The best I've read on: Depleted Uranium... A Scientific Perspective

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The Lone Star Iconoclast Online

 

Depleted Uranium

 

A Scientific Perspective

 

An Interview With LEUREN MORET, Geoscientist

 

Interview Conducted By W. Leon Smith and Nathan Diebenow

 

 

Leuren Moret is a geoscientist who works almost around the clock educating

citizens, the media, members of parliaments and Congress and other officials on

radiation issues. She became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore Nuclear

Weapons Lab after witnessing fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project. She is

currently working as an independent citizen scientist and radiation specialist

in

communities around the world, and contributed to the U.N. subcommission

investigating depleted uranium. According to Wikipedia online encyclopedia,

Moret

testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan in Japan in

2003, presented at the World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg,

Germany, and spoke at the World Court of Women at the World Social Forum in

Bombay,

India, in January 2004.

 

 

THE INTERVIEW

 

 

ICONOCLAST: What are the latest developments with reducing depleted uranium

exposures on U.S. troops?

 

 

MORET: A young veteran named Melissa Sterry of Connecticut has introduced a

bill into the Connecticut Legislature requiring independent testing of

returning Afghan and Gulf War veterans going back to 2001. She said that she did

it

because she’s sick, and her friends are dead, and that’s from serving in the

2003 conflict. I have been following the bill and talking to her. Yesterday, she

testified twice at the United Nations. I said, “Why don’t we get this bill

all over the U.S. in state legislatures because it informs the public and get

the local media to cover it.†The U.S. has blocked any accountability at

international and national levels. There’s a total cover-up just like with

Agent

Orange, the atomic veterans, MKULTRA, the mind control experiments the CIA did.

This is more of the same, but the issue is much, much worse because the genetic

future of all those contaminated is effected. Now vast regions around our

world, as well as our atmosphere, are contaminated with the depleted uranium.

They

’ve used so much. It’s the equivalent number of atoms, as the Japanese

professor calculated it, to over 400,000 Nagasaki bombs that has been released

into

the atmosphere. That’s really an underestimate. I went to Louisiana in April.

I was invited to speak at the University of New Orleans for three days. One

of the veterans asked me to be in their April 19 protest and rally through the

City of New Orleans. He took the Connecticut bill straight to the Legislature,

and he got two legislators to sponsor it, and he said, “Just whiteout the

name ‘Connecticut’ and write in ‘Louisiana’ on the bill.†You’re not

going to

believe it. It passed 101 to 0 yesterday in the Louisiana House. I want you to

write about it because we want it (the DU testing bill) in Texas. Nevada is

going to introduce it. Congressman Jim McDermott is going to put it into the

Washington legislature. We want to get the governor of Montana to do it because

he’s the first governor to demand his National Guard be returned. I think half

of them are back. He said, “I need them in the state.†The DU issue is just

really, really, really, really so awful. I don’t think there’s any greater

tragedy in the history of the world in what they’ve done.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: Is there a danger of depleted uranium, being used in weaponry

over there, spreading by air over here?

 

 

