Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Blog

  • Senator Feinstein Takes Commendable Stand Against New Nukes

    Concerned citizens from all over the US have been writing their Congressional representatives in opposition to the Bush administration’s plans to research and develop dangerous new nuclear weapons. Elected officials are feeling the heat from their constituents . Some members of Congress are taking commendable stands on this important issue . Sen ator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) in particular has been struggling to eliminate funding for new nuclear weapons. Below is a copy of a letter she is sending constituents in response to their letters.

    If you haven’t already, please take a moment to write to the President and your Members of Congress using the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Action Center.

    —

    Thank you for your letter regarding the development and use of nuclear weapons. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue. I am deeply concerned by the Bush Administration’s renewed emphasis on the development of so-called “low-yield” nuclear weapons. This policy includes the possible repeal of prohibitions on developing “low-yield” bombs and deep-penetration “bunker-busters.” Even more troubling is the fact that the Administration is contemplating giving nuclear armaments a role in the new doctrine of preemption. I believe that this is taking our Nation in exactly the wrong direction.

    There is no question that a full range of policy options for dealing with new and uncertain threats should be on the table.

    Nevertheless, I am concerned that the development of nuclear weapons by the United States would blur the distinction between conventional and nuclear forces, and in turn, diminish our ability to dissuade other nations from pursuing nuclear weapons.

    Again, thank you for your letter. Please know that I am closely monitoring these developments and will do what I can to limit the development of new nuclear weapons by our country. If you have additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact my Washington, DC office at (202) 224-3841.

    Sincerely yours,

    Dianne Feinstein
    United States Senator

    http://feinstein.senate.gov

    Further information about my position on issues of concern to California and the Nation are available at my website http://feinstein.senate.gov . You can also receive electronic e-mail updates by subscribing to my e-mail list athttp://feinstein.senate.gov/issue.html

  • ‘Nuclear Terrorism’: Counting Down to the New Armageddon

    Nuclear Terrorism The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe by Graham Allison
    263 pp. Times Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $24.

    Terrorists are striving to acquire and then use nuclear weapons against the United States. Success, as defined by Osama bin Laden, would be four million dead Americans. Mounting evidence makes this much abundantly clear. Documents discovered in Afghanistan seem to reveal Al Qaeda’s detailed knowledge of nuclear weaponry, while intelligence confirms the terrorists’ attempts to acquire nuclear material on the black market.

    In reaction, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry are giving pride of place to catastrophic terrorism in their foreign policy platforms. Both proclaim it the nation’s No. 1 security challenge. Meanwhile, policy analysts have urgently recommended preventive measures in a flurry of reports, books, journal articles and Congressional testimony.

    Now the Harvard scholar Graham Allison is sounding his own warning in ”Nuclear Terrorism” — a well-written report for general readers on the threat and what it will take to reduce it. He addresses all the big questions: who could be planning an attack; how they might acquire and deliver the weapons; when they might launch the first assault. Allison touches on chemical and biological dangers, but he separates out the far more lethal nuclear threat for special attention. Nonnuclear radioactive (”dirty”) bombs and chemical or biological devices would kill in the thousands. A 10-kiloton nuclear bomb, delivered to Times Square by truck and then detonated, could kill up to one million New Yorkers.

    Some experts think a terrorist attack with nuclear weapons is already unstoppable. Allison disagrees — up to a point. He argues that prevention is still possible, and he gives the Bush administration some credit for several post-9/11 initiatives meant to tighten the security of nuclear weapons and material. However, he calls for far bolder measures, more money and forceful American leadership to improve what is at present rather lax international cooperation. His bottom line is blunt: anything less will make nuclear terrorism inevitable.

    Allison blames both the White House and the Congress for falling short of meeting the challenge. To take one example, since 9/11 the rate of funding has hardly changed for the Nunn-Lugar program, which was established to destroy or secure Russia’s enormous stockpile of fissile material and nuclear weapons. Much remains to be done. Of special concern is Russia’s large supply of suitcase-size nuclear bombs, which terrorists could smuggle into the United States in cargo containers or as airline baggage. The safeguards on these weapons are loose at best. (In 1997, Russia acknowledged that 84 of some 132 such weapons were missing.)

    At present, it will take 13 years, in Allison’s estimation, to secure Russia’s fissile material. Allison’s position, adopted by the Kerry campaign, is to spend whatever dollars are necessary to complete the job in four years, though achieving this objective would also require elimination of Congressionally imposed impediments to Nunn-Lugar and overcoming Russian resistance to intrusion into their facilities.

    We face many vulnerabilities — limited intelligence of the terrorists’ plans; poorly protected ports, borders and nuclear power plants. But the most urgent danger is that terrorists could acquire the fissile material with which to construct a nuclear weapon in a relatively short period of time. Russia presents the greatest problem; 90 percent of all existing fissile material outside the United States is stored within the former Soviet Union. Still, it’s not the only region we need to focus on. At least 32 countries possess weapons-grade fissile material.

    Allison would round up all fissile material and ban the creation of any more. This is a daunting task. Allison himself observes that there are some 200 locations around the world where nuclear weapons or fissile material could be acquired, and he pinpoints the most dangerous — Russia because of its huge supplies, shaky safeguards and extensive corruption; Pakistan because of its indiscriminate spreading of nuclear know-how and equipment; North Korea because of its history of selling missile systems and its apparent nuclear development program; and lastly, the research reactors (some 20-odd) with significant quantities of bomb-grade uranium located in developing countries.

    Allison’s other remedies — like imposing intrusive nuclear power plant inspections and sanctioning violators — may also prove difficult to implement in the real world of suspicious governments and corrupt officials. Because the United States is widely viewed with hostility these days, it may not be able to marshal the international support needed to shut down black markets or block the emergence of new nuclear weapons states. And then there is the question of money. Governments are reluctant to spend lavishly on prospective threats when tax-conscious citizens have not yet experienced any consequences.

    As a champion of the idea that nuclear terrorism is preventable, Allison emphasizes the elements of an offense — improved intelligence, tighter treaties, more transparency and intrusion. But a stronger homeland defense is also needed in case prevention by offense fails. And currently, homeland security is getting short shrift. For the 2005 budget, Congress has allotted $7.6 billion to improve the security of military bases but only $2.6 billion to protect the nation’s vital infrastructure. Within the Department of Defense, $10 billion is spent annually on missile defense, compared with only a few billion on all other counterproliferation programs.

    Homeland security becomes an even higher priority if one broadens one’s thinking about the potential damage from nonnuclear weapons to include more than simply the number who would die. Allison is less concerned with biological and chemical weapons and so-called dirty bombs because they kill in the thousands, not millions. But these unconventional arms can still cause mass disruption; a few anthrax incidents, after all, virtually shut down the Congress. The release of pathogens in a public space, or a biological attack on the food supply system, or a dirty bomb set off in a seaport could have enormous economic consequences. Large-scale government efforts are needed to minimize the danger of such attacks.

