Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: DU weapons

  • 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.

  • The Real Dirty Bombs: Depleted Uranium

    Lost in the media circus about the Iraq war, supposedly being fought to prevent a tyrant from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, is the salient fact that the United States and Britain are actively waging chemical and nuclear warfare in Iraq – using depleted uranium munitions.

    The corporate-controlled press has failed to inform the public that, in spite of years of UN inspections and numerous international treaties, tons of banned weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – used and unused – remain in Iraq. Indeed, both chemical and radioactive WMD have been – and continue to be used against U.S. and coalition soldiers.

    The media silence surrounding these banned WMD, and the horrendous consequences of their use, is due to the simple fact that they are being used by the U.S.-led coalition. They are the new “Silver Bullet” in the U.S. arsenal. They are depleted uranium weapons.

    Depleted uranium (DU) weapons were first used during the first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. The Pentagon estimated that between 315 and 350 tons of DU were fired during the first Gulf War. During the 2003 invasion and current occupation of Iraq, U.S. and British troops have reportedly used more than five times as many DU bombs and shells as the total number used during the 1991 war.

    While the use of DU weapons and their effect on human health and the environment are subjects of extreme importance the Pentagon is noticeably reluctant to discuss these weapons. Despite numerous calls to specific individuals identified as being the appointed spokesmen on the subject, not one would answer their phone during normal business hours for the purpose of this article.

    Dr. Doug Rokke, on the other hand, former director of the U.S. Army’s Depleted Uranium Project, is very willing to talk about the effects of DU. Rokke was involved in the “clean up” of 34 Abrams tanks and Bradley armored vehicles hit by friendly fire during the 1991 Gulf War. Today he suffers from the ill effects of DU in his body.

    Rokke told American Free Press that the Pentagon uses DU weapons because they are the most effective at killing and destroying everything they hit. The highest level of the U.S. and British governments have “totally disregarded the consequences” of the use of DU weapons, Rokke said.

    The first Gulf War was the largest friendly fire incident in the history of American warfare, Rokke says. “The majority of the casualties were the result of friendly fire,” he told AFP.

    DU is used in many forms of ammunition as an armor penetrator because of its extreme weight and density. The uranium used in these missiles and bombs is a by-product of the nuclear enrichment process. Experts say the Department of Energy has 100 million tons of DU and using it in weapons saves the government money on the cost of its disposal.

    Rather than disposing of the radioactive waste, it is shaped into penetrator rods used in the billions of rounds being fired in Iraq and Afghanistan . The radioactive waste from the U.S. nuclear weapons industry has, in effect, been forcibly exported and spread in the environments of Iraq , Afghanistan , the former Yugoslavia , Puerto Rico , and elsewhere.

    THE REAL “DIRTY BOMBS”

    “A flying rod of solid uranium 18-inches long and three-quarters of an inch in diameter,” is what becomes of a DU tank round after it is fired, Rokke said. Because Uranium-238 is pyrophoric, meaning it burns on contact with air, DU rounds are burning as they fly.

    When the DU penetrator hits an object it breaks up and causes secondary explosions, Rokke said. “It’s way beyond a dirty bomb,” Rokke said, referring to the terror weapon that uses conventional explosives to spread radioactive material.

    Some of the uranium used with DU weapons vaporizes into extremely small particles, which are dispersed into the atmosphere where they remain until they fall to the ground with the rain. As a gas, the chemically toxic and radioactive uranium can easily enter the body through the skin or the lungs and be carried around the world until it falls to earth with the rain.

    AFP asked Marion Falk, a retired chemical physicist who built nuclear bombs for more than 20 years at Lawrence Livermore lab, if he thought that DU weapons operate in a similar manner as a dirty bomb. “That’s exactly what they are,” Falk said. “They fit the description of a dirty bomb in every way.”

    According to Falk, more than 30 percent of the DU fired from the cannons of U.S. tanks is reduced to particles one-tenth of a micron (one millionth of a meter) in size or smaller on impact.

    “The larger the bang” the greater the amount of DU that is dispersed into the atmosphere, Falk said. With the larger missiles and bombs, nearly 100 percent of the DU is reduced to radioactive dust particles of the “micron size” or smaller, he said.

