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Depleted Uranium and What You Won't See on Fox News

The Implications of the Use of U.S. Depleted Uranium Weapons in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq

(Don Nordin's interview with Leuren Moret)

Hello, this is Don Nordin.  You're listening to the Monday Brownbagger (Vancouver Cooperative Radio - 102.7 fm) of February 23, 2004 and I will have on the line in a moment a guest from Berkeley.  Her name is Leuren Moret. She is an independent scientist and international expert on radiation and public health issues. She is on the organizing committee of the World Committee on Radiation Risk, an organization of independent radiation specialists, including members of the Radiation Committee in the EU parliament, the European Committee on Radiation Risk.  She is an environmental commissioner for the City of Berkeley.  Ms. Moret earned her BS in geology at U.C. Davis in 1968 and her MA in Near Eastern studies from U.C. Berkeley in 1978.  She has completed all but her dissertation for a PhD in the geosciences at U.C. Davis.  She has traveled and conducted scientific research in 42 countries.  She wrote a scientific report on depleted uranium for the United Nations sub commission investigating the illegality of depleted uranium munitions.  Marian Falk, a former Manhattan Project scientist and retired insider at the Livermore Lab, who is an expert on radioactive fallout and rainout, has trained her on radiation issues. (Don) Do you have any idea of how much depleted uranium the U.S. has in its national inventory?

(Leuren) Yes, the U.S. has about a million tons of depleted uranium.  Most of it is stored in canisters as uranium hexafluoride, and it's just really an environmental problem.  There is no place to dispose of it so in 1974, against the advice of the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense began testing and manufacturing weapons made out of DU and the first system was manufactured by Hughes Aircraft.  It was called the Phalanx System developed by the Navy and within six months of the Navy testing it, they had sold it to 14 branches of the U.S. military and other countries.  We have now sold DU weapons systems to 29 countries.

(Don) In what kind of weapons is this DU used?

(Leuren) Well, depleted uranium is made in every caliber [and used in projectiles] for handguns, tanks, cannons, all the way up to large bombs weighing more than 5,000 lbs [and also used in the body of] the Warthog airplane.  So everything from handguns to bombs practically has...many have conventional weapons for ammunition but they also have them in depleted uranium.  A lot of systems are interchangeable.  You can put a DU warhead in a bomb or a conventional warhead in the same bomb.

(Don) Now why would they use it in the construction of an airplane itself?

(Leuren) Oh, depleted uranium or uranium metal is nearly twice as dense as lead and so instead of using larger amounts of a dense material like lead, they can use smaller amounts of depleted uranium as ballast in planes, so they use it in commercial planes and in military planes as ballast along the wings and the tail to balance the plane.  [It's] very similar to the lead lugs they put on tires when we go and get our tires balanced.

(Don) Well, I guess, anyway, the DU being in the wings and tail wouldn't be of any significant threat to the occupants of the plane itself.

(Leuren) It's not to the occupants of the plane; it is to crash site investigators when a plane crashes.  There was depleted uranium in whatever hit the Pentagon on 9-11 and I'm the only journalist in the world who even wrote an article about it.  The German science journal Nature picked up my article and actually wrote its own [article] based on the interviews I did. It's used in golf clubs.it's used in many, many surprising things and because there is so much of it, which the Department of Energy has, they're trying to find ways to dispose of it.  And there are proposals now to put it inside building blocks to construct buildings with. So if this continues we'll be living in radioactive buildings and then the terrible thing is that when the aluminum from planes or the metal from planes is recycled, the DU is not removed, so the metal that is re-manufactured will contain radioactive DU mixed in with it.

(Leuren) Anyone within 1,000 miles of Iraq; anyone within 1,000 miles of Afghanistan is potentially contaminated now.  It's not just the people [living] in the country.  Anyone going to Iraq or Afghanistan now will become contaminated.  There's no way to escape it.

(Don) Now, for the average soldier over there, what types of reactions would this likely be causing in the body?

(Leuren) In the first Gulf War they used an estimated 340 or 350 tons of DU and the amount used is increasing every year.  So there were terrible effects from that [which people know as] the Gulf War Syndrome. In Afghanistan a thousand tons were used, three times as much. The entire country, the water supplies, the infrastructure were bombed, and now in last March and April they used at least 2,200 tons, which is eight to ten times more than what they used in Gulf War One, and like Afghanistan, they bombed the whole country, the towns, the cities, the villages, the water supplies, the whole infrastructure of the country.  So civilians and soldiers will be experiencing skin rashes, which is the heavy metal effect; they will have dental problems, respiratory problems. It's causing heart damage and brain damage.  The effects will be much more severe and much faster now than what we know of in Afghanistan or the first Gulf War in 1991.