    What makes the job of prevention all the more difficult is that the threat of nuclear terrorism is growing at the same time as the need for nuclear-generated electricity. Allison points out that all signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty are permitted to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium to make fuel for peaceful power reactors, provided they declare what they are doing and submit to periodic inspections. In other words, states can come to the brink of nuclear weapons capability without explicitly violating the treaty. Then, without penalty, they can withdraw from the treaty and turn enriched uranium or plutonium into bombs.

    This is a loophole that both Iran and North Korea have sought to take advantage of. Allison and other experts argue that the United States should not discard the treaty but take the lead in fixing it. Their preferred solution is to distinguish ”fuel cycle” states from ”user states.” Those states where fuel-producing facilities already exist would provide enriched fuel to other states that wish to generate electricity from nuclear reactors. Coupling this with stiffer inspection provisions and penalties for withdrawal from the treaty would return the nonproliferation treaty to an important (if limited) role in countering proliferation.

    Nuclear dangers come in several forms, those that might be mounted by states and those from terrorists that cannot be contained by treaties alone, no matter how strict. Allison covers all the potential eventualities but might have been clearer in setting priorities, since resources are limited. Rogue states, capable of launching nuclear-tipped missiles, may ultimately be a threat. But the evidence indicates that the danger currently lies elsewhere. The urgent threat is nuclear terrorism, and funds need to be freed up to fill the considerable holes remaining in our counterterrorism programs.

    Allison’s comprehensive but accessible treatment of this vital subject is a major contribution to public understanding. In turn, an informed public could spur the government to complete the counterterrorism agenda. Only then, as Allison argues, will nuclear terror against America prove preventable.

    James Hoge is the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine.

  • The Optimism of Uncertainty

    In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?

    I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.

    There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

    What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. A revolution to overthrow the czar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II–the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German Army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?

    And then the postwar world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone.

    No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere’s Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin’s adjacent Uganda. Spain became an astonishment. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone.

    The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres of influence and control, vying for military and political power. Yet they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence. The failure of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after almost a decade of ugly intervention, was the most striking evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination over a determined population. The United States has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale war in lndochina, conducting the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In the headlines every day we see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as in Brazil, where a grassroots movement of workers and the poor elected a new president pledged to fight destructive corporate power.

    Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it’s clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience–whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.

    I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another’s existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.

    Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don’t “win,” there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.

    An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

  • Radioactive Reservation: The Uphill Battle to Keep Nuclear Waste Off Native American Land

    Nuclear waste is not just an issue for those who live near a nuclear reactor or waste site. It is an issue that in time – due to deadly, toxic waste that will remain harmful for thousands of years – will have adverse affects on the entire world. However, the reality within the United States is that one group has been disproportionately affected by waste policies since the inception of the US nuclear program – the Native American population. In the quest to dispose of nuclear waste, the government and private companies have disregarded and broken treaties, blurred the definition of Native American sovereignty, and directly engaged in a form of economic racism akin to bribery.

    Many people consider treaties between Native American tribes and the United States government to be a topic reserved for history books, yet few realize how hard many Native American tribes are still battling over treaty rights being denied to them. The nuclear waste storage issue has become the most recent excuse for the government to breach treaties made with Native American tribes and perhaps the most well known example is the proposed waste storage site at Yucca Mountain. The planned nuclear waste dump site lies on sacred land to which the Shoshone people have rights based on the Treaty of Ruby Valley. The Western Shoshone Tribe has sued the government, but with little success in halting the plans for the permanent storage of 77,000 metric tons of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. The government has attempted to offer the Shoshone monetary compensation for the use of their land as a radioactive dump. However, the Shoshone people have refused the bribe and they continue to reiterate that they would rather have their land nuclear free than money in their pockets and their land desecrated beyond repair.

    The issue of nuclear waste has played a key role in obscuring the definition of Native American sovereignty. Although sovereignty is a simple concept, contradictory government policies have skewed its definition and made it a sticky subject for even the politically astute to comprehend. By turning their nose up at treaties and claiming Native American land as their property for nuclear testing and radioactive waste dumping, the government has blown gaping holes into Native American sovereignty rights. Sadly, the government’s view on sovereignty is that “.an Indian Tribe is sovereign to the extent that the Untied States permits it to be sovereign.” (United States v. Blackfeet Tribe, 1973). No Native American nation can be a truly autonomous entity if the United States government can choose when they wish to give them sovereignty.

    In the late 1980s, the United States government seemed to make a complete 180 degree turn when it began to support the idea of Native American sovereignty, but the goal was still the same: to place nuclear waste storage sites on Native American lands. The Department of Energy appealed to native tribes to host temporary nuclear storage sites on their land, mostly based on the fact that restrictions placed on such sites are not as strict on reservations because of their sovereign status. In the words of the Grace Thorpe, an activist against the dumping of nuclear waste on native reservations and a member of the Sac and Fox tribe, “The real irony is that after years of trying to destroy it, the United States is promoting Indian national sovereignty — just so they can dump their waste on Native land.”

    The broken treaties and the confusion injected into the issue of Native American sovereignty are disturbing to be sure. However, the most disturbing aspect of United States nuclear waste policy is the blatant economic racism this policy exhibits. As a whole, Native Americans are the most poverty stricken ethnic group in the United States. On average, 23 percent of Native American families live in poverty, which is almost double that of the national poverty rate of families at 12 percent. Nuclear utility companies and the United States government take advantage of the overwhelming level of poverty on native reservations by offering them millions of dollars to host nuclear waste storage sites.

    No matter how pretty a picture the government paints about their “benevolent” efforts to improve the economic development of the reservations, this policy is virtually a bribe to try to coerce Native tribes into taking nuclear waste out of the hands of the government. An example of this occurred in 1989; Waste Tech Incorporated approached a small Navajo community with an offer to provide 175 jobs, a hospital, and a minimum of $100,000. In exchange, the community would allow Waste Tech to put a toxic waste incinerator and a dump to bury the dangerous toxic ash on their land. At the time, the tribe had a 72 percent unemployment rate. The tribe was targeted by this company because of their poor economic condition. The government itself has almost exactly copied this tactic and solicited Native American tribes with a reservation to host a waste site.

