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'I’m horrified. The people out there – the Iraqis,
the media and the troops – risk the most appalling ill health.
And the radiation from depleted uranium can travel literally anywhere.
It’s going to destroy the lives of thousands of children,
all over the world. We all know how far radiation can travel.
Radiation from Chernobyl reached Wales and in Britain you sometimes
get red dust from the Sahara on your car.’
The speaker is not some alarmist doom-sayer. He is Dr Chris Busby,
the British radiation expert, Fellow of the University of Liverpool
in the Faculty of Medicine and UK representative on the European
Committee on Radiation Risk, talking about the best kept secret
of this war: the fact that, by illegally using hundreds of tons
of depleted uranium (DU) against Iraq, Britain and America have
gravely endangered not only the Iraqis but the whole world. For
these weapons have released deadly, carcinogenic and mutagenic,
radioactive particles in such abundance that – whipped up
by sandstorms and carried on trade winds – there is no corner
of the globe they cannot penetrate – including Britain. For
the wind has no boundaries and time is on their side: the radioactivity
persists for over 4,500,000,000 years and can cause cancer, leukaemia,
brain damage, kidney failure, and extreme birth defects –
killing millions of every age for centuries to come. A crime against
humanity which may, in the eyes of historians, rank with the worst
atrocities of all time.
These weapons have released deadly, carcinogenic
and mutagenic, radioactive particles in such abundance that there
is no corner of the globe they cannot penetrate – including
Britain.
Yet, officially, no crime has been committed. For this story
is a dirty story in which the facts have been concealed from those
who needed them most. It is also a story we need to know if the
people of Iraq are to get the medical care they desperately need,
and if our troops, returning from Iraq, are not to suffer as terribly
as the veterans of other conflicts in which depleted uranium was
used.
‘Depleted’ uranium is in many ways a misnomer. For
‘depleted’ sounds weak. The only weak thing about depleted
uranium is its price. It is dirt cheap, toxic, waste from nuclear
power plants and bomb production. However, uranium is one of earth’s
heaviest elements and DU packs a Tyson’s punch, smashing
through tanks, buildings and bunkers with equal ease, spontaneously
catching fire as it does so, and burning people alive. ‘Crispy
critters’ is what US servicemen call those unfortunate enough
to be close. And, when John Pilger encountered children killed
at a greater distance he wrote: ‘The children’s skin
had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh
that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead.
I vomited.’ (Daily Mirror)
The millions of radioactive uranium oxide particles released
when it burns can kill just as surely, but far more terribly.
They can even be so tiny they pass through a gas mask, making
protection against them impossible. Yet, small is not beautiful.
For these invisible killers indiscriminately attack men, women,
children and even babies in the womb – and do the gravest
harm of all to children and unborn babies.
Doctors in Iraq have estimated that birth defects have increased
by 2-6 times, and 3-12 times as many children have developed cancer
and leukaemia since 1991. Moreover, a report published in The
Lancet in 1998 said that as many as 500 children a day are
dying from these sequels to war and sanctions and that the death
rate for Iraqi children under 5 years of age increased from 23
per 1000 in 1989 to 166 per thousand in 1993. Overall, cases of
lymphoblastic leukemia more than quadrupled with other cancers
also increasing ‘at an alarming rate’. In men, lung,
bladder, bronchus, skin, and stomach cancers showed the highest
increase. In women, the highest increases were in breast and bladder
cancer, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.1
On hearing that DU had been used in the Gulf in 1991, the UK
Atomic Energy Authority sent the Ministry of Defence a special
report on the potential damage to health and the environment.
It said that it could cause half a million additional cancer deaths
in Iraq over 10 years. In that war the authorities only admitted
to using 320 tons of DU – although the Dutch charity LAKA
estimates the true figure is closer to 800 tons. Many times that
may have been spread across Iraq by this year’s war. The
devastating damage all this DU will do to the health and fertility
of the people of Iraq now, and for generations to come, is beyond
imagining.