    While the Pentagon officially denies the dangers of DU weapons, since at least 1943 the military has been aware of the extreme toxicity of uranium dispersed as a gas. A declassified memo written by James B. Conant and two other physicists working on the U.S. nuclear project during the Second World War, and sent to Brig. Gen. L.R. Groves on October 30, 1943, provides the evidence:

    “As a gas warfare instrument the [radioactive] material would be ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground-fired projectile, land vehicles, or aerial bombs,” the 1943 memo reads. “In this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small. It has been estimated that one millionth of a gram accumulation in a person’s body would be fatal. There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty.”

    The use of radioactive materials “as a terrain contaminant” to “deny terrain to either side except at the expense of exposing personnel to harmful radiations” is also discussed in the Groves memo of 1943.

    “Anybody, civilian or soldier, who breathes these particles has a permanent dose, and it’s not going to decrease very much over time,” Leonard Dietz, a retired nuclear physicist with 33 years experience told the New York Daily News . “In the long run . veterans exposed to ceramic uranium oxide have a major problem.”

    Inhaled particles of radioactive uranium oxide dust will either lodge in the lungs or travel through the body, depending on their size. The smallest particles can be carried through cell walls and “affect the master code – the __expression of the DNA,” Falk told AFP.

    Inhaled DU can “fool around with the keys” and do damage to “practically anything,” Falk said. “It affects the body in so many ways and there are so many different symptoms that they want to give it different names,” Falk said about the wide variety of ailments afflicting Gulf War veterans.

    Today, more than one out of every three veterans from the first Gulf War are permanently disabled. Terry Jemison of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs said that of the 592,561 discharged veterans from the 1991 war in Iraq , 179,310 are receiving disability compensation and another 24,763 cases are pending.

    The “epigenetic damage” done by DU has resulted in many grossly deformed children born in areas such as southern Iraq where tons of DU have contaminated the environment and local population. An untold number of Americans have also been born with severe birth defects as a result of DU contamination.

    The New York Daily News conducted a study on nine recently returned soldiers from the New York National Guard. Four of the nine were found to have “almost certainly” inhaled radioactive dust from exploded DU shells.

    Laboratory tests revealed two manmade forms of uranium in urine samples from four of the 9 soldiers. The four soldiers are the first confirmed cases of inhaled DU from the current Iraq war.

    “These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were military police not exposed to the heat of battle,” said Dr. Asaf Duracovic, who examined the soldiers and performed the testing. “Other American soldiers who were in combat must have more DU exposure,” Duracovic said. Duracovic is a colonel in the Army reserves and served in the 1991 Gulf War.

    The test results showing that four of nine New York guardsmen test positive for DU “suggest the potential for more extensive radiation exposure among coalition troops and Iraqi civilians,” the Daily News reported.

    “A large number of American soldiers [in Iraq ] may have had significant exposure to uranium oxide dust,” Dr. Thomas Fasey, a pathologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center and an expert on depleted uranium said, “And the health impact is worrisome for the future.”

    HOTTER THAN HELL

    “I’m hotter than hell,” Rokke told AFP. The Dept. of Energy tested Rokke in 1994 and found that he was excreting more than 5,000 times the permissible level of depleted uranium. Rokke, however, was not informed of the results until 1996.

    As director of the Depleted Uranium Project in 1994-95, Rokke said his task was three fold: determine how to provide medical care for DU victims, how to clean it up, and how to educate and train personnel using DU weapons.

    Today, Rokke says that DU cannot be cleaned up and there is no medical care. “Once you’re zapped – you’re zapped,” Rokke said. Among the health problems Rokke is suffering as a result of DU contamination is brittle teeth. He said that he just paid out $400 for an operation for teeth that have broken off. “The uranium replaces the calcium in your teeth and bones,” Rokke said.

    “You fight for medical care every day of your life,” he said.

    “There are over 30,000 casualties from this Iraq war,” Rokke said.

    The three tasks set out for the Depleted Uranium Project have all failed, Rokke said. He wants to know why medical care is not being provided for all the victims of DU and why the environment is not being cleaned up.

    “They have to be held accountable,” Rokke said, naming President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and British prime minister Tony Blair. They chose to use DU weapons and “totally disregarded the consequences.”