In Kuwait, which is downwind [of Iraq], and DU was used in Kuwait, doctors are reporting three times the number of congenital heart problems with newborn babies.  Those are the birth defects.

Gulf War soldiers who served in 1991 had normal babies before the Gulf War. [In a study of 251 Gulf War veterans by the Department of Veterans Affairs, it was determined that 67% of the babies born to soldiers after the Gulf War had severe birth defects]. They were born without brains, without eyes, [with] organs missing, without legs or arms, or they had terrible radiation related blood diseases for instance.
(Don) How many years is this effect likely to go on?

(Leuren) It will be forever.  The half life of depleted uranium is 4 and a half billion years, but even worse, over time as the Uranium-238 decays, it transforms four times into much more radioactive daughter products or daughter isotopes and they are more radioactive than uranium-238 by millions and billions of times, so the level of radioactivity will increase over time, and that's why we call depleted uranium the Trojan Horse of Nuclear War.  Depleted uranium is a nuclear weapon and it is a weapon of mass destruction under the U.S. government definition of WMDs.

So he [professor Yagasaki from Okinawa] calculated that 800 tons of depleted uranium is the atomicity equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs.  So [the total atomicity], roughly estimating the amount of depleted uranium weapons used in Afghanistan and Iraq and former Yugoslavia, is approximately equivalent to 400,000 Nagasaki bombs.  In all of the testing by the nuclear states during the Cold War, the [atomicity] equivalent of only 40,000 [Nagasaki] bombs was [produced], so this is roughly ten times the amount of radiation that was released during nuclear weapons testing.  This is just an absolutely horrendous amount of radiation.

The U.S. has staged a nuclear war in Iraq and in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the northern half of India all the way through Turkey and Iran and the Russian oil-rich states, the Caspian oil region, and half of Egypt, Israel and the Saudi Arabian peninsula. These areas are now all contaminated.

(Don) So if they know the effects of depleted uranium on people, does that not then make them the highest type of war criminals?

(Leuren) These are the highest types of war criminals.  These people have developed weapons of mass destruction knowing full well what the health and environmental effects are, and they have spent tremendous amounts of money and effort to hide this from not just the American people, but from the global community.  They have constructed a huge and a very connected apparatus of scientists, scientific journals, medical professionals, academic institutions, secret radiation labs, and nuclear weapons laboratories.  We have over 550 national laboratories in the United States - I think the number has been reduced maybe to 250, but there were over 3,500 facilities in the United States, which functioned as part of the nuclear weapons complex.  There's no way that they don't know everything and the international nuclear, call them the nuclear Mafia, has mostly been controlled by the United States.  It's all to hide the health and environmental effects.

(Don) They seem not to be only the highest types of criminals, but they seem to be insane. I mean only an insane...

(Leuren) It's a culture of insanity!  You're absolutely right.  I worked at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab. I saw people go to work every day.  Their friends were dying of cancer.  Some of them had cancer.  You know that a nuclear weapons lab paycheck is about 30 to 40% more than scientists would make in a private sector academia.  So people get addicted to that money and their wives die of brain cancer.  Their children die of leukemia and they still go to work every day.

(Don) Yeah, George W.'s son and progeny are going to be affected for all time.

(Leuren)  George Bush Jr., our president now, he and all of his siblings have learning disabilities as a result of being exposed to nuclear weapons testing fallout during the Cold War.  And his toddler sister died of leukemia when she was just a couple of years old.  His whole family has been affected by nuclear weapons testing.  This is the insanity of it. They do it anyway.

(Don) Yeah, it doesn't bode very well to be ruled by people that are brain cell deficient, that's for sure.

(Leuren) Well, it's had a tremendous effect on the I.Q. and the learning ability of all American children. The SAT scores, the average SAT scores for the entire population of 18 year-olds, teenagers in their last year of high school when they are given the SAT tests, declined from 475 which was the average score for 20 years before bomb testing started and it started in about 1946. By 1963 the SAT scores for children born that year, [those children] exposed in utero to the radiation and receiving brain damage, [declined nationwide] to 425.  As soon as the test ban treaty was signed between the U.S. and Russia in 1963, SAT scores started going up again.  But what the United States did was sacrifice an entire generation of children to test nuclear weapons.  The same thing is happening now because of nuclear power plants and one out of twelve children have learning disabilities in the U.S. What cost is that to our society?