The radioactivity persists for over 4,500,000,000
years killing millions of every age for centuries to come. This
is a crime against humanity which may rank with the worst atrocities
of all time.
We must also count the numberless thousands of miscarried babies.
Nobody knows how many Iraqis have died in the womb since DU contaminated
their world. But it is suggested that troops who were only exposed
to DU for the brief period of the war were still excreting uranium
in their semen 8 years later and some had 100 times the so called
‘safe limit’ of uranium in their urine. The lack of
government interest in the plight of veterans of the 1991 war
is reflected in a lack of academic research on the impact of DU
but informal research has found a high incidence of birth defects
in their children and that the wives of men who served in Iraq
have three times more miscarriages than the wives of servicemen
who did not go there.
Since DU darkened the land Iraq has seen birth defects which
would break a heart of stone: babies with terribly foreshortened
limbs, with their intestines outside their bodies, with huge bulging
tumours where their eyes should be, or with a single eye –
like Cyclops, or without eyes, or without limbs, and even without
heads. Significantly, some of the defects are almost unknown outside
textbooks showing the babies born near A-bomb test sites in the
Pacific. Doctors report that many women no longer say ‘Is
it a girl or a boy?’ but simply, ‘Is it normal, doctor?’
Moreover this terrible legacy will not end. The genes of their
parents may have been damaged for ever, and the damaging DU dust
is ever-present.
What the governments of America and Britain have done to the
people of Iraq they have also done to their own soldiers, in both
wars. And they have done it knowingly. For the battlefields have
been thick with DU and soldiers have had to enter areas heavily
contaminated by bombing. Moreover, their bodies have not only
been assaulted by DU but also by a vaccination regime which violated
normal protocols, experimental vaccines, nerve agent pills, and
organophosphate pesticides in their tents. Yet, though the hazards
of DU were known, British and American troops were not warned
of its dangers. Nor were they given thorough medical checks on
their return – even though identifying it quickly might have
made it possible to remove some of it from their body. Then, when
a growing number became seriously ill, and should have been sent
to top experts in radiation damage and neurotoxins, many were
sent to a psychiatrist.
Over 200,000 US troops who returned from the 1991 war are now
invalided out with ailments officially attributed to service in
Iraq – that’s 1 in 3. In contrast, the British government’s
failure to fully assess the health of returning troops, or to
monitor their health, means no one even knows how many have died
or become gravely ill since their return. However, Gulf veterans’
associations say that, of 40,000 or so fighting fit men and women
who saw active service, at least 572 have died prematurely since
coming home and 5000 may be ill. An alarming number are thought
to have taken their own lives, unable to bear the torment of the
innumerable ailments which have combined to take away their career,
their sexuality, their ability to have normal children, and even
their ability to breathe or walk normally. As one veteran puts
it, they are ‘on DU death row, waiting to die’.
Whatever other factors there may be, some of their illnesses
are strikingly similar to those of Iraqis exposed to DU dust.
For example, soldiers have also fathered children without eyes.
And, in a group of eight servicemen whose babies lack eyes seven
are known to have been directly exposed to DU dust. They too have
fathered children with stunted arms, and rare abnormalities classically
associated with radiation damage. They too seem prone to cancer
and leukaemia. Tellingly, so are EU soldiers who served as peacekeepers
in the Balkans, where DU was also used. Indeed their leukaemia
rate has been so high that several EU governments have protested
at the use of DU.
Despite all that evidence of the harm done by DU, governments
on both sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly claimed that as
it emits only ‘low level’ radiation DU is harmless.
Award winning scientist, Dr Rosalie Bertell who has led UN medical
commissions, has studied ‘low level’ radiation for 30
years.2 She has found that uranium oxide particles
have more than enough power to harm cells, and describes their
pulses of radiation as hitting surrounding cells ‘like flashes
of lightning’ again and again in a single second.2
Like many scientists worldwide who have studied this type
of radiation, she has found that such ‘lightning strikes’
can damage DNA and cause cell mutations which lead to cancer.