    Yucca Mountain is just one more example to add to the list of the United States government’s existing nuclear waste policies that are transparently racist, violate long-standing Native American treaty rights and disregard Native American sovereignty or use it for their own ends. Millions of dollars are being spent to bribe a minority portion of the population to take stewardship of the majority’s nuclear waste. Is this the best method the United States government can devise to deal with the issue of nuclear waste? Or is it just the simplest option available to the government with the least public visibility? With the billions of dollars spent each year on nuclear weapons and power plants, wouldn’t a more feasible option be to, first and foremost, stop producing new nuclear waste and redirect some of this money to solving the ever growing problem of nuclear waste? Since its formation, the United States government has subjugated and subdued Native Americans, and it is time to reverse this trend, beginning with the government’s policies on nuclear waste.

    Bayley Lopez is a Lena Chang Intern at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and currently a sophomore at Stanford University. This Article expresses her point of view as a person of Native American descent; it does not express the opinion of all native Peoples.

  • Oyster Creek Plant Couldn’t Withstand Hit from Terrorist Aircraft

    Our political leaders need to resolve a serious predicament. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulation allows power plants like the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Lacey to operate in a post-9/11 environment, although the plant’s reactor building is structurally inadequate to protect used nuclear fuel rods from a terrorist attack.

    Oyster Creek is neither structurally robust nor designed to resist an aircraft impact. This concern may also be present in 22 nuclear sites, some with more than one reactor building.

    The Nuclear Security Coalition, a consortium of independent nuclear watchdog groups, petitioned the NRC earlier this month to address structural vulnerabilities at plants with building designs similar to Oyster Creek’s. The magnitude of this issue and its implications for national security require congressional oversight; it should not be left only to the NRC review process.

    To the best of my knowledge, the current design-basis-threat orders issued by the NRC do not include a requirement to protect against an aircraft attack. In addition, the most recent evacuation plan for Oyster Creek does not consider an evacuation based on a suicide aircraft attack that can result in a Chernobyl-type event.

    The evacuation plan assumes an orderly egress from towns around the power plant, ignoring any road congestion resulting from panic outside the 10-mile plant radius. At last month’s public hearing on Oyster Creek’s evacuation plan, which estimated it would take seven to 10 hours to evacuate a 10-mile radius around the plant, someone asked how slow the response would have to be in order for the pl an to be deemed unacceptable. The panel’s response: There is no time limit. This is unacceptable.

    The impact of a large aircraft into the reactor building’s concrete floor near the spent fuel pool would cause catastrophic building failure. It would allow burning fuel to leak onto the floors below, damaging vital wiring and equipment needed to shut down the reactor. An aircraft impact would severely damage the spent fuel pool, causing a water leak that would uncover tons of radioactive fuel r ods. The result of a terrorist attack on Oyster Creek’s reactor building would exceed a Chernobyl meltdown event because there is more fuel in Oyster Creek’s fuel pool than there was in Chernobyl’s reactor.

    The impact from only one 1,000-pound object traveling at 300 mph and hitting the floor at an angle of 30 degrees above horizontal exceeds the strongest floor beam capacity by more than 500 percent. Impact on the weakest floor beam exceeds the beam’s capacity by 8,000 percent. The order of magnitude of these values clearly demonstrates Oyster Creek’s reactor building is an unacceptable safety risk.

    There are other important reasons the Oyster Creek plant should be shut down:

    “The federal government is not yet prepared to identify and prevent every terrorist plot, and the level of expertise required to stop terrorism may not occur for many years. Exelon, the owner of Oyster Creek, stated in public information newsletters that it relies on our president, the Armed Forces, the FBI and intelligence agencies to protect the plant from attack outside the fence of the plant . That isn’t good enough.

    “As described in the 9/11 Commission report, al-Qaida terrorists are meticulous in their planning and they are patient. The longer Oyster Creek is allowed to operate, the longer it is a target of opportunity.

    To succeed, they need only one aircraft, flying from an overseas airport, to disappear from FAA radar screens 15 minutes before impacting Oyster Creek’s reactor building. Timelines supplied by the 9/11 Commission report show our military fighters cannot take off, intercept and shoot down a plane within 15 minutes after terrorist actions are recognized by FAA personnel.

    “If Oyster Creek were shut down today, all fuel in the reactor vessel must be transferred to the spent fuel pool to “cool” a minimum of five years before it can be removed from the reactor building. Before any used radioactive fuel can be taken out of the reactor building’s fuel pool, Exelon must order, build and install additional dry storage vaults to store the material somewhere on site.

    “The longer Oyster Creek operates without an exact closing date, the more the work culture at the plant will degrade because of fear of losing a job. Exelon management will postpone equipment upgrades or choose “cheap fixes” if there is no assurance the company will recoup its investment for any plant repair or upgrade.

    I urge residents to support the immediate shutdown of Oyster Creek, to lobby town leaders to pass resolutions demanding the plant’s closure and to lobby congressional representatives to pass laws eliminating NRC regulations that place the interest of private companies over public safety.

    Stephen M. Lazorchak, Dover Township, is a consulting structural engineer and a former Oyster Creek employee.

    Originally published in the Asbury Park Press.

  • Pentagon Brass Suppresses Truth About Toxic Weapons

    Poisonous Uranium Munitions Threaten World

    The use of weapons containing uranium violates existing laws and customs of war and “constitutes a war crime or crime against humanity,” according to a leading U.S. expert on humanitarian law.

    Karen Parker, a San Francisco-based expert in armed conflict law, told American Free Press that the use of radioactive uranium weapons violates the Hague and Geneva Conventions as well as the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980.

    Although no treaty specifically bans DU weapons, they are illegal “de facto and de jure,” Parker said. However, a class action lawsuit by victims of DU weapons will probably be required for a court to ban their use, she said.

    ‘ILLEGAL FOR ALL COUNTRIES’

    “A weapon made illegal only because there is a specific treaty banning it is only illegal for countries that ratify such a treaty,” Parker wrote in a paper, “The Illegality of DU Weaponry,” presented at the International Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg, Germany last October. However, “a weapon that is illegal by operation of existing law is illegal for all countries.”

    Parker, a delegate to the UN Commission on Human Rights since 1982, provides legal advice to the UN on DU weapons and other matters of humanitarian law.

    “DU weaponry cannot possibly be legal in light of existing law,” Parker said.

    “In evaluating whether a particular weapon is legal or illegal when there is not a specific treaty, the whole of humanitarian law must be consulted,” Parker wrote.

    According to humanitarian law, the illegality of DU weapons is based on four criteria:

    The first is the “territorial” test. Weapons may only be used in the legal field of battle. Weapons may not have an adverse effect off the legal field of battle.

    The second is the “temporal” test, meaning that weapons may only be used for the duration of an armed conflict. A weapon that continues to act after the war violates this criterion.

    The territorial and temporal criteria are meant to prevent weapons from being “indiscriminate” in their effect.