(Don) Hasn't Baghdad, and maybe even the whole country of Iraq, been made virtually an area that is not suitable for living in now?

(Leuren) Oh, and the regions within a thousand miles.  The Middle East and Central Asia are radioactive.  People shouldn't be living there; nothing should be living there.  And I began to read, I couldn't believe it when I started researching it, I just couldn't believe it.  I couldn't believe what had happened.  I couldn't believe they were using depleted uranium in the amounts they were using.  And when that Japanese professor calculated the atomicity equivalent of Nagasaki bombs, I started making maps of the areas contaminated and when I saw the map with circles drawn around Afghanistan and Iraq with a one thousand mile radius, I knew there was a deeper purpose. But I still couldn't understand why they'd used it.  No other country has used it.  The U.S. broke a 46-year taboo in 1991 and used it.  No other countries have used it since then.
There has to be a reason, and I began to read The Grand Chessboard by Brzezinski.  Anyway he, Zbigniew Brzezinski it's called The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperative wrote it in 1998 but it's a blueprint, absolutely, for U.S. foreign policy being carried out in Central Asia and the Middle East.  And they have basically bombed the major oil rich regions in the Eurasian area.  This is not going to stop. It's going to continue. It's really, I think, the greatest tragedy that humanity has faced.  So I feel terrible about people who went to Iraq as human shields, to media who were there,they're all contaminated.  And when I was in Japan last summer I met the human shield people from Japan,they're sick with depleted uranium exposure and over time it just continues to act in the body.  So people really need to think about where they are going and be aware of the potential risk.

(Don) Before we wrap it up, I would like you to give us contacts on the website where people can find more information.

(Leuren) People can go to an excellent website: http://www.mindfully.org and just do a Google search on my name, Moret.

They can also go to: http://www.traprockpeace.org That's the Traprock Peace Center in Connecticut.  They have an excellent website.  Lots of people get a lot of good information from it and they have a lot of information on depleted uranium.
Those are probably the two best websites that I know of.

There's a letter to Congressman McDermott that I wrote. They could do a Google search on "letter to McDermott."  He's a Congressman from Seattle, Washington who has introduced a bill in Congress, and I wrote him a letter with a lot of details. The attachments and the references are also on the website with a letter.  That's on the mindfully.org website, and then [there's] my testimony for the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan of December 13, 2003, which is also on the mindfully.org website.  That [testimony] has fourteen questions that the prosecutor sent me to answer, and there are questions like: What does the U.S. government know about DU? (My answer was twelve pages long). What is the connection between depleted uranium and fourth generation nuclear weapons? And then, what are the environmental and human effects?

Last comment of Leuren Moret:

(Leuren) I would like to read a quote from Henry Kissinger.  "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy". This is what the elite believe about our military.

I am now working with an international group of scientists and radiation experts.  We are forming a World Committee on Radiation Risks comprised of honest researchers to help citizens, elected officials, affected populations and individuals to learn the truth about radiation, and to work toward an international moratorium on depleted uranium and other radioactive weapons. So watch for us.  The European Committee on Radiation Risk, within the European Parliament, has just published an excellent report on low-level radiation and you can get it at: http://www.euradcom.org  And now the citizens of the world, the scientists of the world, the radiation experts of the world,we have to all work together and it's not hopeless.  But people need good information.

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from: www.yesmagazine.org

The War Against Ourselves

An Interview with Major Doug Rokke

Doug Rokke has a PhD in health physics and was originally trained as a forensic scientist. When the Gulf War started, he was assigned to prepare soldiers to respond to nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, and sent to the Gulf. What he experienced has made him a passionate voice for peace, traveling the country to speak out. The following interview was conducted by the director of the Traprock Peace Center, Sunny Miller, supplemented with questions from YES! editors.

QUESTION: Any viewer who saw the war on television had the impression this was an easy war, fought from a distance and soldiers coming back relatively unharmed. Is this an accurate picture?