Moreover, these particles can be taken up by body fluids and travel
through the body, damaging more than one organ. To compound all
that Dr Bertell has found that this particular type of radiation
can cause the body’s communication systems to break down,
leading to malfunctions in many vital organs of the body and to
many medical problems. A striking fact, since many veterans of
the first Gulf war suffer from innumerable, seemingly unrelated,
ailments.
In addition, recent research by Eric Wright, Professor of Experimental
Haematology at Dundee University, and others, have shown two ways
in which such radiation can do far more damage than has been thought.
The first is that a cell which seems unharmed by radiation can
produce cells with diverse mutations several cell generations
later. (And mutations are at the root of cancer and birth defects.)
This ‘radiation induced genomic instability’ is compounded
by ‘the bystander effect’ by which cells mutate in unison
with others which have been damaged by radiation – rather
as birds swoop and turn in unison. Put together, these two mechanisms
can greatly increase the damage done by a single source of radiation,
such as a DU particle. Moreover, it is now clear that there are
marked genetic differences in the way individuals respond to radiation
– with some being far more likely to develop cancer than
others. So the fact that some veterans of the first Gulf war seem
relatively unharmed by their exposure to DU in no way proves that
DU did not damage others.
That the evidence from Iraq and from our troops, and the research
findings of such experts, have been ignored may be no accident.
A US report, leaked in late 1995, allegedly says, ‘The potential
for health effects from DU exposure is real; however it must be
viewed in perspective... the financial implications of long-term
disability payments and healthcare costs would be excessive.’3
Clearly, with hundreds of thousands gravely ill in Iraq and at
least a quarter of a million UK and US troops seriously ill, huge
disability claims might be made not only against the governments
of Britain and America if the harm done by DU were acknowledged.
There might also be huge claims against companies making DU weapons
and some of their directors are said to be extremely close to
the White House. How close they are to Downing Street is a matter
for speculation, but arms sales makes a considerable contribution
to British trade. So the massive whitewashing of DU over
the past 12 years, and the way that governments have failed to
test returning troops, seemed to disbelieve them, and washed their
hands of them, may be purely to save money.
The possibility that financial considerations have led the governments
of Britain and America to cynically avoid taking responsibility
for the harm they have done not only to the people of Iraq but
to their own troops may seem outlandish. Yet DU weapons weren’t
used by the other side and no other explanation fits the evidence.
For, in the days before Britain and America first used DU in war
its hazards were no secret.4 One American study
in 1990 said DU was ‘linked to cancer when exposures are
internal, [and to] chemical toxicity – causing kidney damage’.
While another openly warned that exposure to these particles under
battlefield conditions could lead to cancers of the lung and bone,
kidney damage, non-malignant lung disease, neuro-cognitive disorders,
chromosomal damage and birth defects.5
In 1996 and 1997 UN Human Rights Tribunals condemned DU weapons
for illegally breaking the Geneva Convention and classed them
as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ ‘incompatible
with international humanitarian and human rights law’. Since
then, following leukaemia in European peacekeeping troops in the
Balkans and Afghanistan (where DU was also used), the EU has twice
called for DU weapons to be banned.
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Yet, far from banning DU, America and Britain stepped up their
denials of the harm from this radioactive dust as more and more
troops from the first Gulf war and from action and peacekeeping
in the Balkan and Afghanistan have become seriously ill. This
is no coincidence. In 1997, while citing experiments, by others,
in which 84 percent of dogs exposed to inhaled uranium died of
cancer of the lungs, Dr Asaf Durakovic, then Professor of Radiology
and Nuclear Medicine at Georgetown University in Washington was
quoted as saying, ‘The [US government’s] Veteran Administration
asked me to lie about the risks of incorporating depleted uranium
in the human body.’ He concluded, ‘uranium… does
cause cancer, uranium does cause mutation, and uranium does kill.
