Return to Nuke Notes Index | Columns | Features | Sonoma County Free Press Home Page
Last revised: February, 1996
Nuke Notes
Author's note: My guest writer this issue is John LaForge with Nukewatch in Madison, Wisconsin, John just spent 7-1/2 months in the Bayfield County jail for repeated trespass at Project ELF (extremely low frequency). Project ELF is the Navy communication system that controls the megaton equivalent of 100,000 bombs like the one that destroyed Hiroshima. . T. Woodard
Low Intensity Nuclear War?
by
John LaForge
U.S. GENERALS HAVE FAILED FOR 50 YEARS TO CONVINCE A PRESIDENT TO BOMB CITIES AGAIN WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS. UNTIL 1991, THAT IS. The 40-day carpet bombing of the Tigris and Euphrates River Valley region, known as the Persian Gulf War, involved the first use ever of so-called "depleted uranium" (DU) armaments.
Without any public debate, a sort of back door Hiroshima--call it a low-intensity nuclear war experiment--was foisted upon the world by the United States. Much like how the U.S. sprung the atomic age 50 years ago, the human costs of testing radioactive weapons may prove to be as much cancer at home as on the battle field (add Gulf war vets to the 16,000 civilians used in government radiation experiments during the Cold war).
About 300 tons of DU was dispersed during the 1,000-sortie-per day bombing of the Persian Gulf, according to William Arkin writing in the May 1993 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Arkin estimated that 940,000 of the Air Force's 30mm DU shells, and 4,000 of the Army's 120mm DU anti-tank shells were fired. The military has its own classified estimates, but the 4,000 tank shells alone contained a total of more than 50,000 pounds (25 tons) of DU.
DU is uranium-238, a radioactive, alpha emitting nuclear waste left over from the uranium "enrichment" process. Alloyed with titanium, the DU becomes extremely hard and makes devastating armor-piercing ammunition.
DU is left in vast quantities (1/2 million tons in the U.S.; one million tons world-wide) at 50 sites in 18 states where uranium on has been "enriched" for warheads and reactor fuel. Enrichment separates the fissionable U-235 from the U-238, but there is only one pound of U-235 in a ton of uranium ore. The remaining1,999 lbs. (of U-238) is nothing but nuclear waste, and is given away free to industries who use it to manufacture and sell DU shells to the U.S. military.
The danger posed by DU warheads is that when they smash through tanks, etc., the DU partially burns, producing uranium oxide dust which is spread far and wide by the wind. Small particles can be permanently trapped in the lungs, where the alpha radiation does cumulative and irreversible increases over the victim's lifetime.
"The air-borne particles enter the body easily", wrote Dr. Eric Hoskins, about the Harvard Study Team's survey of health in post-bombardment Iraq. "The uranium then deposits itself in bones, organs (lungs), and cells. Children are especially vulnerable. . ." Hoskins warned in 1993.
The United Nations World Health Organization is investigating the health effects of the DU weapons thatwere used against and left littering the Persian Gulf.
Today, eerie complaints of possibly radiation-induced illnesses are coming from Iraq, and from vets and their families. In January, Iraqi diplomats at the U.N. protested the use of DU weapons before the international Red Cross, and in May acting Iraqi Foreign Minister H.Y. Hammadi blamed the use of "radiation weapons" for the otherwise unexplained incidence in Iraq of certain diseases. In his letter to the UN Secretary Gen. Hammadi wrote that, "Baffling pathological cases have appeared. . . an abnormal increase in leukemia, lung cancer, cancer of the digestive system and carcinoma", Mr. Hammadi also said there is "an appreciable increase in congenital diseases and fetal deformities.
"The wide-scale use" of DU weapons meant that small particles of uranium oxide were carried by the wind over long distances. Hammadi wrote, "and conflicts with the claims of the coalition countries that the weapons employed. . .were. . .conventional." At home strange undiagnosed ailments have been reported of Gulf war vets in growing numbers: 37,000 by April 1994; 43,000 by January 1995-6% of the 697,000 people who were sent to the massacre. (Between 75,000 and 150,000 Iraqi conscripts and civilians were killed.)
The Gulf War Syndrome's short-term symptoms are probably the result of untested vaccines and drugs given, in untested combinations, to vets without their informed consent. But chromosomal and reproductive damage and possible cancer incidence are the long-term dangers, and early warnings are now appearing in the flesh.
Since thousands of vets were exposed to the uranium oxide dust, DU could be responsible for symptoms that often result from radiation exposure: hair loss, fatigue, bowel disruptions, cancer, and, ominously, increased birth defects, miscarriages, still births and infant mortality among women partners of exposed vets.
As usual, the Pentagon has dismissed the symptoms as "stress related" or "in your head." The Defense Department has issued official brush-offs in July 1992; March, June and Dec. 1993; and August 1995. These denials of a Gulf War Syndrome are being countered by vets groups, their supporters and by scientists.
The Los Angeles Times reported in November that as many as ten times the expected number of birth defects and infant deaths among children of Gulf vets is perhaps caused by contamination in the Gulf. Uranium was among the possible culprits named by toxicologists who testified to Congress that contaminated men can pass toxic chemicals and genetic mutations directly to their children through sperm. ". . .as many as 65% of the children born to Gulf War soldiers are afflicted," according to some groups, the L.A. Times said. One environmental pediatrician, comparing Gulf War babies with others, found a 30% rate of birth defects among the vets' children - "probably tenfold of what is in the normal population."
Complaining of what it called a "hodgepodge" of small-scale Pentagon studies of the vets ailments, the Institute of Medicine (IOM)-associated with the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-demanded in January a large epidemiological study, and an end to wasteful, poorly designed research. Then in August, supported by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the IOM again blasted the Pentagon, saying it hadn't supported its August 1st finding of "no evidence" of a single Gulf. Syndrome. Mrs. Clinton seemed to direct her criticism at an earlier NIH panel's claim (April 1994), that some potential causes of illness such as DU or experimental drugs "seemed less likely as major factors." Mrs. Clinton said, "No issue is off-limits and every reasonable inquiry should be pursued."
The disability compensation bill passed last November for Gulf War vets covers only those who registered a "chronic disability that became evident while in the Gulf". This eliminates diseases with latency periods. The Veteran Affairs Department says that disability compensation for sick vets cannot be made to those with undiagnosed symptoms. This eliminates at least 6,450 sick vets, by the Army's own count, and it gives the Pentagon a vested interest in not finding a diagnosis for unexplained ailments and reproductive disorders.
In other words, this latest round of human radiation experimentation has consequences that, conveniently for the Pentagon, can be plausiblly denied if you want to be fooled.
###
Comments? Questions? The
authors of Nuke Notes would like to hear from
you! |
Or email the
Sonoma
County Free Press |
||||