HAVE DU WILL TRAVEL: ‘To my mind, it’s a human rights issue.’ nterview With Chr

[Guest guest]

http://lonestaricon.com/2006/Archives/09/news05.htm

 

 

 

 

February 28, 2006 7:33 PM

HAVE DU WILL TRAVEL

 

 

`To my mind, it's a human rights issue.'

Iconoclast Interview With Chris Busby

 

By W. Leon Smith

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

 

 

Dr. Chris Busby, who obtained a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the

University of London, has served as the scientific secretary of the

European Committee on Radiation Risk and director of the environmental

consultancy Green Audit.

 

 

 

ICONOCLAST: What impact do you think the report will have on the

United States?

 

BUSBY: I think the most important thing is that it makes clear that

the use of depleted uranium involves indiscriminate effects on

civilians. And so it takes it away from being the weapon of legitimate

use in a military situation and puts it in the same category as

weapons like nerve gas that affect large populations. So that, to my

mind, would make it illegal under the considerations of the Geneva

Convention.

 

ICONOCLAST: The London Times did an article last Sunday and the

Ministry of Defense said that it is unfeasible that depleted uranium

could have traveled so far.

 

BUSBY: The point is that material from Chernobyl which is 1,800 miles

to the east of Great Britain traveled to Great Britain and

contaminated Wales, Scotland, and various parts of the United Kingdom.

And they might well have said that it was equally unfeasible for it to

travel that distance in the opposite direction to the general flow of

the wind, but we have examined computer models of wind directions over

the period of the Gulf War and it's quite clear the material from Iraq

could have come through the United Kingdom because of the particular

types of depressions and anticyclone systems that were there. The

American NOAH website has a computer program that enables you to model

the origin of air masses that coordinate on the globe and we use the

NOAH system to back track material that was in the Aldermaston field

over the period and a lot of that material did come from Iraq

according to the calculations of this computer program.

 

ICONOCLAST: Is monitoring still going on on a frequent basis and are

you following the models?

 

BUSBY: Uranium is still being measured.

 

ICONOCLAST: How are the people of London taking this news?

 

BUSBY: There are a lot of different responses to our paper, from the

Ministry of Defense and from the Royal Society and from the

Environment Agency who are the people who deal with this in our

country. They all seem to be different responses. None of them seem to

be very sensible. The Environment Agency at one point said they

thought it was somebody digging the road up. The Royal Society said

that it might be from Iraq but actually it's probably natural uranium

from a sandstorm. The Ministy of Defense is just saying it's

unfeasible for it to come all that distance.

 

So really it's kind of knee-jerk denial, for, because as far as the

MoD is concerned, it makes quite a big difference to the ethical basis

of their use of uranium as a weapon.

 

ICONOCLAST: If they say it's from other local environmental sources,

such as a p ower station, wouldln't that have alerted authorities to

be on the lookout.

 

BUSBY: The problem with the argument about the power station is that

we've looked at the data from 2000 to 2004, and there's data every two

weeks. In that whole period from 2000 to 2004, there's only one

enormous increase in radiation, in uranium, and that's during the time

of the Iraq war. It would be quite extraordinary that the power

station happened to produce these releases just at the same time as

the war occurred, and, secondly, there aren't many power stations. The

nearest nuclear power station is at Sellafield and the wind was

blowing north at the time. It was blowing from the south so anything

that would have come out of there would have gone north. It wouldn't

have gone to Reading which is about 600 miles southeast of the power

station.

 

ICONOCLAST: What do you think the result of this report will be. Do

you think it will get people's attention?

 

BUSBY: I think it will have tremendous impact. At the moment, what

happens is that they're just going to go off and think about it and

try to bury it. There's a legal case in this country at the moment

relating to some activists who damaged a B-52 bomber that was carrying

depleted uranium to Iraq. It'll certainly be used in this court case.

They'll argue that the U.S. was using weapons of indiscriminate

effect. I hesitate to say mass destruction, because it's not quite in

that category, but certainly it's a very toxic substance that can

cause genetic damage and congenital malformations and cancer. And even

if it's a very small risk of all of these things, and this is what

they argue, if you are contaminating people in the United Kingdom,

then you're clearly contaminating people in Turkey and Greece and

Italy and France — a hugh swathe of Southern Europe, and so the

population that has been contaminated is extremely large. So you are

likely to have had some effect.

 

And in any case, it's a human rights issue. People don't actually want

to inhale uranium, strange as it may seem.

 

ICONOCLAST: Do you think that the health of a good number of Londoners

has been effected by this?

 

BUSBY: Not just Londoners, it would be people over the whole of

Southern Europe. And the answer is that I don't know. We will

certainly look, and the first place that we will be looking will be in

infant mortality, congenital malformations.

 

ICONOCLAST: Do you think that there will be an uprising against DU?

 

BUSBY: There's already an uprising against DU. Everybody thinks that

DU should be an illegal weapon. Everybody. I don't know anybody,

except the military — who say that it's a valuable weapon in tank

warfare. I can't think of anybody who thinks that the use of a

radioactive weapon like that is justified under any circumstances.

 

I mean, after all, the military says, " Oh, we need this weapon because

if enables us to win wars. " Well fair enough! But you might as well

use nerve gas, or biological weapons. The same argument applies.

 

ICONOCLAST: Here in the United States, very few people are aware of

what DU is. It doesn't mean anything to them. So what do you think we

need to do in the United States?

 

BUSBY: You people in the media need to make it more clear that the

United States is the major user of this weapon and that it should be

banned, because it's a very serious, and what goes around comes

around. You can be sure that if it has come to the United Kingdom,

it's certainly gone to America.

 

ICONOCLAST: Do you think your paper will open the eyes of many people

in the government in Europe?

 

BUSBY: I think so. I think it will have a big impact. It might not

have quite sunk into them yet, but over a period of time they will

have to accept that this is the first clear evidence that this stuff

is capable of traveling such large distances, and therefore it is

capable of contaminating huge populations.

 

ICONOCLAST: Scientists have been saying that DU travels and that it is

a global problem. Can they look at your study as being proof?

 

BUSBY: A lot of people have theorized that it travels long distances,

because these particles are very small and they can be kept in the

atmosphere, in motion and by electro-static effects and so on. There

was always the fear that this was the case, and the military has

argued that this was not true. I've been in Kosovo where I measured

these particles, but this is the first really strong evidence that

they can travel long distances, and irony is that the evidence has

actually come deployed by the military themselves around the atomic

weapons establishment.

 

To my mind, it's a human rights issue. Originally, it was an issue

relating to whether or not it should be used in Iraq and if the

population of Iraq is being contaminated and possible the Gulf War

veterans being contaminated, but now we are seeing that everybody is

being contaminated. We are all Gulf War veterans.