Radioactive Ammunition Fired In The Middle East May Claim More Lives Than Hiroshima And Nagasaki
By firing radioactive ammunition, the U.S., U.K., and Israel may have triggered a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East
that, over time, will prove deadlier than the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan.
So much ammunition containing depleted uranium(DU) has been fired, asserts nuclear authority Leuren Moret, "The genetic
future of the Iraqi people for the most part, is destroyed."
"More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric testing (of nuclear bombs) has been released
from depleted uranium weaponry since 1991," Moret writes, including radioactive ammunition fired by Israeli troops in
Palestine.
Moret is an independent U.S. scientist formerly employed for five years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and
also at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both of California.
Adds Arthur Bernklau, of Veterans For Constitutional Law, "The long-term effect of DU is a virtual death sentence. Iraq
is a toxic wasteland. Anyone who is there stands a good chance of coming down with cancer and leukemia. In Iraq, the
birth rate of mutations is totally out of control."
Moret, a Berkeley, Calif., Environmental Commissioner and past president of the Association for Women Geoscientists,
says, "For every genetic defect that we can see now, in future generations there are thousands more that will be
expressed." She adds, "the (Iraq) environment now is completely radioactive."
Dr. Helen Caldicott, the prominent anti-nuclear crusader, has written: "Much of the DU is in cities such as Baghdad,
where half the population of 5 million people are children who played in the burned-out tanks and on the sandy, dusty
ground."
"Children are 10 to 20 times more susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of radiation than adults," Caldicott wrote.
"My pediatric colleagues in Basra, where this ordnance was used in 1991, report a sevenfold increase in childhood cancer
and a sevenfold increase in gross congenital abnormalities," she wrote in her book, "Nuclear Power is not the
Answer"(The New Press).
Caldicott goes on to say the two Gulf wars "have been nuclear wars because they have scattered nuclear material across
the land, and people---particularly children--- are condemned to die of malignancy and congenital disease essentially
for eternity."
Because of the extremely long half-life of uranium 238, one of the radioactive elements in the shells fired, "the food,
the air, and the water in the cradle of civilization have been forever contaminated," Caldicott explained.
Uranium is a heavy metal that enters the body via inhalation into the lung or via ingestion into the GI tract. It is
excreted by the kidney, where, if the dose is high enough, it can induce renal failure or kidney cancer. It also lodges
in the bones where it causes bone cancer and leukemia, and it is excreted in the semen, where it mutates genes in the
sperm, leading to birth deformities.
Nuclear contamination is spreading around the world, Caldicott adds, with heaviest concentrations in regions within a
1,000-mile radius of Baghdad and Afghanistan. These are, notably, northern India, southern Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Tibet, Pakistan, Kuwait, the Gulf emirates, and Jordan.
"Downwind from the radioactive devastation in Iraq, Israel is also suffering from large increases in breast cancer,
leukemia and childhood diabetes," Moret asserts. Doug Rokke, formerly the top U.S. Army DU clean-up officer and now
anti-DU crusader, says Israeli tankers fired radioactive shells during the invasion of Lebanon last year. U.S. and NATO
forces also used DU ammunition in Kosovo. Rokke says he is quite ill from the effects of DU and that members of his
clean-up crew have died from it.
As a result of DU bombardments, Caldicott writes, "Severe birth defects have been reported in babies born to
contaminated civilians in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and the incidence and severity of defects is increasing over
time."
Like symptoms have been reported among infants born to U.S. service personnel that fought in the Gulf Wars. One survey
of 251 returned Gulf War veterans from Mississippi made by the Veterans Administration found 67% of children born to
them suffered from "severe illnesses and deformities."
Some were born without brains or vital organs or with no arms, hands, or arms, or with hands attached to their
shoulders. While U.S. officials deny DU ammunition is dangerous, it is a fact Gulf War veterans were the first Americans
ever to fight on a radioactive battlefield, and their children apparently are the first known to display these ghastly
deformities.
Soldiers who survived being hit by radioactive ammunition, as well as those who fired it, are falling ill, often showing
signs of radiation sickness.
Of the 700,000 U.S. veterans of the first Gulf War, more than 240,000 are on permanent medical disability and 11,000 are
dead, published reports indicate. This is an astonishingly high toll from such a short conflict in which fewer than 400
U.S. soldiers were killed on the battlefield.
Of course, "depleted uranium munitions were and remain another causative factor behind Gulf War Syndrome(GWS)," writes
Francis Boyle, a leading American authority on international law in his book "Biowarfare and Terrorism," from Clarity
Press Inc.
"The Pentagon continues to deny that there is such a medical phenomenon categorized as GWS---even beyond the point where
everyone knows that denial is pure propaganda and disinformation," Boyle writes.
Boyle contends, "The Pentagon will never own up to the legal, economic, tortious, political, and criminal consequences
of admitting the existence of GWS. So U.S. and U.K. veterans of Gulf War I as well as their afterborn children will
continue to suffer and die. The same will prove true for U.S. and U.S. veterans of Bush Jr.'s Gulf War II as well as
their afterborn children."
Boyle said the use of DU is outlawed under the 1925 Geneva Convention prohibiting poison gas.
Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, writes in his "The Sorrows of Empire"(Henry Holt and
Co.) that, given the abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and deformities in Iraq as well as Kosovo, the evidence
points "toward a significant role for DU."
By insisting on its use, Johnson adds, "the military is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that
classifies DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction."
Moret calls DU "the Trojan Horse of nuclear war." She describes it as "the weapon that keeps killing." Indeed, the
half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5-billion years, and as it decays it spawns other deadly radioactive by-products.
Radioactive fallout from DU apparently blew far and wide. Following the initial U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 2003, DU
particles traveled 2,400 miles to Great Britain in about a week, where atmospheric radiation quadrupled.
But it is in the Middle East, predominantly Iraq, where the bulk of the radioactive waste has been dumped.
In the early Nineties, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority warned that 50 tons of dust from DU explosions could
claim a half million lives from cancer by year 2000. Not 50 tons, but an estimated two thousand radioactive tons have
been fired off in the Middle East, suggesting the possibility over time of an even higher death toll.
Dr. Keith Baverstock, a World Health Organization radiation advisor, informed the media, Iraq's arid climate would
increase exposure from its tiny particles as they are blown about and inhaled by the civilian population for years to
come.
The civilian death toll from the August, 1945, U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been put at 140,000
and 80,000, respectively. Over time, however, deaths from radiation sickness are thought to have claimed the lives of
another 100,000 Japanese civilians.
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(Sherwood Ross is a Miami, Florida-based free-lance writer who covers military and political topics. Reach him at
sherwoodr1@yahoo.com. Ross has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and several wire services and is a
contributor to national magazines.)