MORET: The atmosphere globally is contaminated with it. It’s completely mixed

in one year. I’m an expert on atmospheric dust. I’m a geoscientist, a

geologist, and that’s what I studied and did my research on. It’s really a

fascinating subject. We have huge dust storms that are a million square miles

and

transport millions of tons of dust and sand every year around the world. The

main

centers of these dust storms are the Gobi Desert in China, which is where the

Chinese did atmospheric testing, so that’s all contaminated with radiation,

and it gets transported right over Japan, and it comes straight across the

Pacific and dumps all its sand and dust on the U.S., North America. It’s

loaded

with radioactive isotopes, soot, pesticides, chemicals, pollution — everything

is

in it — fungi, bacteria, viruses. The Sahara Desert is another huge dust

center, and it goes up all over Europe and straight across the Atlantic, to the

Caribbean, and up the East Coast. Of course, you get it in Texas with those

hurricanes. They all originate in the Sahara Desert. The third region is the

Western United States, which is where the Nevada test site is located. We did

1,200

nuclear weapons tests there, so all this radiation that is already there,

which is bad enough, has caused a global cancer epidemic since 1945. All of that

radiation was the equivalent of 40,000 Nagasaki bombs. We’re talking about 10

times more. In April of 2003, the World Health Organization said they expect

global cancer rates to increase 50 percent by the year 2020. Infant mortality

is going up again all over the world. This is an indicator of the level of

radioactive pollution. When the U.S. and Russia signed the partial test ban

treaty

in 1963, the infant mortality rate started dropping again, which is normal.

Now they are going up again. It’s the global pollution with this radiation.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: I had one of our correspondents send me a series of photographs

of the Al-Asad dust storm in Iraq on April 28.

 

 

MORET: That dust is what I’m talking about.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: In the picture you can see a gigantic wall of sand.

 

 

MORET: I have 16 pictures of that storm. They’re posted with photos from

Iraqi doctors of the children of people with cancer and leukemia. So what did

you

think of that dust storm?

 

 

ICONOCLAST: I thought it was really dramatic.

 

 

MORET: It remobilizes all the radiation, but those are the larger chunks. The

DU burns at such high temperatures. It’s a pyroforic metal which means it

burns. The bullets and big caliber shells are actually on fire when they come

out

of the gun barrel because they are ignited by the friction in the gun barrel.

Seventy percent of the DU metal becomes a metal vapor. It’s actually a

radioactive gas weapon and a terrain contaminant. I’ll email you the URL of

the 1943

memo to General Leslie Grove under the Manhattan Project. It’s the blueprint

for depleted uranium. They dropped the atomic bombs, but they did not use the

DU weapons because they thought they were too horrific. I’ve toured and gone

all over Japan with a pediatrician in Basra and an oncologist, a cancer

specialist. These poor doctors — their whole families are dying of cancer. He

has 10

members of his family with cancer now that he’s treating, and this is just

from Gulf War I. They’ve used much, much, much more in 2003. All over the

whole

country.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: What can soldiers expect when they come home?

 

 

MORET: If they were in Bradley Fighting Vehicles, they’re coming home with

rectal cancer from sitting on ammunition boxes. The young women are reporting

terrible problems with endometriosis. That’s the lining of the uterus

malfunctioning, and they just bleed and bleed and bleed. Some of them have

uterine

cancer — 18 and 19 and 20 year olds. The Army will not even diagnose it. They

send

them back to the battlefields. They won’t treat them or diagnose them. A group

of 20 soldiers pushed from Kuwait to Baghdad in 2003 in all the fighting.

Eight of those 20 soldiers have malignancies.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: Does exposure to depleted uranium effect their psychological

background when they come home?

 

 

MORET: Depleted uranium are these particles that form at very high

temperatures. They are uranium oxides that are insoluble. They are at least 100

times

smaller than a white blood cell, so when the soldiers breathe, they inhale them.

The particles go through the nose, go through the olfactory and into the

brain, and it messes up their cognitive abilities, thought processes. It damages

t

heir mood-control mechanism in the brain. Four soldiers at Fort Bragg came

back from Afghanistan, and within two months, those four had murdered their

wives. This is part of the damage to the brain from the radiation and the

particles. The soldiers from Gulf War I in a group of 67 soldiers who came back,

they

had DU in their equipment, in their clothes, in their bodies, in their semen,

and they had normal babies before they went over there to war. They came back,

and the VA did a study. Of 251 Gulf War I veterans in Mississippi, in 67

percent of them, thier babies born after the war were deemed to have severe

birth

defects. They had brains missing, arms and legs missing, organs missing. They

were born without eyes. They had horrible blood diseases. It’s horrific. If

you

want to look at something, Life magazine did a photo essay which is still on

the Internet. It’s called “The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm.†You should

look

at that — oh, my God, the post-Gulf War babies playing with their brothers

and sisters who are normal. Basically, it’s like smoking crack, only you’re

smoking radioactive crack. It goes straight into the blood stream. It’s

carried

all throughout the body into the bones, the bone marrow, the brain. It goes

into the fetus. It’s a systemic poison and a radiological poison.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: What about the people in the United States that are here? You say

that DU is being mixed and spread globally?