ROKKE: At the completion of the Gulf War, when we came back to the United States in the fall of 1991, we had a total casualty count of 760: 294 dead, a little over 400 wounded or ill. But the casualty rate now for Gulf War veterans is approximately 30 percent. Of those stationed in the theater, including after the conflict, 221,000 have been awarded disability, according to a Veterans Affairs (VA) report issued September 10, 2002.

Many of the US casualties died as a direct result of uranium munitions friendly fire. US forces killed and wounded US forces.

We recommended care for anybody downwind of any uranium dust, anybody working in and around uranium contamination, and anyone within a vehicle, structure, or building that's struck with uranium munitions. That's thousands upon thousands of individuals, but not only US troops. You should provide medical care not only for the enemy soldiers but for the Iraqi women and children affected, and clean up all of the contamination in Iraq.

And it's not just children in Iraq. It's children born to soldiers after they came back home. The military admitted that they were finding uranium excreted in the semen of the soldiers. If you've got uranium in the semen, the genetics are messed up. So when the children were conceived, the alpha particles cause such tremendous cell damage and genetics damage that everything goes bad. Studies have found that male soldiers who served in the Gulf War were almost twice as likely to have a child with a birth defect and female soldiers almost three times as likely.

Q: You have been a military man for over 35 years. You served in Vietnam as a bombardier and you are still in the US Army Reserves. Now you're going around the country speaking about the dangers of depleted uranium (DU). What made you decide you had to speak publicly about DU?

ROKKE: Everybody on my team was getting sick. My best friend John Sitton was dying. The military refused him medical care, and he died. John set up the medical evacuation communication system for the entire theater. Then he got contaminated doing the work.

John and Rolla Dolph and I were best friends in the civilian world, the military world, forever. Rolla got sick. I personally got the order that sent him to war. We were both activated together. I was given the assignment to teach nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare and make sure soldiers came back alive and safe. I take it seriously. I was sent to the Gulf with this instruction: Bring 'em back alive. Clear as could be. But when I got all the training together, all the environmental cleanup procedures together, all the medical directives, nothing happened.

More than 100 American soldiers were exposed to DU in friendly fire accidents, plus untold numbers of soldiers who climbed on and entered tanks that had been hit with DU, taking photos and gathering souvenirs to take home. They didn't know about the hazards.

DU is an extremely effective weapon. Each tank round is 10 pounds of solid uranium-238 contaminated with plutonium, neptunium, americium. It is pyrophoric, generating intense heat on impact, penetrating a tank because of the heavy weight of its metal. When uranium munitions hit, it's like a firestorm inside any vehicle or structure, and so we saw tremendous burns, tremendous injuries. It was devastating.

The US military decided to blow up Saddam's chemical, biological, and radiological stockpiles in place, which released the contamination back on the US troops and on everybody in the whole region. The chemical agent detectors and radiological monitors were going off all over the place. We had all of the various nerve agents. We think there were biological agents, and there were destroyed nuclear reactor facilities. It was a toxic wasteland. And we had DU added to this whole mess.

When we first got assigned to clean up the DU and arrived in northern Saudi Arabia, we started getting sick within 72 hours. Respiratory problems, rashes, bleeding, open sores started almost immediately.

When you have a mass dose of radioactive particulates and you start breathing that in, the deposit sits in the back of the pharynx, where the cancer started initially on the first guy. It doesn't take a lot of time. I had a father and son working with me. The father is already dead from lung cancer, and the sick son is still denied medical care.
Q: Did you suspect what was happening?

ROKKE: We didn't know anything about DU when the Gulf War started. As a warrior, you're listening to your leaders, and they're saying there are no health effects from the DU. But, as we started to study this, to go back to what we learned in physics and our engineering, I was a professor of environmental science and engineering, you learn rapidly that what they're telling you doesn't agree with what you know and observe.

In June of 1991, when I got back to the States, I was sick. Respiratory problems and the rashes and neurological things were starting to show up.

Q: Why didn't you go to the VA with a medical complaint?

ROKKE: Because I was still in the Army, and I was told I couldn't file. You have to have the information that connects your exposure to your service before you go to the VA. The VA obviously wasn't going to take care of me, so I went to my private physician. We had no idea what it was, but so many good people were coming back sick.

They didn't do tests on me or my team members. According to the Department of Defense's own guidelines put out in 1992, any excretion level in the urine above 15 micrograms of uranium per day should result in immediate medical testing, and when you get up to 250 micrograms of total uranium excreted per day, you're supposed to be under continuous medical care.

