Is Depleted Uranium Creating a New Nuclear Danger in Iraq?

Democracy Now
06/13/2003

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/13/1549215


The nuclear arms watchdog group, Nuclear Policy Research Institute is warning of possible health risks to Iraqi civilians over the use of depleted uranium anti-tank shells used in Iraq. The group recently called on the Bush Administration to fully cleanup areas contaminated by DU in Iraq.

DU is considered to be the most effective anti-tank weapon ever devised. It is made from nuclear waste left over from making nuclear weapons and fuel.

The public first became aware the US military was using DU weapons during the Persian Gulf War in 1991. But it had been used as far back as the 1973 Yom Kippur war in Israel.

During the first Persian Gulf War, the U.S. used 320 tons of munitions made with depleted uranium. The Air Force fired roughly 750,000 rounds from A-10 aircraft. The Army fired over 50 of DU ammunition from Abrams tanks.

The effects of depleted uranium have been long debated. The Pentagon denies depleted uranium poses health or environmental risks. Many environmentalists say it is a radioactive carcinogen that has caused large spikes in cancer in areas like Iraq.

This weekend The Nuclear Policy Research Institute is hosting a major conference in New York on depleted uranium.


Helen Caldicott, president of Nuclear Policy Research Institute and former President of Physicians for Social Responsibility. She is a pediatrician and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on nuclear disarmament.
Thomas Fasy, Associate Professor of Pathology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Geoffrey Sea, health physicist. He is the former executive director of the International Foundation on Radiation, Ecology and Health. From 1981-1986 he served as health and safety consultant for the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union where he worked with employees at three of the nation’s depleted uranium manufacturing plants.

Article also found at:

http://www.nuclearpolicy.org/NewsArticle.cfm?NewsID=173

I have read study after study that has shown to be far less dangerous than it is said to be among many of the left. The WHO even said that depleted uranium in the ground is not a major health hazard. The radiation it gives off is very weak and cannot penetrate your skin. There is a large amount of uranium in topsoil, equivalent to almost 6 tons of DU in the topsoil of one square mile of the midatlantic.

Lastly, many of the cancers and birth defects could be caused by chemical weapons (extensivly used in Iraq, especially souther iraq during the 1980-1988 war as well as being stored in many places), or toxins like oil fires, or simply excess pollution. Hold on, let my find an article on it.

however, at present I have to disagree about the dangers of DU an its effects on civilians in Iraq.

I just watched a very intense and passionate speech by Helen Caldicott on this. Look her name up on google and you should get a wealth of info.

The Americans are making a hash of rebuilding Iraq, but one of the not so bad things they have done is to give Iraqis the freedom to scribble. On the wall outside the Baathist ministry of health the other day, a graffiti artist had scrawled in perfect English, ‘We need a health ministry free of corruption.’





For years John Pilger — ‘one of the world’s most renowned investigative journalists’, it says on the back of his latest book — has been insisting that the West, not Saddam, is to blame for the crisis in Iraq’s public health; that 5,200 Iraqi children were dying every month; that Western depleted-uranium weapons were to blame for an epidemic of cancers; that sanctions crippled Iraq’s doctors. Funnily enough, Pilger’s journalism echoed what the Baathist regime wanted people to hear.

But very recently in Baghdad what some might call the Pilger–Baathist line was put to a very public test by yet another American blunder. They handpicked a new acting health minister, Dr Ali Shenan al-Janabi, who was number three at the health ministry under Saddam. According to virtually every Iraqi doctor I spoke to, he was an unacceptable choice. The Iraqi doctors were not keen to say so to the BBC on camera. To criticise the Baath party on the record is, even now, something that no Iraqi will do lightly. Then two surgeons at Al Kindi teaching hospital in Baghdad, Dr Rahim Ismael and Dlair Omar, mulled it over and said, ‘OK, we’ll do it.’ They damned the health ministry under Saddam as a corrupt and brutal instrument of state oppression. They said that many medicines had been held back in warehouses. The ministry was trying to make healthcare worse in Iraq, the goal being to blacken the name of UN sanctions, which Saddam detested as a brake on his power. The fewer drugs, the worse the equipment and the more dead babies, the better it was for the regime. Any Iraqi doctors who didn’t toe the line were punished.

At a press conference to launch the new acting health minister, Dr Ali Shenan replied that what his critics were really complaining about were Western-led United Nations sanctions against Iraq. As the words came out of his mouth, I thought to myself, ‘He’s talking John Pilger.’ But Dr Ali Shenan was sacked, thanks to the doctors, while John Pilger is still in business.