 

 

MORET: Yes, it’s being mixed globally. We’re getting secondary smoke. It’s

the secondary smoke effect. You know the people who inhabit a room with

smokers? They are getting that secondary smoke, and so are we.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: Is that secondary smoke getting thicker as we speak?

 

 

MORET: Yeah, the concentration of the depleted uranium particles in the

atmosphere all around the globe is increasing. There are indications that the

U.S.

will go in June and bomb the heck out of Iran. We’re monitoring the U.S. Army

ammunition factories. They have very large orders for those huge bunker buster

bombs that have 5,000 lbs. of DU in the warhead.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: So the prognosis for America isn’t really good?

 

 

MORET: No, it’s really bad.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: And if this continues then?

 

 

MORET: It’s going to kill off the world’s population. It already is, and it

doesn’t just effect people. It effects all living systems. The plants, the

animals, the bacteria. It effects everything.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: So the things that we eat for instance, if they have DU in them,

then we’ll just get it in our systems, and so we’re polluting the oceans, so

that could effect all marine life?

 

 

MORET: Yes, it’s in the air, water, and soil. The half-life of DU, Uranium

238, is 4.5 billion years the age of the Earth.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: With the damage that’s been done to this point, can we turn back?

We can’t clean it up?

 

 

MORET: There’s no way to clean it up. What happens is these tiny particles

float around the Earth. There are still plutonium and uranium floating around

the Earth from bomb testing. These particles are so tiny that molecules bumping

into them keep them lofted in the air, and so the only way for them to get out

of the atmosphere is rain, snow, fog, pollution, which will clear them out of

the air and deposit them in the environment. What happens is the surface of

these particles gets wetted by the moisture in the air. They come down and land

on stuff and stick to it like a glue. You can’t ever get the particles off

whatever they’re sticking to because have you ever put a drop of water on a

microscope slide and then put another one on top of it? Can you pull those

apart?

 

 

ICONOCLAST: No.

 

 

MORET: Okay, that’s the same effect that happens to radioactive particles.

Once they are removed from the atmosphere, they stick to any surfaces they land

on. In a way they are removed from circulation from the atmosphere. You can’t

wash them off. If it keeps raining or they’re in a creek, you know, if they’

re on rocks or stones or something in a creek, they won’t even wash off. You

didn’t know it was this bad, did you?

 

 

ICONOCLAST: No, I knew it was bad, but I thought it was fairly isolated.

 

 

MORET: No. What is over there (in Iraq) is over here in about four days. I don

’t know if you followed Chernobyl. That big bubble of radiation went around

and around the world, but this is dust. It becomes a part of atmospheric dust.

Like the dust storm you saw in that photo, it goes everywhere.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: Is it in the upper levels of the atmosphere or the lower levels?

 

 

MORET: It’s in lower orbital space. They brought the Mir spacecraft back down

to Earth when they got done using it, and there was something called a space

midge which covered the electronics on the outside of the spacecraft and

protected it from radiation that comes from the sun because electronics are real

vulnerable to radiation. They analyzed the surface of that space net and found

uranium and uranium decayed products which they said came from atmospheric

testing or burned up spacecraft with nuclear materials or nuclear reactors on

board. Uranium can also come from supernovas, but they thought that the most

likely sources were atmospheric testing and the nuclear materials we put in

space.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: Essentially then, you’re saying that we’re conducting a nuclear

war.