Finally the US Department of Energy performed a radiobioassay on me in November 1994, while I was director of the Depleted Uranium Project for the Department of Defense. My excretion rate was approximately 1500 micrograms per day. My level was 5 to 6 times beyond the level that requires continuous medical care.
But they didn't tell me for two and a half years.

Q: What are the symptoms of exposure to DU?

ROKKE: Fibromyalgia. Eye cataracts from the radiation. When uranium impacts any type of vehicle or structure, uranium oxide dust and pieces of uranium explode all over the place. This can be breathed in or go into a wound. Once it gets in the body, a portion of this stuff is soluble, which means it goes into the blood stream and all of your organs. The insoluble fraction stays, in the lungs, for example. The radiation damage and the particulates destroy the lungs.

Q: What kind of training have the troops had, who are getting called up right now, the ones being shipped to the vicinity of what may be the next Gulf War?

ROKKE: As the director of the Depleted Uranium Project, I developed a 40-hour block of training. All that curriculum has been shelved. They turned what I wrote into a 20-minute program that's full of distortions. It doesn't deal with the reality of uranium munitions.

The equipment is defective. The General Accounting Office verified that the gas masks leak, the chemical protective suits leak. Unbelievably, Defense Department officials recently said the defects can be fixed with duct tape.

Q: If my neighbors are being sent off to combat with equipment and training that is inadequate, and into battle with a toxic weapon, DU, who can speak up?

ROKKE: Every husband and wife, son and daughter, grandparent, aunt and uncle, needs to call their congressmen and cite these official government reports and force the military to ensure that our troops have adequate equipment and adequate training. If we don't take care of our American veterans after a war, as happened with the Gulf War, and now we're about ready to send them into a war again, we can't do it. We can't do it. It's a crime against God. It's a crime against humanity to use uranium munitions in a war, and it's devastating to ignore the consequences of war.

These consequences last for eternity. The half life of uranium 238 is 4.5 billion years. And we left over 320 tons all over the place in Iraq.

We also bombarded Vieques, Puerto Rico, with DU in preparation for the war in Kosovo. That's affecting American citizens on American territory. When I tried to activate our team from the Department of Defense responsible for radiological safety and DU cleanup in Vieques, I was told no. When I tried to activate medical care, I was told no.

The US Army made me their expert. I went into the project with the total intent to ensure they could use uranium munitions in war, because I'm a warrior. What I saw as director of the project, doing the research and working with my own medical conditions and everybody else's, led me to one conclusion: uranium munitions must be banned from the planet, for eternity, and medical care must be provided for everyone, not just the US or the Canadians or the British or the Germans or the French but for the American citizens of Vieques, for the residents of Iraq, of Okinawa, of Scotland, of Indiana, of Maryland, and now Afghanistan and Kosovo.

Q: If your information got out widely, do you think there's a possibility that the families of those soldiers would beg them to refuse?

ROKKE: If you're going to be sent into a toxic wasteland, and you know you're going to wear gas masks and chemical protective suits that leak, and you're not going to get any medical care after you're exposed to all of these things, would you go? Suppose they gave a war and nobody came. You've got to start peace sometime.

Q: It does sound remarkable for someone who has been in the military for 35 years to be talking about when peace should begin.

ROKKE: When I do these talks, especially in churches, I'm reminded that these religions say, And a child will lead us to peace. But if we contaminate the environment, where will the child come from? The children won't be there. War has become obsolete, because we can't deal with the consequences on our warriors or the environment, but more important, on the noncombatants. When you reach a point in war when the contamination and the health effects of war can't be cleaned up because of the weapons you use, and medical care can't be given to the soldiers who participated in the war on either side or to the civilians affected, then it's time for peace.

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For more information on DU, see the WISE Uranium Project, www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/ ; the National Gulf War Resource Center, www.ngwrc.org ; or Veterans for Common Sense, www.veteransforcommonsense.org. Sunny Miller's interview was originally broadcast on WMFO (Boston) in November 2002 and is available for re-broadcast at www.traprockpeace.org .
=A92003 Positive Futures Network P.O. Box 10818, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-0818, USA - phone 206/842-0216 - 800/937-4451 - fax 206/842-5208

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MORE ON DEPLETED URANIUM

from Dennis Kucinich - 1.3 megabyte download of disturbing photos of children with birth defects and disturbing statistics about depleted uranium munitions. 4.5 billion years of contamination happily handed to the people of the earth by the U.S. Military.

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