In Victorian London the biggest killer was not the absence of medicines. It was unclean water, untreated sewage and uncollected rubbish. In Saddam’s Iraq dirty water, untreated sewage and uncollected rubbish from the Shia slums of Baghdad and Basra were state policy for a regime that earned $12 billion in oil revenue every year. Yet Pilger makes no mention of Saddam’s neglect of public health. Why?

And then there’s the ‘Hiroshima effect’ of depleted uranium. Pilger wrote in the Daily Mirror just before the war, ‘Depleted uranium a sinister component of tank shells and airborne missiles. In truth, it is a form of nuclear warfare, and all the evidence suggests that its use in the Gulf war in 1991 has caused an epidemic in southern Iraq: what the doctors there call “the Hiroshima effect”, especially among children.’ That the cancer rates from 1991 onwards are the fault of the West’s depleted-uranium weapons alone was one of Saddam’s central messages.

In his television documentary film, Paying the Price, broadcast three years ago, Pilger did the rounds of a Basra hospital. He spoke to a paediatrician, Dr Ginan Ghalib Hassen. He wrote it all up in his book The New Rulers of the World: ‘In the next bed, a child lay in his shrouded mother’s arms. One side of his head was severely swollen. “This is neuroplastoma,” said Dr Hassen. “It is a very unusual tumour. Before 1991, we saw only one case of this tumour in two years. Now we have many cases. I am a doctor; I am not supposed to cry, but I cry every day, because this is torture.”’ Pilger asked her, ‘What do you say to those in the West who deny the connection between depleted uranium and the deformities of these children?’ ‘That is not true. How much proof do they want? There is every relation between congenital malformation and depleted uranium. Before 1991, we saw nothing like this at all.’

Felicity Arbuthnot, Pilger’s senior researcher for the film, wrote in a magazine article published in September 1999, ‘By early 1992, doctors in Iraq were bewildered by the rise in birth deformities — some so grotesque and unusual that they expected to see them only in textbooks and perhaps once or twice in a lifetime. They compared them to those recorded in the Pacific Islands after the nuclear testing in the 1950s. Cancers, too, were rising, especially among the young, the most susceptible to radiation.’

Hang on a minute. Cancers don’t happen overnight. They develop after a latency period of at least four years. The Iraqis reported a rash of cancers in the south from 1992 onwards. The cancers that happened in 1992 cannot, scientifically, have been caused in 1992 — or 1991 when the depleted uranium was used — but at least four years before that. ‘To say any different is ridiculous; it would deny the evidence from Hiroshima and Nagasaki,’ Dr Nick Plowman, the head of oncology at Barts, told me.

In the mid-1980s Iranian human-wave offensives almost took Basra, but they were stopped by Saddam’s chemical weapons. The UN found incontrovertible evidence that Saddam used mustard gas against the Iranians every year between 1984 and 1988. When the Iranians came close to Basra, the Iraqis dropped gas on their own people, too. Nearly all of the war was fought in Iraq, not Iran, so that’s where Saddam dropped his chemical weapons.

Mustard gas — sulphur mustard — is carcinogenic and mutagenic. That is, sulphur mustard causes cancers, leukaemias and birth defects. The children of Iranian soldiers who were gassed by Saddam’s men have developed terrible cancers and birth defects. No depleted-uranium weapons were used on them. The children of Halabja, the Kurdish town gassed by Saddam, have developed cancers and birth defects. Again, no depleted uranium was used on them.

Pilger knows all about chemical weapons. He wrote in the Mirror in January, ‘I often came upon terribly deformed Vietnamese children in villages where American aircraft had sprayed a herbicide called Agent Orange. This terrible chemical weapon was dumped on almost half of South Vietnam. Today, as the poison continues to move through water and soil and food, children continue to be born without palates and chins and scrotums or are stillborn. Many have leukaemia.’ If chemical weapons cause cancers in Vietnam, why don’t they do the same in Iraq? The answer seems a simple one: chemical weapons cause cancer so long as they are dropped by the Americans.

Shortly after Pilger’s programme was broadcast in 2000, Arbuthnot phoned Gwynne Roberts, the only journalist brave enough to go to Iraq in 1988 and dig up soil contaminated by Saddam’s chemical weapons. Portland Down found mustard gas in Roberts’s soil samples. Arbuthnot was puzzled: how could the cancers in Iraq have started in 1992? Roberts’s view, like mine, is that — without letting the West off the hook on the question of depleted uranium — the contribution that Saddam’s chemical weapons may have made to the Hiroshima Effect should be seriously investigated.