 

 

MORET: Yes, and that’s exactly what it is. We’ve conducted four nuclear wars

since 1991. Yeah, these are nuclear wars. DU is a nuclear weapon.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: From the point of view of a scientist, what needs to happen to

correct this?

 

 

MORET: Well, we need to stop the use of it. We’ve built an international

movement to stop the use, the manufacture, the storage, the sales, and the

deployment of depleted uranium weapons.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: Are the munitions we sell to other countries contained with

depleted uranium?

 

 

MORET: We have. In 1968 the first depleted uranium weapons systems that we

found a patent for suddenly appeared in the U.S. patent office. It was for the

Navy. It was sort of a Gatling gun style weapon system that you mounted on

ships. It rapidly fires like 2,500 bullets a minute. It’s over 3,000 now.

They’ve

improved the design. Then in 1973, we gave depleted uranium weapons systems

to the Israelis and supervised their use. They used them in the Arab-Israeli

war and completely wiped out the Arabs in five days. Then the show was on the

road. That was the first actual battlefield demonstration of this new weapon

system. Hughes Aircraft developed the full-length system which is for the Navy.

That’s the Gatling gun system. They still use it. That was produced in 1974

and

tested. Within six months the U.S. government had sold the DU weapons system

to 12 entities which included many branches of the U.S. military and other

counties. We’ve sold DU weapons systems to about — we don’t know exactly

for

sure — it’s been about 12 or 17 countries. The good news is that normally

such a

weapons system that effective would have been sold to 80, 100, or 120

countries by now. But because of the radiological, biological, and environmental

hazard, countries were not only afraid to buy it, the ones who did buy it are

afraid to use it. The only countries we know that have used DU are Britain, the

U.S., and Israel. The United Nations in 1996 passed a resolution that depleted

uranium weapons are weapons of mass destruction, and they are illegal under all

international laws and treaties. In 2001, the European Parliament passed a

resolution on DU. What happened is that the NATO forces went into Yugoslavia in

1998 and ’99 and flew 39,000 bombing runs and completely bombed Yugoslavia

into radioactive rubble. Germany and the U.S. made the most money on the

destruction of Yugoslavia, and they made sure that countries that didn’t know

about

the DU, that the peacekeepers from those countries like from Italy and Portugal,

were sent to the most contaminated regions in Yugoslavia. Germans and

Americans didn’t send their own troops into those areas. They were in the

least

contaminated areas. These poor soldiers from other countries came back and died

within weeks or in a couple of days or months. The parents in Portugal and Italy

are furious and went to the Parliament and media, and there was just a huge

media storm of articles about DU. The cat was out of the bag because of the 1998

NATO invasion of Yugoslavia. The cat was out of the bag, but Japanese troops

have been sent into Somawa. They’re self-defense forces. It was the most

contaminated area where the heaviest fighting happened in Iraq. We can expect

those

soldiers to be really, really sick.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: What about Iraq itself? What’s been done thus far?

 

 

MORET: It’s uninhabitable. The whole country. Yugoslavia, Iraq, and

Afghanistan are completely uninhabitable.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: But people live there, so they’re going to live there suffering?

 

 

MORET: Well, you can see from the birth defects and the illnesses that it is

pretty severe. Each year the number of birth defects and illnesses will rise

because of the total contamination levels in all living things will increase

because they are breathing that air and drinking water and eating the food from

contaminated soils. It’s just a slow death sentence. The same with Yugoslavia

and Afghanistan. Depleted uranium is a very, very, very effective biological

weapon. This is the primary purpose for using it. Marion Falk (a retired

chemical physicist who built nuclear bombs for more than 20 years at Lawrence

Livermore lab), who is the Manhattan Project scientist I work with, taught me

pretty

much everything about radiation and particles and DU. He said the purpose of

weapons used by the military is not only to injure and kill the enemy

soldiers, but the purpose is to kill, maim, and disease the civilian population

because it reduces the productivity of a country and pretty soon a lot of their

resources are going to be used for taking care of sick people. They will have

fewer and fewer healthy workers. Of course, once you cause mutation in the DNA,

that damage is passed on to future generations of that affected person or animal

or plant. DNA does not repair itself.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: So the mutations would be probably destructive moreso than

constructive.

