview, Nov. 9, 2005.
(Very good on Pentagon's unprotected radioactive dump sites inside United
States. Good on international laws broken and Pentagon's own regulations
ignored.
Nichols is a pioneer journalist on depleted uranium.)
“Nothing depleted about ‘depleted uranium’ ”
Disturbing photos of children
by Abel Bult-Ito, news-miner.com and uruknet.info, Jan. 22, 2006.
(Scientific with good statistics and projections.)
“Weapons of Self-Destruction”
by David Rose, Vanity Fair, Nov. 15, 2004.
(Comprehensive. Strong on Pentagon stonewalling. Touching case studies and
information about extensive D.U. contamination inside the United States.)
“The Invasion and Occupation of Iraq”
Moderator: Haifa Zangana
Testimony — World Tribunal Iraq — Istanbul, Turkey.
The Excessive Use of Weapons and Banned Weapons
Report by Akira Maeda, Sayo Saruta, Koichi Inamori,
ICTI Istanbul June 23-27, 2005
Global Research Articles by Irving Wesley Hall