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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.

August 31, 2004
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.

August 25, 2004
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

August 20, 2004
Depleted Uranium Blamed for Cancer Clusters Among Iraq War Vets

A discovery by American Free Press that nearly half of the recently returned soldiers in one unit from Iraq have “malignant growths” is “critical evidence,” according to experts, that depleted uranium weapons are responsible for the huge number of disabled Gulf War vets – and damage to their DNA.

A growing number of U.S. military personnel who are serving, or have served, in the Persian Gulf, Iraq , and Afghanistan have become sick and disabled from a variety of symptoms commonly known as Gulf War Syndrome. Depleted uranium (DU) weapons have been blamed for causing many of the symptoms.

“Gulf War vets are coming down with these symptoms at twice the rate of vets from previous conflicts,” said Barbara A. Goodno from the Dept. of Defense’s Deployment Health Support Directorate.

A recent discovery by American Free Press that nearly half the soldiers in one returned unit have malignant growths has provided the scientific community with “critical evidence,” experts say, to help understand exactly how depleted uranium affects humans – and their DNA.

One of the first published researchers of Gulf War Syndrome, Dr. András Korényi-Both told AFP that 27-28 percent of Gulf War veterans have suffered chronic health problems, more than 5 times the rate of Viet Nam vets, and 4 times the rate of Korean War vets.

Korényi-Both said his son had recently returned from Iraq , where he had been part of the initial assault from Kuwait to Baghdad . From his unit of 20 men, 8 now have “malignant growths,” Korényi-Both said.

Dr. Korényi-Both is not an expert on DU, but has written extensively about how the fine desert sand blowing around Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula provides a ideal vehicle for toxins, increasing the range and effect of biological and chemical agents, such as DU, that attach themselves to the particles of sand.

Korényi-Both described how, during the 1991 Gulf War, he and others had inhaled large quantities of sand dust that could have been laden with chemical or biological agents. The sand “destroyed our immune systems,” he said.

FULK’S THEORY

Marion Fulk, a former nuclear chemical physicist at Lawrence Livermore lab, is investigating how DU affects the human body. Fulk said that 8 malignancies out of 20, in 16 months, “is spectacular – and of serious concern.”

The high rate of malignancies found in this unit appears to have been caused by exposure to DU weapons on the battlefield. If DU were found to be the cause, this case would be “critical evidence” of Fulk’s theory on how the DU particulate affects DNA.

Such quick malignancies are caused by the particulate effect of DU, according to Fulk:

When DU (Uranium 238) decays, it transforms into two short-lived and “very hot” isotopes – Thorium 234 and Protactinium 234. As it transforms in the body, the DU particle is firing off faster and faster “bullets” into the DNA, Fulk said, or wherever it is lodged. Because uranium has a natural attraction to phosphorus, however, it is drawn to the phosphate in the DNA.

As the Uranium 238 decays, it releases alpha and beta particles with millions of electron volts. When a DU particle makes this transformation in the human body it releases “huge amounts of energy in the same location doing lots of damage very quickly,” Fulk said.

Thorium 234 has a half-life of 24 days and emits a beta particle of .270 million electron volts as it transforms into Protactinium 234, which has a half-life of less than 7 hours. Protactinium then emits a beta particle of 2.19 million electron volts as it transforms into the more stable Uranium 234.

The chemical binding energy in the molecules of the human cell is less than 10 electron volts. One alpha particle from U-238 is over 4 million electron volts, which is like “nuking a cell.”

Leuren Moret, a scientist who is opposed to the use of DU, compared it to sitting in front of a fire and putting a red-hot coal in your mouth. “The nuclear establishment wants us to believe that it is like sitting in front of the fire and warming the whole body evenly – and that no harm is done, but that is not the reality,” she said.

“We can expect to see multiple cancers in one person,” Moret said. “These multiple unrelated cancers in the same individual have been reported in Yugoslavia and Iraq in families that had no history of any cancer. This is unknown in the previous studies of cancer,” she said. “A new phenomenon.”

