Gulf War Vets Home Page
Article published Aug 9, 2005
Depleted uranium is WMD
http://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/
by Leuren Moret
My grandfather, U.S. Army Col. Edwin Joseph McAllister, was born in Battle
Creek in 1895. He does not know that his first grandchild is an international
expert on depleted uranium. I have worked in two U.S. nuclear weapons
laboratories, and in 1991 I became a whistleblower at the Livermore lab.
Depleted uranium is very, very, very nasty stuff:
Depleted uranium (DU) weaponry meets the definition of weapon of mass
destruction in two out of three categories under U.S. Federal Code Title 50
Chapter 40 Section 2302.
DU weaponry violates all international treaties and agreements, Hague and
Geneva war conventions, the 1925 Geneva gas protocol, U.S. laws and U.S.
military law.
Since 1991, the U.S. has released the radioactive atomicity equivalent of at
least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs into the global atmosphere. That is 10 times the
amount released during atmospheric testing which was the equivalent of 40,000
Hiroshima bombs. The U.S. has permanently contaminated the global atmosphere
with radioactive pollution having a half-life of 2.5 billion years.
The U.S. has illegally conducted four nuclear wars in Yugoslavia,
Afghanistan and twice in Iraq since 1991, calling DU "conventional" weapons when
in fact they are nuclear weapons.
DU on the battlefield has three effects on living systems: it is a heavy
metal "chemical" poison, a "radioactive" poison and has a "particulate" effect
due to the very tiny size of the particles that are 0.1 microns and smaller.
The blueprint for DU weaponry is a 1943 Manhattan Project memo to Gen. L.
Groves that recommended development of radioactive materials as poison gas
weapons - dirty bombs, dirty missiles and dirty bullets.
DU weapons are very effective kinetic energy penetrators, but even more
effective bioweapons since uranium has a strong chemical affinity for phosphate
structures concentrated in DNA.
DU is the Trojan Horse of nuclear war - it keeps giving and keeps killing.
There is no way to clean it up, and no way to turn it off because it continues
to decay into other radioactive isotopes in over 20 steps.
Terry Jemison at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs stated in August
2004 that over 518,000 Gulf-era veterans (14-year period) are now on medical
disability, and that 7,039 were wounded on the battlefield in that same period.
Over 500,000 U.S. veterans are homeless.
In some studies of soldiers who had normal babies before the war, 67 percent
of the post-war babies are born with severe birth defects - missing brains,
eyes, organs, legs and arms, and blood diseases.
In southern Iraq, scientists are reporting five times higher levels of gamma
radiation in the air, which increases the radioactive body burden daily of
inhabitants. In fact, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan are uninhabitable.
Cancer starts with one alpha particle under the right conditions. One gram
of DU is the size of a period in this sentence and releases 12,000 alpha
particles per second.
Before my grandfather died, he told me that his generation had made a mess of
this planet. I wonder what he would say to me now I would tell him to see
"Beyond Treason" (www.beyondtreason.com),
a new documentary about the history of treason by the U.S. government against
our own troops: Atomic veterans, MK-Ultra, Agent Orange and DU. After Vietnam,
Henry Kissinger said, "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as
pawns in foreign policy. . ." (from Chapter 5 in the "Final Days" by Woodward
and Bernstein).
Leuren Moret is an international radiation specialist, with a B.S. degree
in geology from University of California at Davis, a M.A. degree in Near Eastern
studies from University of California at Berkeley and has done post-graduate
work in the geosciences at UC-Davis. She is environmental commissioner for the
City of Berkeley, Calif.
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