I emailed John Pilger, asking him, ‘You know about Saddam’s use of chemical weapons, so why didn’t you raise the possibility of that being the cause of the cancers and birth defects?’ He replied, ‘You apparently think my film was made in 1991. It wasn’t. It was made in 1999, eight years after the 1991 Gulf war, or twice the time it takes for deformities to develop, according to you. In the film I clearly put to one of the doctors the doubts that depleted uranium is the cause of the deformities. Her answer was a good one. Another specialist himself raises the doubts and addresses them. At no point in the film do I say that DU is, on its own, responsible for the extraordinary rise in cancers over, I repeat, a period of eight years up to when the film was made.’

This is artful. If Pilger and Arbuthnot accept that DU cannot have caused cancers observed in 1992, why haven’t they made this clear? None of the cancers and birth defects that Pilger’s researcher dates back to 1992 can be the fault of depleted uranium. To omit the possibility that some of the cancers were caused by Saddam’s chemical weapons is to misrepresent the facts. To imply by that omission that depleted uranium is solely responsible for the cancers and birth defects in Iraq as he does in his book, his film and in the Daily Mirror is a disgrace to journalism.

I accuse John Pilger of cheating the public and favouring a dictator.

John Sweeney is special correspondent for the BBC.
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© 2003 The Spectator.co.uk

Pilger than with Pilger's assessments. I'm still against the use of DU and have not been persuaded by Sweeney's argument here.

much from both sides of the argument and I tend to think that it is far less dangerous than people make it out to be.
I have a bunch of buddies who served in the Army, and many of them were around DU. None of them has any chronic health problems.
Let me look up some scientific stuff on the relative dangers.

It seems to me that Caldicott has an agenda--she has been a passionate left wing anti-nuclear activist for years. I think she wants to believe everything bad about DU without looking at many of the studies that show it is less dangerous than she believes.

as when something is blown up. A lot of that has happened in Iraq; and a lot is happening. Laying on, and settling into, the ground, it may not be a big risk; but what happens when it is disturbed, especially in an explosive manner? Short of that, what happens when it is plowed over or dug up by construction?

I've heard of environmental effects as well.

Caldicott also spoke of unplowable fields in Afghanastan.

It just makes me sick the greatness this country is capable of, yet we feel the need to kick everyone's ass. Dispicable.

but nothing makes any sense. Everyone seems to have an axe to grind.

What does make sense to me is that while the amount of radiation in DU ammo may be far less than what is considered dangerous, the fine residues after the thing is fired makes for a nasty dust. We are well aware of what other heavy metals do, and uranium in any form is a lot heavier than lead or mercury, and I can't see that breathing it is any safer. We thought uranium tailings were safe until we learned about radon gas.

It may be interesting to note that hazmat teams are around at test flights of stealth fighters in case they crash. The stuff they coat the body with is pretty nasty, but they won't say what it is. The military is pretty well exempt from environmental regulations, and just doesn't give a damn.

I suspect that there really hasn't been any proper research on DU, and both sides are picking and choosing their little bits for their arguments.

DU is 'depleted' because the more-radioactive isotopes have been removed -- to make bombs as well as for other uses. Thus, the DU is less-radioactive than what was taken out -- something the 'nuclear waste' terminology obscures, since nuclear waste is generally radioactive by-products of the use of radioactive materials in medicine, power generation, or the making (and shooting off) of nuclear bombs. That said, it appears that DU is extremely hazardous. The alpha radiation from DU should not penetrate a piece of paper or a coat of paint -- but is highly-dangerous when inhaled or ingested. Even worse are the chemical hazards of uranium, the heaviest metal used extensively -- and those hazards are at their highest when DU is in particulate form. So, when DU sits in a shell casing or in the armor of a vehicle, it is comparatively safe; but when the shell is exploded, or the armor hit by a shell (made of DU or not), a cloud of DU particles is blasted all over the place. Yes, the particles are very dense, so will settle out of air faster than other particles, and will settle into the ground and through ground water faster, than lighter materials; but the risk is there, and no one really knows how much may still be inhaled or ingested over time.

but I just have a problem with the use of Uranium on or near civilian population centers regardless of "effect."

We are responsible for any deaths that might have occurred as a result of this crap. My tax money helped kill people and I'm not happy about that.

Caldicott noted in her speech that we used way too many weapons not because we actually need them but because it helped finance the defense industry. So a few too many daisy cutters and bunker busters killed and maimed more innocent civilians than necessary so a few assholes at the Pentagon and at Lockheed Martin could makes some extra dough.