The Pentagon’s Goodno questioned Dr. Korényi-Both’s report that 8 of 20 recently returned soldiers from one unit had experienced malignant growths. Goodno and Korényi-Both did agree, however, that Iraqi chemical and biological agents had not played a role in the 2003 invasion.

This is significant because three factors have generally been blamed for causing Gulf War Syndrome: Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, the cocktail of vaccinations given to coalition soldiers, and depleted uranium. The absence of any detectable chemical or biological agents during the 2003 invasion of Iraq reduces the number of potential factors for the malignancies in the veterans to pre-war vaccinations and DU.

Statistics published in Encyclopedia Britannica’s 2003 Almanac indicate that 325,000 Gulf War vets were receiving compensation for service-related disabilities in 2000. The almanac lists 580,400 combatants in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, yet only 467 U.S. personnel were actually wounded during the conflict. The 325,000 disabled Gulf War vets are equivalent to 56 percent of the number of military personnel “serving in the theater of operation.”

Furthermore, in 2000, nine years after the three-week war in Iraq had ended, the number of disabled vets from the Gulf War was increasing yearly by more than 43,000. While the number of disabled vets from previous wars is decreasing by about 35,000 per year, since the “War on Terror” began in 2001, the total number of disabled vets has grown to some 2.5 million.

MORE DISABLED VETS

“More than ever before,” Brad Flohr of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs said about the total number of disabled vets. Asked if there are more disabled vets now than even after World War II, Flohr said he believed so.

Terry Jemison of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs told AFP that current statistics indicate that more than half a million veterans of the 14-year-old “Gulf War era” are now receiving disability compensation. During this period, some 7,035 soldiers are reported having been wounded in Iraq .

With 518,739 disabled “Gulf-era veterans” currently receiving disability compensation, according to Jemison, the number of veterans disabled after the war is more than 73 times the total number of wounded, in and out of combat, from the entire 14-year conflict with Iraq.

DEPLETED URANIUM WEAPONS

Last December, Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a nuclear medicine expert who has conducted extensive research on depleted uranium, examined nine soldiers from the 442nd Military Police Company of New York and found that four of the men had absorbed or inhaled depleted uranium (U-238).

Several of the men had traces of another uranium isotope, U-236, which is only produced in a nuclear reaction process. U-236 is a man-made isotope of uranium.

“These men were almost certainly exposed to radioactive weapons on the battlefield,” Durakovic said.

“Due to the current proliferation of DU weaponry, the battlefields of the future will be unlike any battlefields in history,” Durakovic, then Chief of Nuclear Medicine for the Veterans Administration said after the first Gulf War, in which he served.

Since 1991, the U.S. military has used DU in munitions as penetrating rods, which destroy enemy tanks and their occupants, and as armor on U.S. tanks. When DU penetrating rods strike a hard target some of the radioactive and chemically toxic DU is vaporized into ultra-fine particles that are easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin.

According to a survey of 10,051 Gulf War veterans, conducted between 1991 and 1995 by Vic Sylvester and the Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm Association, 82 percent of veterans reported having entered captured Iraqi vehicles. “This would suggest that 123,000 soldiers have been directly exposed to DU,” Durakovic said.

“Since the effects of contamination by uranium cannot be directed or contained, uranium’s chemical and radiological toxicity will create environments that are hostile not only to the health of enemy forces but of one’s own forces as well,” Durakovic said.

“Because of the chemical and radiological toxicity of DU, the small number of particles trapped in the lungs, kidneys, and bone greatly increase the risk of cancer and all other illnesses over time,” Durakovic, an expert of internal contamination of radio-isotopes, said.

According to Durakovic, other symptoms associated with DU poisoning are: emotional and mental deterioration, fatigue, loss of bowel and bladder control, and numerous forms of cancer. Such symptoms are increasing showing up in Iraq ‘s children and among Gulf War veterans and their offspring, he said.