 

 

MORET: Oh, the mutations are causing those birth defects.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: They’re not evolutionary diseases?

 

 

MORET: No, they are evolutionary. They are inherited by all future

generations and passed on. It’s like if you have red hair and all of your

future

generations will have that gene.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: So if I had a precondition to heart disease because of the

radiation, then the generation that would come after me would have the same

problem?

 

 

MORET: Well, if you damage the cell or parts of the cell or functioning of

cells, that doesn’t necessarily damage the DNA. There are two kinds of damage:

one damages the cells of the living organism, and that may not be passed on,

but if you damage the DNA in the egg or the sperm, that is passed on to all

future generations.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: So the guys coming back from the war, their sperm is probably

going to be —

 

 

MORET: Damaged. Yes. They also have depleted uranium in their semen. When they

’re intimate with their partners, they internally contaminate them with

depleted uranium. The women become sick themselves. They have depleted uranium

in

their bodies, and there is something called burning syndrome. Just absolutely

horrible. You can read about it in an article by David Rose in the December

Vanity Fair. It’s on the Internet. A friend of mine is the widow of a Canadian

Gulf War veteran. David Rose interviewed her, and she griped about the burning

semen. She said, “I had 20 condoms full of frozen peas in my freezer at all

times, and after we were intimate, I would insert one into my vagina, and that

is

the only way I could bear the pain from the burning semen.†And it goes

through condoms, too.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: Gosh, durn!

 

 

MORET: Yeah, you should see the high school classes when I talk about the

burning semen and the internal contamination. The girls’ mouths go into little

round Os, and the boys start panicking because they’re like, “I’ll never

get

sick!†(laughs) The name of this article is “Weapons of Self-Destruction.â€

 

 

ICONOCLAST: How much DU will it take to kill off all known life on this

planet?

 

 

MORET: The amount of radiation released is certainly going to have a very,

very profound global impact, and we’re already seeing infant mortality

increasing globally. The fetus is the most susceptible to radiation damage

because all

the cells are rapidly dividing, the limbs and the bodies developing, so when

you start introducing toxic chemicals and radiation, it really damages the

natural process of fetal development. The reason they were able to convince the

Senate to sign the partial test ban treaty in 1963 was because of the increase

in infant mortality. It had been dropping and declining two or three percent

for quite a long time each year because of better prenatal care and educating

mothers. Infant mortality started going up after the bombs were dropped on

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially in the ‘50s when the big bomb testing

started.

By 1963, it was really obvious that the bomb testing globally was having a real

impact on the unborn. They signed the partial test ban treaty. Russia and the

U.S. stopped atmospheric testing, and the infant mortality rate started going

down right away. They’re going up again now. This is global radioactive

pollution, and how long it would take to eliminate all life is something nobody

knows, but the depleted uranium is a very, very effective biological weapon.

There are two purposes for the military use of weapons. One is to destroy the

enemy soldiers, and the other, which is just as important, is to destroy the

enemy

civilian population. By causing illnesses and disease, long lingering

illnesses really impact the productivity and the economy of a country. It was

Chernobyl and other nuclear disasters that actually destroyed the Soviet Union

because the former Soviet Union is very, very sick from all the radiation that

was

released. They were much more sloppier than we were. I have a World Health

Organization world health survey which they published in the Journal of American

Medical Association last June. The impact of atmospheric testing is very, very

apparent by the percentage of population in each country they investigated for

some form of mental illness. For instance, Japan is 8.8 percent. Nigeria is

very low — 4.7 percent. They have almost no radiation in Nigeria. In the

Ukraine where they had the Chernobyl accident, it is 20.4 percent. Spain is at

9.2

percent. Italy is 8.2 percent. It’s pretty low because they don’t have nuke

plants. France is 75 percent reliant on nuclear power, so you have mental

illness in 18.4 percent of the population. Mexico is at 12.2 percent, and the

United

States is at 26.3 percent — the highest rate of mental illness in the world.

