Depleted Uranium: The Toxic Killer

[Guest guest]

http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload & name=News & file=article\

& sid=720

 

Depleted Uranium: The Toxic Killer

 

 

 

 

 

 

-->The Bush Administration knows about the health and the environmental

consequences of using depleted uranium but it doesn't care.

By Mick Youther

 

 

When I first heard the term “depleted uranium”, I thought it must be uranium

after the radioactivity was gone. I was wrong.

 

• “Depleted uranium (DU) is the highly toxic and radioactive byproduct of the

uranium enrichment process.... Depleted uranium is roughly 60% as radioactive as

naturally occurring uranium, and has a half life of 4.5 billion years. As a

result of 50 years of enriching uranium for use in nuclear weapons and reactors,

the U.S. has in excess of 1.1 billion pounds of DU waste material.”-- Dan Fahey,

“Metal of Dishonor” (1997)

 

• “More ordinance was rained down on Iraq during the six weeks of the Gulf War

than during the whole of the Second World War. Unknown to the public or the

Allied troops at the time, much of it was coated with depleted uranium (DU)”--

Felicity Arbuthnot, New Internationalist, September 1999

 

• “The Pentagon and the United Nations estimate that the U.S. and Britain used

1,100 to 2,200 tons of armor-piercing shells made of depleted uranium during

attacks on Iraq in March and April [2003]--far more than the 375 tons used in

the 1991 Gulf War.”-- Seattle Post Intelligencer, 8/4/03

 

• “Since the U.S. military's widespread use of DU in the Gulf became known in

1991, the Pentagon has struggled to suppress mounting evidence that DU munitions

are simply too toxic to use. It has cashiered or attempted to discredit its own

experts, ignored their advice, impeded scientific research into DU's health

effects and assembled a disinformation campaign to confuse the issue.”--

Environmental Magazine, May/Jun 2003

 

• “When I spoke out within the military about how bad [depleted uranium] was, my

life ended, my career ended. I received threats, warnings, sent to the reserve

from full active duty. " -- Dr. Doug Rokke, former Army Major, who was in charge

of the military's environmental clean-up following the first Gulf War, ABC News,

5/5/03 (Thirty members of Rokke’s cleanup team have already died, and he has

5,000 times the acceptable level of radiation in his body, resulting in damage

to his lungs and kidneys, brain lesions, skin pustules, chronic fatigue,

continual wheezing and painful fibromyalgia. After the Gulf War, Rokke was

assigned to make a training video to teach soldiers how to handle depleted

uranium. It was a never shown to the troops.)

 

• “...General Calvin Waller told NBC's ‘Dateline’ that neither he nor General

Norman Schwartzkopf were ever told about the health hazards of DU.”-- Military

Toxics Project's Depleted Uranium Citizens' Network, 1/16/96

 

• ”Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign

policy.”-- Henry Kissinger, quoted by Bob Woodward in “The Final Days” (1976)

 

• “Our studies indicate that more than forty percent of the population around

Basra will get cancer. We are living through another Hiroshima”-- Dr. Jawad

Al-Ali, an oncologist and member England's Royal Society of Physicians, quoted

by islamonline.net, 5/15/03

 

• “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.”-- Baltimore Chronicle, 12/5/01

 

• “Drought-stricken Afghanistan's underground water supply is now contaminated

by these nuclear weapons. Experts with the Uranium Medical Research Center

report that urine samples of Afghanis show the highest level of uranium ever

recorded in a civilian population.”-- Amy Worthington, Idaho Observer, April

2003

 

• ”By now, half of all the 697,000 U.S. soldiers involved in the 1991 war have

reported serious illnesses. According to the American Gulf War Veterans

Association, more than 30 percent of these soldiers are chronically ill and are

receiving disability benefits from the Veterans Administration.”-- Sara

Flounders and John Catalinotto, Swans Commentary, 2/2/04

 

• “Gulf War Syndrome not only killed, maimed, and made soldiers sick, they

brought it home. In a study of 251 Gulf War veterans' families in Mississippi,

67 percent of their children were born without eyes, ears or a brain, had fused

fingers, blood infections, respiratory problems or thyroid and other organ

malformations.”-- Leuren Moret, environmental geologist, San Francisco Bay View,

11/7/01

 

• “In America, war means money - lots of it - and to the corporations which

profit from war, our soldiers are nothing more than an expendable item. The

Pentagon and the military corporations clearly consider contamination of their

own soldiers as an acceptable cost.”-- S.R. Shearer, The End Times Network,

5/10/99

 

How can we do this to our soldiers, their families and the other victims of war?

How can anyone think this is a good idea?

 

 

Mick Youther is an Instructor in the Department of Physiology at Southern

Illinois University in Carbondale, IL. You can email your comments to

Mick

 

 

 

 

 

 

Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at HotJobs