“Although I personally served in Operation Desert Shield as Unit Commander,” Durakovic said, “my expertise of internal contamination was never used because we were never informed of the intended use of DU prior to or during the war.”

“The numbers are overwhelming, but the potential horrors only get worse,” Robert C. Koehler of the Chicago-based Tribune Media Services wrote in his March 25 article on DU weapons, “Silent Genocide.”

“DU dust does more than wreak havoc on the immune systems of those who breathe it or touch it; the substance also alters one’s genetic code,” Koehler wrote. “The Pentagon’s response to such charges is denial, denial, denial. And the American media is its moral co-conspirator.”

As AFP reported last week, the smallest particles of DU, when inhaled, are capable of moving throughout the human body, passing through cell walls and affecting the person’s Master Code, according to Fulk, and the “_expression of the DNA.”

Four years after the Gulf War of 1991, Life magazine published a photo-essay entitled “The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm,” which focused on the numerous cases of severe birth defects that had occurred in families of veterans from that war.

Life reported, “Of the 400 sick vets who had already answered [Don Riegle’s Senate Banking] committee inquiries, a startling 65 percent reported birth defects or immune-system problems in children conceived after the war.”

AFP asked the Dept. of Veterans Affairs if they kept records of the birth defects occurring among the families of veterans, and was told they do not.

August 15, 2004
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.”

August 6, 2004
Nuclear Weapons in Iran: Plowshare or Sword?

A recurring fear haunts the West’s increasingly tense confrontation with Iran: Is its work on civilian nuclear power actually a ruse for making a deadly atomic arsenal, as has been the case with other countries?

Next month, the United Nations plans to take up that question at a board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna . The diplomatic backdrop includes possible sanctions and even the threat of war.

“If Iran goes nuclear, you worry that Hezbollah goes nuclear,” said Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, a private group in Washington , referring to the Iran-backed terrorist group.

The Iranian crisis, and related ones simmering in North Korea and also around Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani expert who recently confessed to running nuclear black markets, are giving new urgency to limiting proliferation, a central danger of the atomic era. Recently, international inspectors discovered that North Korea may have clandestinely supplied uranium to Libya , demonstrating how an aspiring state can secretly reach for nuclear arms.

The development of such arsenals is often hard to hide, because it takes place in large industrial complexes where nuclear power and nuclear weapons are joined at the hip – using technologies that are often identical, or nearly so. Today, with what seems like relative ease, scientists can divert an ostensibly peaceful program to make not only electricity but also highly pure uranium or plutonium, both excellent bomb fuels.

Experts now talk frankly about a subject that was once taboo: “virtual” weapon states – Japan, Germany, Belgium, Canada, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Taiwan and a dozen other countries that have mastered the basics of nuclear power and could, if they wanted, quickly cross the line to make nuclear arms, probably in a matter or months. Experts call it breakout.

The question now, driven largely by the perception that the world is entering a dangerous new phase of nuclear proliferation, is whether the two endeavors can be separated. And as difficult as that may seem, new initiatives are rising to meet the challenge.

Last year, North Korea stunned the world by withdrawing from the Nonproliferation Treaty. It was the first time a nation had dropped out of the 1968 pact, setting a grim precedent and prompting warnings of the accord’s demise.

If another virtual power crosses the line, experts fear, it could start a chain reaction in which others feel they have no alternative but to do likewise.

Yet a country like Iran can retain its virtual-weapons status – and the threat of breakout – even if the International Atomic Energy Agency gives it a clean bill of health. That kind of quandary is driving the wider debate on ways to safeguard nuclear power, especially given that the world may rely on it increasingly as worries grow about global warming and oil shortages.

“We can’t give absolute guarantees,” said Graham Andrew, a senior scientist at the agency. “But there will be technological developments to make the fuel cycle more proliferation-resistant.”