And George Bush and his siblings were all exposed in utero to bomb testing

fallout in the United States. He had a toddler sister who died of leukemia when

she was about three. I worked with a group called the Radiation And Public

Health Project. Their website is <www.radiation.org>. We are all radiation

specialists, well-known scientists, and independent scientists. We’ve

collected 6,000

baby teeth around nuclear power plants and measured the radiation in them,

and one of our members is the neighbor of the women who worked with all of the

Bush children, including President Bush himself, because they had severe

learning disabilities.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: How do we know that the Bush children were exposed?

 

 

MORET: By the year of their birth. The year they were carried by their

mother. You have to look at how much bomb testing material was released into the

atmosphere, and there’s a direct correlation to the decline in SAT scores for

all

teenagers in the U.S. to the amount of radiation that was released into the

atmosphere the year their mother was carrying them. These are delayed effects

of radiation exposure in utero.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: So they were living in Connecticut, but they were still feeling

the effects of the radiation in Nevada?

 

 

MORET: Two years ago the U.S. government admitted that every single person

living in the United States between 1957 and 1963 was internally exposed to

radiation. So for any pregnant woman during those years, her fetus was exposed.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: What type of radiation levels are we talking about?

 

 

MORET: It’s low levels, and the main pathways are drinking water and dairy

products. It even killed the baby fish in the Atlantic. Strontium-90 is a

man-made isotope that comes out of nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors. They

measured

the levels of strontium-90 in milk in Norway from the 1950s up until the

1970s, and they measured the decline in the fishing catch in that same period,

and

as the strontium-90 increased in the milk in Norway, fishing catches

declined. By 1963, when the U.S. tested a nuclear bomb almost every day (they

did 250

tests in one year because the treaty was going to be signed), the fishing

catch declined by 50 percent. In the Pacific, it declined 60 percent because

there

was Russian, Chinese, French, and U.S. testing in the Pacific.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: So we’re still eating those contaminated fish today. Has the

genetic code been changed?

 

 

MORET: The oceans are getting whatever is getting rained down, snowed down,

or fogged down from the atmosphere. It’s getting into the oceans. This big

frog

die-off, which is global, is certainly related to the radiation in the

rainwater. It’s a global nuclear holocaust. It effects all living things.

That’s

why they call it “omnicide,†which means it kills all living things — the

plants, the animals, the bacteria. Everything.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: You think we ought to have the Weather Channel report on the

current sand storm conditions in Iraq so we can prepare four days in advance for

the radiation?

 

 

MORET: I’ll tell you what I did when 9/11 happened. I called all the doctors

with Radiation And Public Health Project, and I said, “Get out of town, and

don

’t come back until it has rained three times.†One lived 12 miles downwind

from the Pentagon. She went out on her balcony with her geiger counter. I said,

“Get that geiger counter out of your purse.†We had just done a press

conference in San Francisco, and I knew she had it in her purse. Well, the

radiation

levels were 8-10 times higher than background. We called the EPA, HAZMAT,

FBI, and said, “Get all those emergency response workers suited up. They need

to

be protected.†Two days after 9/11, the EPA radiation expert for that region

called back and said, “Yup, the Pentagon crash rubble was radioactive, and we

believe it’s depleted uranium, but we’re not worried about that. It’s only

harmful if it’s inhaled.†He said, “We’re worried about the lead solder

in the

plane.†Well, you know what’s in Tomahawk missiles? They have depleted

uranium warheads. The radioactive crash rubble contaminated with DU is evidence

of a

DU warhead.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: I did not think about that, but going back to my original

question: Should the Weather Channel report for us on the toxic dust storms in

Iraq?