    The third rule is that a weapon cannot be unduly inhumane. The Hague Convention of 1907 prohibits “poison or poisoned weapons.” Because DU weapons are radioactive and chemically toxic, as the military knows, they fit the definition of poisonous weapons banned under the Hague Convention.

    WHAT THE MILITARY KNOWS

    The Defense Department is well aware of the toxic effects of DU. In an official presentation by U.S. Army Reserve Col. J. Edgar Wakayama at Fort Belvoir, Va. on Aug. 20, 2002, the dangers of exposure to DU were clearly spelled out:

    “Inhalation exposure has a major effect on the lungs and thoracic lymph nodes,” Wakayama read from a slide. “The alpha particle taken inside the body in large doses is hazardous, producing cell damage and cancer. Lung cancer is well documented,” he noted.

    “Urine samples containing uranium are mutagenic [capable of producing mutation]” and “the cultured human stem bone cell line with DU also transformed the cells to become carcinogenic,” Wakayama read.

    DU deposited in the bone causes DNA damage because of the effects of the alpha particles, Wakayama stressed. One gram of DU emits 12,000 high-energy alpha particles per second.

    The fourth rule for weapons, the “environmental” test, says that weapons cannot have an unduly negative effect on the natural environment.

    Wakayama advised, “Heavily contaminated soil should be removed if the area is to be populated with civilians.”

    Wakayama described the dangers to children playing in contaminated soil and the leaching of DU into local water and food supplies.

    DU FAILS ALL LEGAL CRITERIA

    DU weaponry fails all four tests, Parker says. Because it cannot be contained to the battlefield, it fails the territorial test. Airborne DU particles are carried far from the battlefield affecting distant civilian populations and neighboring countries.

    Because the uranium dispersed on the ground and in the air cannot be “turned off” when the war is over, DU fails the temporal test.

    “The airborne particles have a half-life of billions of years and have the potential to keep killing . . . long after the war is over,” Parker wrote.

    “The status of DU as nuclear, radiological, poison or conventional does not change its illegality. When the weapons test is applied to DU weaponry, it fails,” she concluded.

    DU weapons fail the humaneness test because of how they kill, Parker says, “by cancer, kidney disease etc, long after the hostilities are over.

    “DU is inhumane because it can cause birth defects such as cranial facial anomalies, missing limbs, grossly deformed and non-viable infants and the like, thus affecting children . . . born after the war is over,” Parker said.

    “The teratogenic [interfering with normal embryonic development] nature of DU weapons and the possible burdening of the gene pool of future generations raise the possibility that the use of DU weaponry is genocide,” she wrote. “Willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health” of civilians constitutes a grave breach of the fourth Geneva Convention, and this is “exactly what DU weapons do.”

    Finally, because DU weapons cannot be used without unduly damaging the natural environment, they fail the fourth rule for weapons, the environmental test.

    “No available technology can significantly change the chemical and radiological toxicity of DU,” the Army Environmental Policy Institute reported to Congress in 1994. “These are intrinsic properties of uranium.”

    “Regarding environmental damages, users of these weapons are obligated to carry out an effective cleanup,” Parker wrote. “The cost of legal claims and environmental cleanup for the gulf wars alone could be staggering.”

    “Use of DU weaponry necessarily violates the ‘grave breach’ provision of the Geneva Conventions, and hence its use constitutes a war crime or crime against humanity,” Parker concluded.

    Questions regarding the legality of DU weapons were sent in writing to the Pentagon’s appointed spokesman on DU matters, James Turner.

    Turner told AFP that he was “not qualified” to answer such questions.

    By press time the Pentagon had not responded to repeated requests for information.

  • US War Crimes in Indochina and Our Troubled National Soul

    We live in a time in which truth has become increasingly irrelevant. Reality is indistinguishable from spin, not only from politicians but sports figures, church leaders and business executives. It seems almost pointless to note the latest untruths – who has the time to research the facts amidst the welter of accusations, attacks, ripostes and counter-attacks?

    There are certain lies so monstrous, so odious, so malignant, and so significant, however, that they cry out to heaven for rectification. One of these is the claim of the “Swift Boat Veterans” in their latest ad: that John Kerry lied when he stated that the U.S. had committed widespread war crimes in Indochina as a matter of policy as well as individual wrongdoing.

    This nation has no greater moral failing that our ongoing refusal to take responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of Indochinese peasants whom we killed in violation of the laws of war. Those who shape opinion in this country have no higher duty to history or nation than to research the facts of U.S. war crimes in Indochina , and to educate our people and children about them. How can we teach “personal responsibility” to our children, for example, if we refuse to take responsibility or even admit our illegal murder of  innumerable innocent Indochinese? Doesn’t true patriotism call for perfecting our democracy by admitting our crimes and ensuring they never happen again, rather than remaining silent and repeating them?

    We cannot understand the true nature of our nation unless we grapple with the contradiction that we are both the greatest democracy on earth and have committed in Indochina the most protracted and widespread violations of the rules of war of any nation since the end of World War II. Our children cannot understand who they really are unless they grasp the grotesque fact that their parents’ generation not only killed innumerable innocent Indochinese peasants in Indochina , but have tried to deny this reality for more than 30 years now.

    The clearest U.S. violation of the rules of war was the widespread U.S. bombing and use of artillery against villages throughout Indochina, in violation of Article 25 of the U.S.-ratified 1907 Hague Convention which states that “the attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended, is prohibited.” Uncounted Indochinese peasants were burned alive by our napalm, buried alive by our 500 pound bombs, shredded by our anti-personnel bombs, and obliterated by our artillery shells. By simply declaring non-combatants to be either combatants or their “supporters”, the military justified illegal bombardment of populated areas, making millions of Indochinese peasants fair game for U.S. bombing and/or shelling.

    Jonathan Schell described in The Village of Ben Suc , a book which strongly influenced the young John Kerry, how U.S. planes would fly over vast inhabited areas declared “free fire zones” by U.S. officials, and bomb villages and villagers alike. Equally devastating bombardment occurred from the millions more tons of ground artillery fired from army bases and navy ships upon undefended towns, villages, dwellings and buildings.

    I personally interviewed over 2,000 peasants who had escaped from U.S. bombing in Laos . Every single one said that their villages had been leveled by American bombing, and the evidence of this is still apparent to those who visit the Plain of Jars in northern Laos today. Most of this bombing was directed at undefended villages, since Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese guerrillas traveled through jungles so thick that their movements could not be detected from the air.