Other experts agree. “The future looks better than the past in terms of this whole problem,” said Rose Gottemoeller, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “At the moment, it’s a very, very fast-moving arena that a lot of people are into and thinking about.”

The central compact of the nuclear age – what critics call a deal with the devil – is that countries can get help from other nations in developing nuclear power if they pledge to renounce nuclear arms. That principle was codified in the 1968 treaty and has produced a vast apparatus of the International Atomic Energy Agency that not only helps nations go peacefully nuclear but also monitors them for cheating.

But surveillance has proved far from perfect, and states have proved far from trustworthy.

“If you look at every nation that’s recently gone nuclear,” said Mr. Leventhal of the Nuclear Control Institute, “they’ve done it through the civilian nuclear fuel cycle: Iraq , North Korea , India , Pakistan , South Africa . And now we’re worried about Iran .”

The moral, he added, is that atoms for peace can be “a shortcut to atoms for war.”

Moreover, the raw material is growing. The world now has 440 commercial nuclear reactors and 31 more under construction.

Experts say Iran provides a good example of the breakout danger. With the right tweaks, its sprawling complex now under construction could make arms of devastating force. Recently, mistrust over that prospect soared when inspectors found that Iran had hidden some of its most sensitive nuclear work as long as 18 years.

In the central desert near Yazd , the country now mines uranium in shafts up to a fifth of a mile deep.

At Isfahan , an ancient city that boasts a top research center, it is building a factory for converting the ore into uranium hexafluoride. When heated, the crystals turn into a gas ideal for processing to recover uranium’s rare U-235 isotope, which, in bombs and reactors, easily splits in two to produce bursts of atomic energy.

Nearby at Natanz, Iran aims to feed the gas into 50,000 centrifuges – tall, thin machines that spin extraordinarily fast to separate the relatively light U-235 isotope from its heavier cousin, U-238. It recently came to light that Iran had gained much help in making its centrifuges from Dr. Khan and his secretive network.

Iran says it wants to enrich the uranium to about 5 percent U-235, the level needed for nuclear reactors.

But enrichment is one place that good power programs can easily go bad, nonproliferation experts say. By simply lengthening the spin cycle, a nation can enrich the uranium up to 90 percent U-235, the high purity usually preferred for bombs.

Moreover, a dirty little secret of the atomic world is that the hardest step is enriching uranium for reactors, not bombs. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, an arms control group in Washington , said the step from reactor to weapon fuel took roughly 25 percent more effort.

The whirling centrifuges at Natanz could make fuel for up to 20 nuclear weapons every year, according to the Carnegie Endowment. Others put the figure at 25 bombs a year.

The Iranians are building a large power reactor at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf meant to be fueled with low-enriched uranium from Natanz. Here too, experts say, a good program can go bad.

Normally, uranium fuel stays in a reactor for three or four years and, as an inadvertent byproduct of atomic fission, becomes slowly riddled with plutonium 239, the other good material for making atom bombs. But the spent fuel also accumulates plutonium 240, which is so radioactive that it can be very difficult to turn into weapons.

But if the reactor’s fuel is changed frequently – every few months – that cuts the P-240 to preferable levels for building an arsenal. (And since less plutonium than uranium is needed for a blast of equal size, it is the preferred material for making compact warheads that are relatively easy to fit on missiles.)

John R. Bolton, the State Department’s under secretary for arms control, recently told Congress that after several years of operation, Bushehr could make enough plutonium for more than 80 nuclear weapons.

Iran strongly denies such ambitions.

“That we are on the verge of a nuclear breakthrough is true,” Hashemi Rafsanjani , Iran ‘s former president, said recently, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency. “But we are not seeking nuclear weapons.”

If Iran wanted to recover plutonium from Bushehr, or a different reactor under construction at Arak , it would have to extract the metal from spent fuel, a hard job because of the waste’s high radioactivity. Such reprocessing plants have legitimate commercial uses for turning nuclear detritus into new fuel, as France , Britain , Japan and Russia do.