 

 

MORET: But how could people get away from them? These dust storms are a

million square miles. They’re huge, and they come right across the Atlantic,

the

Caribbean, and Texas coast line, and right up the East Coast. There are people

who are going to leave the state every time there’s a hurricane It’s in the

food, drinking water, dairy products, and then the problem with Uranium 238,

which is 99.39 percent DU, is that it decays in over 20 steps into other

radioactive isotopes. That’s why I call it the “Trojan Horse.†It’s the

weapon that

keeps giving. It keeps killing. This is like smoking radioactive crack. It

goes right in your nose. It crosses the olfactory bulb into your brain. It’s a

systemic poison. It goes everywhere. These particles that form at very high

temperatures — 5,000-10,000 degrees C — are nanoparticles. They are a 10th

of a

micron or smaller. A 10th of a micron is 100 times smaller than a white blood

cell. They get picked up in the lipids and probably the cholesterol and go

right through the cell membranes of the cell. They screw up the cell processes.

They screw up the signaling between the cells because the cells all talk to each

other and coordinate what they’re doing. It messes up brain function.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: Do you know what Iraq was like before the first Gulf War?

 

 

MORET: Iraq prior to the 1991 Gulf War was the most advanced in the entire

Middle East. They had scrupulous databases of the health problems and disease

rates, which is why the U.S. bombed all of the offices in the Ministry of

Health. We destroyed all those records so that a pre-Gulf War health base could

not

be established to show how much these diseases have increased. This would

concern the U.S. in terms of compensation for war crimes. In these horrible U.N.

sanctions, they (the Iraqis) could never get all of the protocol medicine for

the treatment of leukemia. They (the U.N.) would say, “These steps of the

leukemia treatment were components in weapons, so you can’t have that.†They

never

gave the people the full proper protocols in the areas of treatment they

needed to get rid of the leukemia. It hid the effects of the depleted uranium

because the children were starving. They had malnutrition. They had the

healthiest

population in the Middle East (prior to Gulf War I).

 

 

ICONOCLAST: Let’s talk about the children of Iraq.

 

 

MORET: After the Gulf War, they had maybe one baby a week born with birth

defects in the hospitals in Basra. Now they are having 10-12 a day. The levels

of

uranium are increasing in the population every year. Every day, people are

eating and drinking while the whole environment is contaminated. Just what

you’d

expect. There are more babies born with birth defects, and the birth defects

are getting more and more severe. An Iraqi doctor told me that babies are

being born now that are lumps of flesh. She said that they don’t have heads or

legs or arms. It’s just a lump of flesh. This also happened to populations

that

were not removed from islands in the Pacific when the bomb tests occurred.

Basically, governments were using them as guinea pigs.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: So all the countries that were equipped with nuclear weapons are

guilty of those atrocities.

 

 

MORET: They were all doing it. France, Russia. China, and the U.S. And I’m

not sure if Britain did bomb testing. They were real low key about it.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: Where are the radiation hot spots in the United States?

 

 

MORET: In the United States, it would be within a 100 miles of nuclear power

plants. We have 110 nuclear power plants in the U.S. We have the most of any

country in the world, but only a 103 are operating. Almost all of the entire

East Coast. What we did was we took government data from the Centers of Disease

Control on breast cancer deaths between 1985 and 1989. Anywhere from within a

100 miles of a nuclear power plant is where two-thirds of all breast cancer

deaths occurred in the U.S. between 1985 and 1989. It’s also around the

nuclear

weapons laboratories. That would be Los Alamos in New Mexico, the Idaho

Nuclear Engineering Lab in Idaho, and Hanford in Washington State, which is

where

they got the plutonium for all the bombs. They contaminated the entire Columbia

River watershed and almost the whole state of Washington. It gets into the

water and into the plants and into the vegetation. If you eat clams or mussels

or

crabs or things like that, even certain kinds of fish that eat off of the mud

at the bottom of the river, you have much higher levels of radiation in your

tissues. It depends on each person and on how healthy they are, but this man

from Washington State died suddenly. He was in his late 40s. They did an

autopsy, and he was full of radioactive zinc. They went, “Where in the world

did he

get this? It only comes from nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors.†They studied

his diet and discovered he loved to eat oysters. They found out where he

bought his oysters and found the oyster beds. They were 200 miles off shore,

from

Washington State. The radiation was being carried off out to sea from the

coastline. It was passing over this oyster bed. The oysters were just gobbling

them up.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: What are the symptoms of DU poisoning?