    In Cambodia , U.S. officials claimed that they would not bomb a village unless the “Bombing Officer” at Nakhorn Phanom airbase in Thailand certified that enemy soldiers were present. This was a baldfaced lie. I tape recorded conversations between pilots and their controllers while bombing was being conducted that showed definitively that the Bombing Officer was not consulted before villages were bombed, as reported by Sidney Schanberg in the New York Times in May 1973. I later interviewed the Bombing Officer at Nakhorn Phanom airbase. He said his only task was to ensure there were no CIA teams in the area where the bombing occurred. Undefended villages throughout vast areas of Cambodia , inhabited by two million people according to the U.S. Embassy, were leveled by U.S. bombing.

    The United States dropped 6,727,084 tons of bombs on 60-70 million people in Indochina, more than triple what it dropped on hundreds of millions of people throughout Europe and the entire Pacific Theater in World War II. It fired an equally massive tonnage of ground artillery. We will never know how many innocent Indochinese peasants died from this massive and unprecedented U.S. firepower, but former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamera has estimated that 3.4 million Indochinese died during the war. Since the vast majority of these were killed by U.S. munitions, estimates of the innocents who died must begin in the hundreds of thousands.

    John Kerry stated on Meet The Press in April 1971 that “I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others in that I shot in free fire zones, fired 50-caliber machine bullets, used harass-and-interdiction fire, joined in search-and-destroy missions, and burned villages. All of these acts are contrary to the laws of the Geneva Convention, and all were ordered as written, established policies from the top down, and the men who ordered this are war criminals.”

    There is no serious doubt that this is a factual description of what occurred in Indochina, and that Kerry showed transcendent moral courage in stating it aloud – just as those who have remained silent about our war crimes, such as Bob Dole, Colin Powell, John McCain, Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush, have dishonored themselves and their nation. The dozens of soldiers who testified to having committed such war crimes at the Detroit “Winter Soldier” hearings, which so affected Kerry just prior to his Meet the Press appearance, had little reason to implicate themselves other than a desire to tell the truth.

    Swift Boat veterans dishonor themselves as well as these brave young men, who so movingly described their participation in war crimes at considerable emotional cost to themselves, by claiming that they were lying. The Swift Boat veterans are also insincere in claiming that they are personally hurt because John Kerry is maligning their service in Vietnam . Neither Kerry nor anyone else has ever claimed that all, or even most, U.S. soldiers were personally guilty of war crimes. The reason that U.S. war crimes in Indochina were so massive is because they were the result of overall policy which did not adequately distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and the major responsibility for these crimes of war thus lie with superiors who created and implemented these policies, not individual soldiers who carried them out. The responsibility of policy-makers includes not only the policies they created, but their failure to change them even when incontrovertible evidence existed that they were resulting in the widespread murder of civilians.

    The Toledo Blade won a Pulitzer in 2003 for reporting that elite Army paratroopers murdered hundreds of civilians in a 7-month rampage in South Vietnam with the encouragement of superiors, and that high U.S. officials including Donald Rumsfeld were informed about their crimes but failed to bring charges against the guilty.

    Official CIA involvement in widespread assassination and torture in Vietnam is also a matter of public record. CIA head William Colby testified to Congress that the CIA’s Phoenix Program routinely assassinated thousands of civilians. At no time has he or any other CIA official presented any evidence that those civilians they murdered were in fact guilty of the crimes of which they were accused. And numerous Operation Phoenix operatives have testified that in fact local assassination teams were given quotas by Colby of the number of people they were to murder weekly, and that there was little evidence that their victims were in fact Viet Cong cadre.

    And the CIA’s notorious “Office of Public Safety” funded and participated in the torture and murder of prisoners in a Kafkaesque South Vietnamese prison system far worse than Abu Ghraib.

    As a result of “victor justice”, no high-ranking U.S. official has ever been punished, or even reprimanded, for the crimes of war that they committed in Indochina . On the contrary. People like Henry Kissinger, who bears a major responsibility for laying waste vast portions of Laos and Cambodia , have been honored by our society. We do not teach our children that our nation is capable of the same kinds of violations of the rules of war as those we despise, or that American officials who commit crimes of war bear any responsibility for their actions.

    This is not only a further outrage against the innocents we killed and to history. It also harms our national self-interest. Had high officials been punished for their war crimes in Indochina it might have made today’s crimes like the prison scandal at Abu Ghraib less likely. This would reduce the growing Muslim hatred of America which has caused – and will continue to cause – so much killing of Americans.

    But there is a far deeper issue at stake here. The success of America ‘s foreign policy – and its ability to remain a healthy society at home – ultimately rests on its moral authority, on remembering that not only we but those foreigners we seek to influence have the same inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as do we. Post-war Germany acknowledged its responsibility for World War II crimes of war not only for the sake of its victims, but for itself. It understood that a nation that does not admit its failings to its children and the world cannot regain its moral center.

    Tring Cong Son, the poet-troubador of Vietnam ‘s Calvary , has written these words: “Corpses float on the water, dry in the field, on the city rooftops, on the winding streets. Corpses lie abandoned under the eaves of the pagoda, on the road to the city churches, on the floors of deserted houses. Oh, springtime, corpses will nourish the plowed soil. Oh, Vietnam , corpses will lend themselves to the soil of tomorrow.”

    The very fact that the issue of U.S. war crimes is at the center of a U.S. presidential race three decades after the end of the war is proof that we have not yet laid these ghosts of Indochina to rest. We can deny our crimes there, pretend that they never occurred. But we cannot erase them from our troubled national soul.

    The basis of healing is the importance of acknowledging our wrongs, and making amends. America will neither regain its moral standing nor ability to improve the world until we teach our children that we created many of these corpses in violation of the rules of war, and that each had a name, a family, dreams and aspirations, and as much of a right to live as do we. If America is to become a nation based on truth again, let it begin with one of the most important verities of all: that we bear responsibility for the civilian deaths we caused in Indochina and need to make amends for them.

    We have not even apologized to the families of our victims, let alone taken even such minimal steps as cleaning up the tons of unexploded ordnance we left behind that still kills dozens of Indochinese peasants yearly. It is to our honor that we have a Holocaust Museum in Washington to remember the innocent victims of World War II. It is a national disgrace that we ignore our own crimes against the innocents of Indochina . America will never be made whole again until we face the awful truth of what we did there.

    Fred Branfman, as Director of Project Air War, exposed U.S. bombing of civilians in Indochina as it was occurring after interviewing thousands of refugees in Laos . He is currently a Santa Barbara-based writer.

  • Blast from the Past: National Missile Defense is Back

    Sometime in mid-September, a Minuteman III ballistic missile carrying a dummy nuclear warhead will be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base and travel 4,800 miles towards Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands . 20 minutes later, a multiple-stage booster rocket launched from Kwajalein will deliver a “kill vehicle” some 100 miles above earth. Aided by military satellites and an array of ground-based radars, the “kill vehicle” will hone in on the missile and make a “fly-by” without actually intercepting it. Another test will take place a couple months later, probably timed for the November election. If all goes well, the Missile Defense Agency and the Bush administration will rejoice – the U.S. will be just one step away from having an “operational” Ground-Based Mid-course Defense system (GMD), one component of a national missile defense.

