February
5, 2001
DU: Cancer as a
Weapon
Radioactive War
At
the close of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was denounced as a
ferocious villain for ordering his retreating troops to destroy
Kuwaiti oil fields, clotting the air with poisonous clouds of
black smoke and saturating the ground with swamps of crude. It
was justly called an environmental war crime.
But months of bombing of Iraq by US and
British planes and cruise missiles has left behind an even more
deadly and insidious legacy: tons of shell casings, bullets and
bomb fragments laced with depleted uranium. In all, the US hit
Iraqi targets with more than 970 radioactive bombs and missiles.
More than 10 years later, the health
consequences from this radioactive bombing campaign are beginning
to come into focus. And they are dire, indeed. Iraqi physicians
call it "the white death"-leukemia. Since 1990, the
incident rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600
percent. The situation is compounded by Iraq's forced isolations
and the sadistic sanctions regime, recently described by UN secretary
general Kofi Annan as "a humanitarian crisis", that
makes detection and treatment of the cancers all the more difficult.
"We have proof of traces of DU in
samples taken for analysis and that is really bad for those who
assert that cancer cases have grown for other reasons,"
says Dr. Umid Mubarak, Iraq's health minister.
Mubarak contends that the US's fear of
facing the health and environmental consequences of its DU bombing
campaign is partly behind its failure to follow through on its
commitments under a deal allowing Iraq to sell some of its vast
oil reserves in return for food and medical supplies.
"The desert dust carries death,"
said Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, an oncologist and member England's Royal
Society of Physicians. "Our studies indicate that more than
forty percent of the population around Basra will get cancer.
We are living through another Hiroshima."
Most
of the leukemia and cancer victims aren't soldiers. They are
civilians. And many of them are children. The US-dominated Iraqi
Sanctions Committee in New York has denied Iraq's repeated requests
for cancer treatment equipment and drugs, even painkillers such
as morphine. As a result, the overflowing hospitals in towns
such as Basra are left to treat the cancer-stricken with aspirin.
This is part of a larger horror inflicted
on Iraq that sees as many as 180 children dying every day, according
to mortality figures compiled by UNICEF, from a catalogue of
diseases from the 19th century: cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis,
e. coli, mumps, measles, influenza.
Iraqis and Kuwaitis aren't the only ones
showing signs of uranium contamination and sickness. Gulf War
veterans, plagued by a variety of illnesses, have been found
to have traces of uranium in their blood, feces, urine and semen.
Depleted uranium is a rather benign sounding
name for uranium-238, the trace elements left behind when the
fissionable material is extracted from uranium-235 for use in
nuclear reactors and weapons. For decades, this waste was a radioactive
nuisance, piling up at plutonium processing plants across the
country. By the late 1980s there was nearly a billion tons of
the material.
Then weapons designers at the Pentagon
came up with a use for the tailings: they could be molded into
bullets and bombs. The material was free and there was plenty
at hand. Also uranium is a heavy metal, denser than lead. This
makes it perfect for use in armor-penetrating weapons, designed
to destroy tanks, armored-personnel carriers and bunkers.
When
the tank-busting bombs explode, the depleted uranium oxidizes
into microscopic fragments that float through the air like carcinogenic
dust, carried on the desert winds for decades. The lethal dust
is inhaled, sticks to the fibers of the lungs, and eventually
begins to wreck havoc on the body: tumors, hemorrhages, ravaged
immune systems, leukemias.
In 1943, the doomsday men associated
with the Manhattan Project speculated that uranium and other
radioactive materials could be spread across wide swaths of land
to contain opposing armies. Gen. Leslie Grove, head of the project,
asserted that uranium weapons could be expected to cause "permanent
lung damage." In the late, 1950s Al Gore's father, the senator
from Tennessee, proposed dousing the demilitarized zone in Korea
with uranium as a cheap failsafe against an attack from the North
Koreans.
After the Gulf War, Pentagon war planners
were so delighted with the performance of their radioactive weapons
that ordered a new arsenal and under Bill Clinton's orders fired
them at Serb positions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia. More than
a 100 of the DU bombs have been used in the Balkans over the
last six years.
Already medical teams in the region have
detected cancer clusters near the bomb sites. The leukemia rate
in Sarajevo, pummeled by American bombs in 1996, has tripled
in the last five years. But it's not just the Serbs who are ill
and dying. NATO and UN peacekeepers in the region are also coming
down with cancer. As of January 23, eight Italian soldiers who
served in the region have died of leukemia.
The Pentagon has shuffled through a variety
of rationales and excuses. First, the Defense Department shrugged
off concerns about Depleted Uranium as wild conspiracy theories
by peace activists, environmentalists and Iraqi propagandists.
When the US's NATO allies demanded that the US disclose the chemical
and metallic properties of its munitions, the Pentagon refused.
It has also refused to order testing of US soldiers stationed
in the Gulf and the Balkans.
If the US has been keeping silent, the
Brits haven't been. A 1991 study by the UK Atomic Energy Authority
predicted that if less than 10 percent of the particles released
by depleted uranium weapons used in Iraq and Kuwait were inhaled
it could result in as many as "300,000 probable deaths."
The British estimate assumed that the
only radioactive ingredient in the bombs dropped on Iraq was
depleted uranium. It wasn't. A new study of the materials inside
these weapons describes them as a "nuclear cocktail,"
containing a mix of radioactive elements, including plutonium
and the highly radioactive isotope uranium-236. These elements
are 100,000 times more dangerous than depleted uranium.
Typically,
the Pentagon has tried to dump the blame on the Department of
Energy's sloppy handling of its weapons production plants. This
is how Pentagon spokesman Craig Quigley described the situation
in chop-logic worthy of the pen of Joseph Heller.: "The
source of the contamination as best we can understand it now
was the plants themselves that produced the Depleted uranium
during the 20 some year time frame when the DU was produced."
Indeed, the problems at DoE nuclear sites
and the contamination of its workers and contractors have been
well-known since the 1980s. A 1991 Energy Department memo reports:
"during the process of making fuel for nuclear reactors
and elements for nuclear weapons, the Paducah gaseous diffusion
plant... created depleted uranium potentially containing neptunium
and plutonium"
But such excuses in the absence of any
action to address the situation are growing very thin indeed.
Doug Rokke, the health physicist for the US Army who oversaw
the partial clean up of depleted uranium bomb fragments in Kuwait,
is now sick. His body registers 5,000 times the level of radiation
considered "safe". He knows where to place the blame.
"There can be no reasonable doubt about this," Rokke
recently told British journalist John Pilger. "As a result
of heavy metal and radiological poison of DU, people in southern
Iraq are experiencing respiratory problems, kidney problems,
cancers. Members of my own team have died or are dying from cancer."
Depleted
uranium has a half-life of more than 4 billion years, approximately
the age of the Earth. Thousand of acres of land in the Balkans,
Kuwait and southern Iraq have been contaminated forever. If George
Bush Sr., Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Bill Clinton are still
casting about for a legacy, there's grim one that will stay around
for an eternity. CP
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