Un-fucking-believable. Pardon the French, but that really ticks me off.

She can say whatever she wants, it doesn't make it true.
She has a strong ideology, is an anti-nuke peacenik and is trying to sell books. She needs to 'rock the boat' and many of her ilk do that by making outrageous claims.

She's done the research. Can you refute it? (With regards to weapons that is)

Depleted Uranium?

given by a doctor admittedly working with the US Government. I'll find other condensed sources that are less biased (most are very, very long hard to read scientific papers). Then again I do not think this doctor is any less biased than the ones that are paid by the International Action Center (ANSWER) for their time and opinions.


vDR. KILPATRICK: Good afternoon. It's certainly my pleasure to be able to be here this afternoon and talk with you about the medical health effects of depleted uranium.

I want to first start by talking a little bit about natural uranium, because I think we need to put it into that perspective. Natural uranium is in the soil around our world. It certainly is something that we eat and drink and breathe in every day, because it is in our environment. We all secrete natural uranium in our urine to a certain level. We know that in some areas of the world there's less and some areas there's more -- particularly say in Florida there's a lot of natural uranium in the soil. You get into Colorado, you'll find the same sort of thing. You get into other areas of the world there are variations. And yet we do not see natural uranium causing any recognized medical complication or health problem in people. We have had a lot of studies in uranium miners. We know an awful lot about what uranium does as a heavy metal in people, and we certainly have a lot of studies on depleted uranium in the environment, and I'll talk a little bit later about from the Gulf War some individuals who were involved in friendly fire.

Next slide, please. Our major concern, as I said, is the chemical nature, because uranium, depleted uranium are both heavy metals -- like lead and tungsten and nickel. The kidney, when the depleted uranium is internalized, becomes a target organ, and there are collecting tubules that essentially concentrate the urine that are most severely affected, the first to be affected if there is a dose of natural uranium or depleted uranium above a threshold in the body.

We looked at some 90 Gulf War veterans who were in or on an armored vehicle when it was struck by depleted uranium in friendly fire. And those individuals have been followed on an annual basis now we are talking 12 years post-incident. And we do not see any kidney damage in those individuals -- and this is using very sophisticated medical evaluation of kidneys. They were also followed for other medical problems, and they have had no -- and I'll talk about this a little bit later, but while I'm here, they've had no other medical consequences of that depleted uranium exposure. Now, some of these individuals had amputations, were burned, had deep wounds, so that these individuals, some of them of course do have medical problems. But as far as a consequence of the depleted uranium exposure, we are not seeing anything related to that either from a chemical or radiological effect.

Next slide, please. We've looked at them for cancers. There has been no cancer of bone or lungs, where you would expect them -- to see that. We have seen no leukemias. As I said, there's been about 90 individuals we've followed up, and about 20 of these individuals still have small fragments of depleted uranium in their body. To try to remove that totally from their body would mean amputation or removal of muscles. And our belief is it's better to follow them than to go through any further traumatic type of surgery for the individuals. And, as I've said, we have not seen any untoward medical consequence in these individuals.

When we take a look at transuranics, and that's been brought up -- you may have heard about that -- these are trace elements of like Americium, plutonium, neptunium that has been found in depleted uranium in the process of making it. It goes through the same processing plant where nuclear fuel is reprocessed after it is spent. And there trace amounts of transuranics in the depleted uranium. It has been looked at, measured by several different countries sand scientists outside of DOD. The amount of radiation that contributes is less than one percent, and that is believed not to have any medical significance as far as adding to the radiation.

Depleted uranium is 40 percent less radioactive than natural uranium around us. And so when it's outside the body it's just not an issue. It's only when it's internalized -- either by inhaling the dust, the oxide, as Colonel Naughton said when there is penetration of armor, it does self-sharpen and it does create an oxide dust. And there are people who were in or on the vehicles that were struck in friendly fire, who did inhale that oxide, and we have not seen any medical consequence from that. They certainly had the highest dose exposure of anybody in the Gulf War.

Next slide, please. We talked about not seeing any cancers in the kidney or certainly in the lungs or the bone in these individuals. Leukemia became an issue a couple of years ago when the Italians were concerned about peacekeepers in the Kosovo area coming back and having leukemia. We took at what are the causes of leukemia. The rates in the United States are usually about two per 100,000 people per year. The cause of leukemia is often unknown. We took a look at data, medical data, from the exposures of atomic bomb blasts in Japan in World War II, people getting chemotherapy. We see an increased rate in leukemia in these individuals, some two to four six years after that exposure. And we certainly know people exposed to toxic solvents like benzene can have an increased rate of leukemia. But the Italians did the epidemiological study and found basically the rate of leukemia in their military personnel was no greater than their civilian population. And so what was triggered as a cause-effect relationship being in Kosovo where depleted uranium in was fired was not a causal relationship. It was just the natural rate of leukemia in the people who had been peacekeepers in that area.