Iran , too, has announced that it wants to master the complete nuclear fuel cycle, apparently including reprocessing. Last year, President Mohammad Khatami said the country wanted to recycle power-plant fuel. “We are determined,” he said in a televised speech, “to use nuclear technology for civilian purposes.”

Around the globe, experts are struggling to find ways to guarantee such good intentions: not just in Iran , but everywhere.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is calling for “multinational controls” on the production of any material that can be used for nuclear arms. If accepted, that would mean no single country could enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium on its own, but only in groups where members would verify each other’s honesty.

Early this month, Iran signaled that it might be interested in teaming with Russia and Europe to enrich uranium, giving arms controllers some hope of a peaceful resolution to the current crisis.

Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has called for sweetening the deal by guaranteeing members of a consortium lifetime fuel supplies and spent-fuel removal if they forgo enrichment and reprocessing plants.

“What you need is an incentive,” he said. One challenge, he added, would be convincing states that consortiums “won’t change their minds,” given that nuclear policy makers have often done so in the past.

President Bush has taken a harder line, proposing in a February speech to limit drastically the number of nations allowed to produce nuclear fuel. Only states that already have enrichment and reprocessing plants, he said, should do such work, and they in turn would service countries that aspire to nuclear power.

While many experts praise Mr. Bush’s attention to the nonproliferation issue, some have faulted his specifics. “It’s all sticks and no carrots,” said Mr. Bunn, adding that the Bush plan would only feed global resentment toward the nuclear club. “I think you can couch this to be more carrotlike.”

Down the road, a different approach involves developing new classes of reactors that would better resist nuclear proliferation, especially by making the recovery of plutonium 239 much harder. Many studies, including one last year at M.I.T., have championed better fuel cycles and security.

“There is potentially a pathway – diplomatic, technical – to see a significant global deployment” of safer technologies and strategies, said Ernest J. Moniz, a former Energy Department official who helped lead the M.I.T. study. “But it can’t happen without U.S. leadership and the U.S. partnering with other countries, and that will require a re-examination of our policies.”

Mr. Leventhal of the Nuclear Control Institute said too many of the proposals were too timid. Most fundamentally, he said, nations have to turn away from the commercial use of plutonium, which grows more abundant every day.

“Only denial and greed” can explain the world’s continuing to want plutonium for peaceful uses, he said, and added, “It may take the unthinkable happening before the political process can screw up the courage to put an end to this ridiculously dangerous industry.”

May 25, 2004
Nuclear Power

It is my belief, based on a professional lifetime of study, that further development of nuclear power presents an unacceptable radioactive curse on all future generations. Aside from the risks of accidents worse than we have so far seen, there is no suitable place in our environment to dispose of either present or future nuclear waste. Now massive public-relations efforts are being launched to retrain the public to trust the “experts.” Damaged gene pools and cancers, and a ruined environment, will be our legacy to future generations if we continue to build nuclear reactors and nuclear armaments. How many of our grandchildren are we willing to sacrifice for the continuation of nuclear electric power and nuclear war?

Nuclear Electric Utilites
The “peacetime” nuclear business in the United States is in bad shape. The hard fact is that nuclear power is the most subsidized of all industries, kept alive by taxpayer, rate-payer, and bondholder financed welfare, and by world wide military support. Abandoned reactors include Rancho Seco in California, Trojan in Oregon, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Shoreham on Long Island. All new reactors ordered since 1973 have been can-celed. Estimates of the cost of disposal rise fantastically above $500 million per reactor, and no one knows what to do with the radioactive stuff stored within and around them. The United States Department of Energy has expressed a desire for tritium to replenish the dwindling supply in its thermonuclear bomb stockpile. In order to survive, some electric utilities have expressed willingness to produce wartime tritium as a government-subsidized by-product of their nuclear electrical power.