 

 

MORET: Soldiers on the battlefield have reported a metallic taste in their

mouth. That’s the actual taste of the uranium metal. Then within 24-48 hours,

soldiers on the battlefield have reported that they felt sick. They start

getting muscle aches, and they lose energy. Some of them came back incontinent.

In

other words, in adult diapers. One woman reported that the first night home,

she wanted to be intimate with her husband, but she had absolutely no feeling.

She couldn’t feel anything from the waist down. This particulate matter

damages

the neuromuscular system, the nerves; it just goes everywhere. And there’s no

treatment for it. These particles are very, very insoluble, so they can’t

even dissolve in body fluids, so they can be excreted from the body. Then they

keep releasing. Even when uranium decays, it turns into another radioactive

isotope. So it’s a particle that just sits there shooting bullets until you

die.

Another problem is that soldiers have crumbling teeth. Teeth just start falling

apart. The uranium replaces calcium in the calcium-phosphate structure of the

teeth. Some have complained about grand mal seizures, cerebral palsy. Some

diseases reported at very high rates in Air Force and Army soldiers are

Parkinson

’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and Hodgkin’s disease. This is damage to

the mitochondria in the cells and the nerves. The mitochondria make all the

energy for the body, so when you damage mitochondria, another symptom is chronic

fatigue syndrome. There’s just not enough energy produced by the body to

function normally. I found a study in the SanDia Nuclear Weapons Laboratory

employee newsletter in September 2003. They are doing major studies in

mitochondrial

disfunction related to Lou Gehrig’s, Hodgkin’s, and Parkinson’s diseases

for

veterans. Since it’s at a nuclear weapon’s lab, they are fully aware of the

health damage.

 

 

ICONOCLAST: Tell me about the tests that detect for DU in the body.

 

 

MORET: The chromosome test in the best indicator. It’s $5,000. The urine test

is a $1,000. If you test positive with the urine test, you know you’re

contaminated. If you test negative, it does not mean that you’re not

contaminated.

It just means that you may or may not be contaminated but enough hasn’t

dissolved in your blood stream to go through your kidneys to be excreted in your

urine. Anyone who goes now cannot avoid being contaminated. Anyone. Anyone.

Anyone. Everyone who goes to the Middle East and Afghanistan will be

contaminated.

The DU issue affects every single living thing on this planet. What else has

that impact? They have altered the genome for the entire planet forever with

this DU. The Pentagon people say, “You’re exaggerating or you use the

uranium

word to scare people.†I don’t care if people believe me or not. All I can

say

is that over time what I am saying will actually be an underestimation of the

long term effects.

 

What Is Depleted Uranium?

 

A Scientific Perspective Interview with Leuren Moret, Geo-Scientist A

Military Perspective Interview with Dr. Doug Rokke, Ph.D, former Director of the

U.S.

Army Depleted Uranium Project A Survivor’s Perpsective Interview with Melissa

Sterry, Gulf War Veteran who is surviving the effects of depleted uranium

 

What Is Depleted Uranium?

A Scientific Perspective

Interview with Leuren Moret, Geo-Scientist

A Military Perspective

Interview with Dr. Doug Rokke, Ph.D, former Director of the U.S. Army

Depleted Uranium Project

A Survivor’s Perpsective

Interview with Melissa Sterry, Gulf War Veteran who is surviving the effects

of depleted uranium

 

 

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