If we continue with the irresponsible contamination of the biosphere,
and denial of the fact that human life is endangered by the deadly
isotope uranium, then we are doing disservice to ourselves, disservice
to the truth, disservice to God and to all generations who follow.’
Not what the authorities wanted to hear and his research was suddenly
blocked.
During 12 years of ever-growing British whitewash the authorities
have abolished military hospitals, where there could have been
specialized research on the effects of DU and where expertise
in treating DU victims could have built up. And, not content with
the insult of suggesting the gravely disabling symptoms of Gulf
veterans are imaginary they have refused full pensions to many.
For, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the current House
of Commons briefing paper on DU hazards says ‘it is judged
that any radiation effects from…possible exposures are extremely
unlikely to be a contributory factor to the illnesses currently
being experienced by some Gulf war veterans.’ Note how over
a quarter of a million sick and dying US and UK vets are called
‘some’.
Britain and America not only used DU in this year’s Iraq
war, they dramatically increased its use – from a minimum
of 320 tons in the previous war to at minimum of 1500 tons in
this one. And this time the use of DU wasn’t limited to anti-tank
weapons – as it had largely been in the previous Gulf war
– but was extended to the guided missiles, large bunker busters
and big 2000 pound bombs used in Iraq’s cities. This means
that Iraq’s cities have been blanketed in lethal particles
– any one of which can cause cancer or deform a child. In
addition, the use of DU in huge bombs which throw the deadly particles
higher and wider in huge plumes of smoke means that billions of
deadly particles have been carried high into the air – again
and again and again as the bombs rained down – ready to be
swept worldwide by the winds.
The Royal Society has suggested the solution is massive decontamination
in Iraq. That could only scratch the surface. For decontamination
is hugely expensive and, though it may reduce the risks in some
of the worst areas, it cannot fully remove them. For DU is too
widespread on land and water. How do you clean up every nook and
cranny of a city the size of Baghdad? How can they decontaminate
a whole country in which microscopic particles, which cannot be
detected with a normal geiger counter, are spread from border
to border? And how can they clean up all the countries downwind
of Iraq – and, indeed, the world?
So there are only two things we can do to mitigate this crime
against humanity. The first is to provide the best possible medical
care for the people of Iraq, for our returning troops and for
those who served in the last Gulf war and, through that, minimize
their suffering. The second is to relegate war, and the production
and sale of weapons, to the scrap heap of history – along
with slavery and genocide. Then, and only then, will this crime
against humanity be expunged, and the tragic deaths from this
war truly bring freedom to the people of Iraq, and of the world.
Read the full article in issue
60 of Caduceus...
References
1. The Lancet volume 351, issue 9103, 28 February 1998.
2. Rosalie Bertell’s book Planet Earth the Latest Weapon
of War was reviewed in Caduceus issue 51, page 28.
3. www.gulflink.osd.mil/du_ii/du_ii_tabl1. htm#TAB L_Research
Report Summaries
4. www.wagingpeace.org/articles/02.01/020117moret.htm The secret
official memorandum to Brigadier General L.R.Groves from Drs Conant,
Compton and Urey of War Department Manhattan district dated October
1943 is available at the website www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/Leuren-Moret-Gen-Groves21feb03.htm
5. www.gulflink.osd.mil/du_iitab11.htm#tab L_research report summaries
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Further information
The Low Level Radiation Campaign hopes to be able to arrange a
limited number of private urine tests for those returning from
the latest Gulf war. It can be contacted at: The Knoll, Montpelier
Park, Llandrindod Wells, LD1 5LW. 01597 824771. Web:
www.llrc.org
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James Denver writes
and broadcasts internationally on science and technology.
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© Caduceus, 2003.
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