    GMD’s job is to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with missiles, the proverbial “hitting a bullet with a bullet.” If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. While most Americans remember the Reagan-era “Star Wars” project – a technically unfeasible boondoggle – they may be unaware that a similar project is coming to fruition in the post-Cold War, post-9/11 era. In just four short years, the Bush administration has poured $20 billion into developing and deploying a staggering global network of radar, satellites, and sea-, land-, space-, and air-based defense systems, designed to intercept missiles at any point in their flight. This complex, integrated system is collectively called the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD). President Bush is prepared to announce that the GMD component is ready to be deployed as the first rudimentary step towards full national missile defense. By the end of the year, six missile silos in Alaska will be equipped with interceptor missiles on alert; four more will be in place at Vandenberg.

    This all may come as a surprise to many Americans whose focus has been on two wars and the global fight against terror in the past three years. In the era of low-tech terror, precious resources are being spent to combat a non-existent threat using Cold War technology. Nonetheless, national missile defense is quickly becoming a reality, thanks to the efforts of defense companies, hawks in the Bush administration, and the complicity of some Democrats. “Reality,” however, is a relative term. When GMD goes on-line later this year it will only be “operational” in 3 out of 23 essential categories, according to the Center for Defense Information. Furthermore, out of the eight intercept tests conducted since 1999, only five have succeeded. Five out of eight may not sound so bad, until you consider that the tests are stage-managed to produce positive results. For example, the target in a July 2001 test had a beacon attached to it that helped the “kill vehicle” score a hit. The General Accounting Office has charged, ” As a result of testing shortfalls and the limited time available to test the BMDS being fielded, system effectiveness will be largely unproven when the initial capability goes on alert…” In other words, there is no evidence to demonstrate that missile defense currently works. There may never be since it is impossible to conduct a “realistic” test outside of an actual attack.

    Even if missile defense’s problems were limited to kinks that technicians could work out, what is the big rush to have a system ready this year? The Bush administration cites the necessity of dealing with ICBMs in the hands of “rogue states,” especially North Korea . However, North Korea poses only a distant threat in this area because it neither currently possesses the capability nor is likely to use an ICBM because the U.S. could easily track the missile and retaliate with devastating force.

    Missile defense is an old idea that just won’t die. It’s been kept alive through changing times and evolving threats through hubris and the will of powerful, well-connected interests. National missile defense drains resources needed to promote peace at home and abroad; threatens global security by trashing long-standing treaties; and provides incentives for other countries to step up their own missile programs.

    *Forrest Wilder is the Ruth Floyd Summer Intern at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a graduate of the University of Texas

  • In the Battlefields of Depleted Uranium

    When we imagine the horrors of nuclear warfare, the twin scepters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki naturally come to mind.  As the only cases of nuclear weapons actually used on a human population, Hiroshima and Nagasaki present, on one hand, the instant and indiscriminating annihilation of all living things and, on the other, the equally malignant long-term effects of fallout.  Yet, however much we may fear and loathe the Bomb, we know what to expect from it. Its destructive power is immense, but predictable. Nuclear warfare is absolute and final; there are no questions about its risks and consequences.  Guided by this knowledge, 50 years of global policy rested on the essential plank that neither side would risk the destruction of itself and the world by launching a first strike.  Contrast this with what many people call “nuclear warfare of a different sort”: the use of depleted uranium (DU) on the battlefield, an issue as thorny as it is enduring.

    DU is the waste product of enriched uranium that is used in nuclear weapons and reactors.  The process of “enriching” uranium involves taking naturally occurring uranium ore and separating the highly radioactive and unstable U-235 isotopes from their much less radioactive cousins, U-238.  This leftover “depleted” uranium is composed of over 99% U-238, and is 60% less radioactive than natural uranium.  However, tests conducted on DU tank armoring and munitions used in Kosovo by NATO troops demonstrated that trace amounts of plutonium and other radioactive elements do sometimes find their way into the mix.  The military is fond of trumpeting the technical truth that DU is less radioactive than that found in nature, but is less candid about its dangers when actually deployed as a weapon.

    The reason for the military’s love affair with DU is that it has proven effective.  DU has several physical properties that make it devastating as a material for both armor and armor-piercing projectiles.  DU is 1.7 times denser than lead and “self-sharpens” as it penetrates metal, allowing it to rip through opponent tanks like “a knife through butter,” in the words of many soldiers who have struggled to explain its awesome power.  DU is also “pyrophonetic,” meaning that it catches fire in the air.  Upon hitting armor, it explodes and releases millions of tiny particles that can be inhaled.  Besides incinerating the occupants of the vehicle, the toxic dust can contaminate the tank and the surrounding area.

    During DU’s debut in Gulf War I, the A-10 Thunderbolt “tank-killer” aircraft and the M1A1 Abrams tank were able to decimate the Iraqi tank forces with almost no US casualties.  The bullets weren’t the only “success.” Stories abound, perhaps apocryphal, that shells Iraqis fired at DU-armored tanks simply bounced off.  In the aftermath of the Gulf War, DU was celebrated as one of the many lethal tools that led to the overwhelming US victory over Iraq .  DU was such a smashing success that it was trotted out again in Kosovo , Bosnia , and Gulf War II.

    If soldiers liked it, then military planners like it even more.  DU provides them with an expedient solution to much of the waste generated by nuclear production.  The Department of Defense (DoD) has a 1.2 billion-pound stockpile of DU, which it happily gives away to weapons manufacturers – “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”  Defense companies take the heretofore-useless waste and manufacture bullets that are 10 times cheaper than the less powerful tungsten alternative.  Then, on the battlefield, planes and tanks can blow up the bad guys while junking the uranium waste for someone else to deal with.  It’s almost too good to be true.

    Except, there’s a hitch.  The debate over whether DU has caused harm to soldiers and civilians has raged for almost 15 years now.  After the first Gulf War, thousands of British and American veterans began exhibiting a host of mystifying symptoms – shortness of breath, diarrhea, muscle pain, tiredness, lack of concentration, and depression – that by 1993 assumed the name, “Gulf War Syndrome.”  Fourteen years and hundreds of studies later, the cause of the veterans’ ailment has been narrowed down to: stress; nerve gas exposure; pesticides; desert diseases; parasites; pollution from burning oil wells; sand; biological agents; DU or some combination thereof.  Naturally, veterans are frustrated with the inconclusiveness of the medical studies and angry with the Pentagon for insufficient medical care and what they see as blatant prevarication.