Nuclear Construction Companies
Nuclear construction companies would like to build nuclear power plants, but it is unlikely that any unsubsidized nuclear power plant will be ordered by a US utility. The United States has proposed to provide reactors to North Korea to replace their “unsafe” nuclear plants. American, French, and Canadian nuclear companies are considering joint ventures to build power reactors in Indonesia and elsewhere, I presume with financial aid from US taxpayers. Now it is proposed that US nuclear corporations sell $60 billion of nuclear products to China, trusting that they will not use their ability to produce plutonium for bombs.

Nuclear War with Depleted Uranium
The US Atomic Energy Commission used its enormous diffusion plants to separate uranium-235 from natural uranium for the purpose of making nuclear bombs, like the one dropped on Hiroshima. The tons of depleted uranium (mostly uranium-238) left over from the diffusion process were to be a valuable material for conversion to plutonium fuel for breeder reactors. Because our breeder program has lost its support, depleted uranium is now a “waste” material in need of “recycling.” Its value for “peace” has been replaced by its value for waging nuclear war. In the Persian Gulf the US military recycled hundreds of tons of depleted uranium into armor piercing shells and protective armor for tanks. After piercing a tank wall the depleted uranium burned, forming a radioactive and chemically lethal aerosol, incinerating everyone inside the tank, then spreading unseen over Iraq. Sickness and death for all future time were spread indiscriminately among Iraqi soldiers and civilians (including children). American soldiers and their children became victims as part of the Gulf War Syndrome. Now US military suppliers plan to sell this “free” government bonanza on the profitable world military market.

Radioactive Pollution on a Worldwide Scale
The public has been conditioned by both corporate and government proponents of nuclear power to believe in the necessity for their inherently “safe” nuclear reactors to avert a coming energy crisis. The nuclear establishment advertises itself as the producer of “green” energy, completely ignoring the non-green effects of the manufacture and eventual disposal of reactors, their fuels, and their radioactive products. They claim that they are now ready to produce “safe” reactors. Extension of the analyses by which the experts support their claim of safety shows, I believe, that there is no possibility of a guaranteed safe reactor. There is certainly no way safely to dispose of nuclear waste into the environment. Reactors are bound occasionally to fail. They are complicated mechanical devices designed, built, and operated by fallible human beings, some of whom may be vindictive. Our reactors may be “weapons in the hands of our enemies,” susceptible to sabotage. Despite attempts at secrecy, the list of reactor accidents fills whole books. In 1986 the Chernobyl reactor exploded, blowing off its two-thousand-ton lid, polluting the northern hemisphere with radioactivity, casting radiation sickness and death into the far future, leaving a million acres of land ruined “forever” by radioactive contamination. Radioactive reindeer meat was discarded in Lapland, and milk in Italy. It is reported that half of the 10 million people in Belorussia live in contaminated areas. Some estimates of adults and children doomed to be killed and maimed by cancer and mutations run in the millions. If nuclear power continues, there will be other “Chernobyls” scattered around the world, perhaps more devastating. The Chernobyl accident demonstrates the devastation which could happen with a nuclear accident near a large city. The nuclear business, here and abroad, has a record of willful and careless radiation exposure and killing of unaware people since the beginning: its miners from radon gas, its Hanford “down-winders”, victims of Chernobyl in the Ukraine, the SL-1 reactor in Idaho. Even “successful” reactors are intolerable. Reactors produce radioactive pollution. They use uranium and make plutonium. Both are radioactive, chemically poisonous heavy metals. Plutonium, a nuclear bomb material, is also the world’s most radioactively lethal material. A power reactor at the end of its life has manufactured lethal radioactive products equivalent to those from several thousand nuclear bombs. We as a society cannot afford, even if we knew how, the cleanup of these radioactive messes. Nuclear power, with its lethal radioactive poisons, pollutes “forever”, in new, more insidious, more intransigent ways than any other form of energy.

May 1, 1998