Next slide, please. There have been over 40 tests done on what happens to depleted uranium from an environmental standpoint, both with shooting munitions through armor, looking at burning of depleted uranium. We had some fires in tanks. We had some fires in depleted uranium -- storage capacities. And we have recently done a capstone study where we again have shot depleted uranium through uranium armored tanks to look at what is the amount of oxide created, how long does it stay suspended, what is the particle size. That study has just been completed, but it is not yet written to be published. When it is written it will be published. All of the environmental information about depleted uranium is in our Department of Defense environmental exposure report, and I'll have a website that will show you that at the end of the talk.

We continue to do testing in animals. Some people ask why do you continue to test if you say it's not an issue. I think if there are questions we need to continue to bore down on the science and make sure that those continued experimental evidence from animals validate what we know in people. And I think that it's extremely important to say that we are doing all the tests that need to be done to understand the physiology of exposure to depleted uranium.

Next slide. Recent environmental assessments done outside the Department of Defense. The United Nations Environmental Programme has put out this book, called "Depleted Uranium in Kosovo," where they went and did soil samples. They went and looked for the penetrators. Again, these are the A-10 airplanes shooting. They found some seven penetrators or the sable, what you saw coming off the round on the ground. These had either hit rocks, cement, and ricocheted. Normally when an A-10 fires if it hits ground it buries anywhere from one to ten meters deep. But they found seven on the ground, some 13 tons of depleted uranium had been shot from the airplane in the Kosovo area. And they have not been able to find any environmental effect of depleted uranium -- not residual other than finding those penetrators lying on the ground. They've checked water. There have been other countries -- the Belgians came in and looked at food, water, milk, fruits, vegetables, meat, and essentially were not able to find any evidence of any increased uranium or depleted uranium in any of those samples.

The World Health Organization has done a similar study in the Balkans. The European Commission, the European Parliament and the United Kingdom Society for World Society has also published a report on looking at all that data. So we have outside of DOD, outside the United States, organizations taking a look at what are the environmental effects, and they are consistent in their finding that there is no environmental effect in an area where depleted uranium has been shot.

Next slide, please. These again are a couple more meetings where they got experts from around the world -- and the last one, depleted uranium in Kosovo, and that has been published at a meeting in Germany. Again the scientists are in concurrence that it does not pose an environmental hazard.

Next slide. When DU does strike armor and that oxide is created, it falls to the ground very quickly -- usually within about a 50-meter range. As Colonel Naughton said, it's heavy. It's 1.7 times as heavy as lead. So even if it's a small dust particle, it's still very heavy. And it stays on the ground. They've looked on the battlefield in multiple locations. We looked in Kuwait where we knew that there were tank battles. We looked in the boneyard in Kuwait where all of the Iraqi armored vehicle that was hit with depleted uranium was dragged, and we were not able to find anything on the ground around those vehicles that's above background in radiation.

If you look at hole where the depleted uranium round went in and out, there is an increased radiation where that metal was essentially welded onto the armor. But that's not going to go anywhere. It's not going to fall off. It's welded onto that armor. And the boneyard is out in the desert were eventually the sand will cover it over. And, again, it does not pose an environmental hazard.

I think the Kosovo report focuses on picking up lose particles that are on the ground. They need to be appropriately disposed of and that would be buried at a documented site.

They recommended continuing to look at groundwater. They don't believe that there's a likelihood that that would be the case. Our studies in the United States over 15 years have not shown depleted uranium going from the soil into groundwater. It just does not move from the round that is in the soil. And the bottom line is there is going to be no impact on the health of the people in the environment, or people who were there at the time it was shot.

Next round. We have a lot of information and history medically on uranium which applies directly to depleted uranium. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Diseases Registry says there has been no documented case of any cancer of any type related to exposure to uranium or depleted uranium.

Looking at those individuals whom we know were most highly exposed to depleted uranium in the Gulf War are some 90 individuals who are being in the medical follow-up program. They have shown no adverse effect from their exposure to depleted uranium. And, again, the multiple other organizations reviewing this data are consistent with our understanding of depleted uranium. It is a superior weapon, superior armor. It is a munition that we will continue to use, if the need is there to attack armor.

I

i don't believe the press is reporting the full magnitude of the problem.