    In many respects, the military has gone out of its way to avoid taking responsibility for Gulf War Syndrome.  When thousands of vets stepped forward to report their illnesses, the Army Surgeon General’s office insisted that only 35 veterans had been exposed to DU. Despite growing pressure, the Pentagon toed this line until 1998 when they finally admitted, “Combat troops or those carrying out support functions generally did not know that DU-contaminated equipment such as enemy vehicles struck by DU rounds required special handling. The failure to properly disseminate such information to troops at all levels may have resulted in thousands of unnecessary exposures.”  Up to this point, the Department of Veteran Affairs, believing the Pentagon, had only conducted one study of 33 soldiers exposed to “friendly fire.”  The VA trumpeted the findings of the study – that none of the soldiers had “uranium-related adverse outcomes.”  However, advocates for veterans’ health acquired internal memoranda from the Pentagon which showed that one of the study participants has cancer and that the VA knew the sample size was too small for accurate results.

    As recently as 2004, British officials went so far as to accuse their soldiers of “faking” Gulf War Syndrome.  In this vacuum of conclusive evidence, many veterans along with outside medical experts and activists have formulated their own opinions.  DU has become suspect Number One.  An excellent 2003 report entitled “Case Narrative: Depleted Uranium (DU) Exposures,” published by a coalition of veterans, nuclear experts, and activists, summarizes this point-of-view:

      Our investigation leads us to conclude that the United States Department of Defense (DoD) has engaged in a deliberate attempt to avoid responsibility for consciously allowing the widespread exposure of hundreds of thousands of United States and coalition servicemen and women to more than 630,000 pounds of depleted uranium released by US tanks and aircraft during the Persian Gulf War. The Department of Defense’s actions regarding depleted uranium exposures have been characterized by a blatant disregard for existing laws and regulations, human rights, and common sense. The Pentagon’s desire to ensure the future use of depleted uranium ammunition has taken precedence over the need to protect American troops from exposure to depleted uranium and the requirement to provide medical care to servicemen and women who have developed serious health problems due to their exposure to depleted uranium.

    Despite this strong stance, the author of this study, Dan Fahey, is quick to point out in interviews that while the DoD has been negligent in pursuing the possibility of DU as a cause of the illness, some anti-DU activists’ shrill accusations have beggared the debate.  This has allowed military leaders to ignore dissenters and hide behind what they call “inconclusive” medical evidence.  The combination of officialdom’s intransigence and the victims’ (rightful) suspicions has soured relations on all sides and led to a severe politicization of the issue.

    However, one of the preeminent medical experts on Gulf War Syndrome, Robert Haley of the University of Texas ‘s Southwestern medical center in Dallas , believes he has made substantial headway in figuring out the cause or causes of the soldiers’ problems, much to the chagrin of defense officials.  By studying the brain images of deployed troops, he pinpointed damage that resonated with preexisting research on the effects of sarin gas on rats. (Soldiers were exposed to low-level sarin gas during chemical fires in Iraq ).  As Haley’s work gained credibility through more detailed study and corroboration with other scientists, the US government began nixing the funding.  On 4 August 2004 , Haley appealed in person to the British government for help to continue his research.  Haley’s hypothesis does not preclude the possibility that DU did contribute to some of the illnesses associated with Gulf War Syndrome; however, it may foreshadow a permanent sidelining of DU as a dangerous and inhumane weapon.  That would be a shame.

    If the military treats suffering veterans so dismissively, one can rest assured that foreign civilians exposed to toxic battlefields receive even less concern.  In each of the conflicts where the US employed DU weaponry – Gulf War I, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Gulf War II – civilians, the medical community, and the government have complained of elevated rates of cancer, birth defects, and other health problems in the aftermath of the fighting.  Children are especially susceptible.  In a revelatory film about DU shot by a German crew, young Iraqi children are shown handling DU tank shells, playing on contaminated vehicles, and collecting scraps of radioactive junk.  Siegwart-Horst Gunther, a German epidemiologist, interviews Iraqi doctors who tell of cases of cancer increasing ten-fold in the years after the first Gulf War.  The doctors proffer pictures of infants born with horrific defects – grotesquely bloated bellies, external bladders, missing limbs – that they said were never seen before.  In their minds, there is no doubt that DU is to blame.  And that the US is waging a war of genocide.  The Pentagon counters that Saddam was behind these claims, stage-managing a propaganda war against the US .  Yet, many Western medical experts, friends of neither Saddam nor the US government, have conducted both fieldwork in Iraq and research in the lab that convinces them that the links between DU and Iraqi sicknesses are clear.

    In some instances even the military seems to admit that DU is inherently dangerous to human beings and the environment.  In the US , the Army has decided to clean up the DU-contaminated Nevada Test Site.  At an ammunition range in Indiana , the US military may spend up to $6 billion to remove 68,000 kilograms of DU ammunition waste.  The US Navy has opted to use tungsten bullets instead of DU. In Kosovo, British soldiers were issued protective suits to wear when handling DU-contaminated objects.  In 1993, the US Army Surgeon General’s Office found that the “[e]xpected physiological effects from exposure to DU dust include possible increased risk of cancer (lung or bone) and kidney damage.”

    In order to condemn DU, we do not need absolute empirical verification – the likelihood of achieving such a thing is unlikely in this case.  In order to ask the international community to make the use of DU a war crime, we do not need the Pentagon to confess wrongdoing.  In order to call for a full investigation of the Gulf War Syndrome and the possible links between DU and civilian illness, we do not need the blessing of the established medical community or the government.   Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclear age almost 60 years ago, scattering poisonous seeds of which many are just now coming to fruition.  Many of these problems are extremely complicated and the answers not immediately clear. Nonetheless, it is imperative that we approach the issues of DU and Gulf War Syndrome with the same degree of concern and compassion as we do the more spectacular problems of full-blown nuclear warfare.

    *Forrest Wilder is the 2004 Ruth Floyd Summer Intern at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a graduate of the University of Texas.

  • DU Syndrome Stricken Vets Denied Care

    Pentagon Hides DU Dangers to Deny Medical Care to Vets

     

    Far from the radioactive battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan , another war is being waged. This war, over the use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons, is being fought between the military top brass and the men who understand the dangers of DU: former military doctors and nuclear scientists.

    This war is for the truth about uranium weapons, and the consequences of their use, and has been waged for more than 13 years-since the U.S. government first used DU weapons against Iraq . Most Americans, however, are unaware of this historic struggle, because the Pentagon has used its power to prevent information about DU from reaching the public.

    John Hanchette, editor of USA Today from 1991 to 2001, in a recent interview with anti-DU activist Leuren Moret, said he had written several news stories about the effects of DU on gulf wars veterans. Every time he was ready to publish a story about the devastating illnesses afflicting soldiers, however, the Pentagon called USA Today and pressured him not to publish the story. Hanchette was eventually replaced as editor and now teaches journalism to college students.

    Dr. Doug Rokke, 37-year Army veteran and former director of the Army’s Depleted Uranium Project, has become an outspoken “warrior for peace” in the war against DU weapons. Rokke is fighting for medical care for all people exposed to DU: active soldiers, veterans and civilians, including Iraqis, and for “remediation” or cleansing of all DU-contaminated land.

    “Anyone who demands medical care and environmental remediation faces ongoing and blatant retaliation,” Rokke told AFP. “Anybody who speaks up-their career ends.”

    During Gulf War I, Rokke was theater health physicist with the 12th Preventive Medicine Command professional staff and served on three special operations teams. Rokke and members of his teams were exposed to large amounts of uranium during recovery of U.S. tanks and armored vehicles mistakenly hit by DU weapons.

    Today, Rokke is fighting to get the Pentagon to abide by its regulations regarding care for individuals exposed to uranium and remediation of contaminated areas.

    The military records of one of Rokke’s comrades, who suffers from the effects of DU exposure, have been completely “gutted” from Army archives, Rokke told AFP.

    “They [defense officials] willfully ignore existing Department of Defense directives that require prompt and effective medical care be provided to ‘all’ exposed individuals,” Rokke says.

    Rokke points to a U.S. Army Medical Command memo dated April 29, 2004, from Lt. Gen. James B. Peake about medical management of Army personnel exposed to DU. The memo, which says “all personnel with actual or potential exposures to DU will be identified, assessed, treated (if needed), and assigned a potential exposure level (I, II, or III),” reiterates the U.S. Army regulations originally written by Rokke in 1991, he said.

    “A radio bioassay has to be done within a few days of exposure,” Rokke said. “This means nasal and pharyngeal swabs being taken and 24-hour urine and fecal analysis.

    “Today,” Rokke writes, “although medical problems continue to develop, medical care is denied or delayed for all uranium-exposed casualties while Defense Department and British Ministry of Defense officials continue to deny any correlation between uranium exposure and adverse health and environmental effects.”

    Rokke said the individuals at the Department of Defense are engaged in a “criminal” conspiracy to deny the toxicity of DU weapons. “The lies by senior Defense Department officials are designed to sustain use of uranium munitions and avoid liability for adverse health and environmental effects,” he said. According to Rokke, a recent Gulf War Review reported that only 262 vets had been treated for DU poisoning through September 2003.

    The military’s strategy of lies and concealment about DU began in March 1991, shortly after the first widespread combat use of DU weapons by the U.S. government in Iraq , Rokke said.

    On March 1, 1991, Lt. Col. Michael V. Ziehmn of Los Alamos National Lab wrote a memo about the effectiveness of DU penetrators. The “future existence” of DU weapons should be ensured by active “proponency” by the Department of Defense, Ziehmn wrote.

    “If proponency is not garnered, it is possible that we stand to lose a valuable combat capability,” Ziehmn wrote. “I believe we should keep this sensitive issue at mind when after-action reports are written.”

    When American Free Press began this series on DU weapons, the U.S. Army alerted the Centers for Disease Control, an Atlanta-based agency of the Department of Health and Human Services.

    “The CDC is going to do a whitewash on DU,” Marion Fulk, a former nuclear chemical physicist at Lawrence Livermore Lab, said. Fulk told AFP he had received this information directly from CDC officials.

    AFP asked Stephanie C. Creel of the CDC about its position on the toxicity of DU. Creel said the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) on-line “fact sheet” would provide the “most in-depth information” on the subject.

    The ATSDR fact sheet: “The radiation damage from exposure to high levels of natural or depleted uranium are [sic] not known to cause cancer.”

    “No apparent public health hazard,” the CDC assessment of Livermore lab, published June 29, said about local exposure levels to tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, Fulk said.

    “It’s nonsense,” Fulk said. “It’s been dumped all around the area. It goes through glass and steel.”

    Depleted uranium is a misnomer, according to Fulk. Depleted uranium, mostly U-238, is uranium that has had the naturally occurring fissile material, U-235, removed. DU is very radioactive, however. While one gram of U-235 emits 81,000 alpha particles per second, U-238 emits 12,000 per second. These high-energy particles coming from DU particles lodged in the body cause the most damage, according to Fulk and others.

    “Depleted uranium dust that is inhaled gets transferred from the lungs to the regional lymph nodes, where they can bombard a small number of cells in their immediate vicinity with intense alpha radiation,” said Dr. Asaf Durakovic, former Pentagon expert on DU.

    Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), a defense contractor in San Diego , published an extensive article about the dangers of DU six months before President George H.W. Bush waged war against Iraq in 1991.

    “Under combat conditions, the most exposed individuals are probably the ground troops [who] re-enter a battlefield following the exchange of armor-piercing (DU) munitions,” SAIC published in its July 1990 magazine.

    “Short-term effects of high doses can result in death, while long-term effects of low doses have been implicated in cancer,” SAIC wrote.

    AFP submitted written questions to the U.S. Army Medical Command asking how the Army can claim that DU exposure is harmless when military documents have stressed its lethal toxicity.

    Mark A. Melanson, of the Army’s Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine in Aberdeen , Md. , responded in an email: “The two positions are not opposing. As with all potentially hazardous material, the amount determines the risk.”

    Melanson wrote that the Army was complying with its own regulations regarding medical care for DU exposure, saying: “Soldiers are being screened by completing the post deployment health questionnaire upon demobilization. Troops identified as being at potential risk for DU exposure are directed to provide a urine bioassay for analysis.”

    Rokke said: “That is too late. Hence they find a way out.”

    AFP repeatedly tried to speak to Melanson about the quantity of DU that the Army considered hazardous. He did not return phone calls.

    “An individual could [safely] breathe in up to a gram per year every year for 50 years,” Melanson recently told The New York Daily News.

    “That’s absolutely absurd,” Fulk said. Fulk said the number of alpha particle emissions from a gram of DU lodged in the body over a year would be about the same as one-10th of all the cells in his body.

    The inhaled DU particles have a tendency to bind with phosphate in the human body, found in the bones and the DNA. The alpha particle being emitted to the cells nearby “is doing the dirty work,” Fulk said.

    Painful breathing and respiratory problems are the first and most common symptoms of DU inhalation, Rokke said. Dr. Janette Sherman told AFP she met a 31-year-old female former soldier at a Maryland veteran’s hospital who had recently served in Kuwait . Sherman, a toxicologist, was shocked when the young woman told her that she required a lung transplant.

    Finis