Depleted Uranium Weapons: The Dead Babies in Iraq and Afghanistan Are No Joke

Depleted Uranium Weapons: The Dead Babies in Iraq and Afghanistan Are
No Joke

Mon, 10/19/2009 - 19:51 — dlindorff

Warning: a photo accompanying this story is not for the faint-hearted

The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam,
about which I wrote on Oct. 15, could ultimately be dwarfed by the
horrors caused by the depleted uranium weapons which the US began
using in the 1991 Gulf War (300 tons), and which it has used much more
extensively--and in more urban, populated areas--in the Iraq War and
the now intensifying Afghanistan War.

Depleted uranium, despite its rather benign-sounding name, is not
depleted of radioactivity or toxicity. The term “depleted” refers only
to its being depleted of the U-235 isotope needed for fission
reactions in nuclear reactors. The nuclear waste material from nuclear
power plants, DU as it is known, is what is removed from the power
plants’ spent fuel rods and is essentially composed of the uranium
isotope U-238 as well as U-236 (a product of nuclear reactor fission,
found rarely in nature but commonly in DU), as well as other trace
radioactive elements. Once simply a nuisance for the industry, which
still has no permanent way to dispose of the dangerous stuff, it turns
out to be an ideal metal for a number of weapons uses, and has been
capitalized on by the Pentagon. 1.7 times heavier than lead, and much
harder than steel, and with the added property of burning at a
super-hot temperature, DU has proven to be an ideal penetrator for
warheads that need to pierce thick armor or dense concrete bunkers
made of reinforced concrete and steel. Once through the defenses, it
burns at a temperature that incinerates anyone inside (which is why we
see the carbonized bodies of bodies in the wreckage of Iraqi tanks hit
by US fire). Accordingly it has found its way into 30 mm machine gun
ammunition, especially that used by the A-10 Warthog ground-attack
fighter planes used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as
Kosovo), and in fixed-wing and helicopter gunships. It is also the
warhead of choice for Abrams tanks (heavily used in Iraq) and is also
reportedly used in GBU-28 and the later GBU-37 bunker buster bombs
(though the Pentagon studiously refuses to confirm or deny this), each
of which can have 1-2 tons of the stuff in its warhead. DU is also
used as ballast in cruise missiles, and this material burns up when a
missile detonates its conventional explosive. Some cruise missiles are
also designed to hit hardened targets and reportedly feature DU
warheads, as does the AGM-130 air-to-ground missile, which carries a
one-ton penetrating warhead. In addition, depleted uranium is used in
large quantities in the armor of tanks and other equipment. This
material becomes a toxic source of CU pollution when these vehicles
are attacked and burned, as many were in Iraq, and as many will no
doubt be in Afghanistan as that conflict heats up.

While the Pentagon has continued to claim, against all scientific
evidence, that there is no hazard posed by depleted uranium, US troops
in Iraq have reportedly been instructed to avoid any sites where these
weapons have been used—destroyed Iraqi tanks, exploded bunkers,
etc.—and to wear masks if they do have to approach. Many torched
vehicles have been brought back to the US, where they have quietly
been buried in special sites reserved for dangerously contaminated
nuclear materials. (Thousands of tons of DU-contaminated sand from
Kuwait, polluted with DU during the US destruction of Iraq’s tank
forces in the 1991 war, were removed and shipped to a waste site in
Idaho last year with little fanfare.) Suspiciously, international
health officials have been prevented or obstructed from doing medical
studies of DU sites in Iraq and Afghanistan. But an excellent series
of articles several years ago by the Christian Science Monitor
described how reporters from that newspaper had visited such sites in
Iraq with Geiger-counters and had found them to be extremely “hot”
with radioactivity.

The big danger with DU is not as a pure metal, but after it has
exploded and burned, when the particles of uranium oxide, which are
just as radioactive as the pure isotopes, can be inhaled or ingested.
Even the smallest particle of uranium in the body is both deadly
poisonous as a chemical, and over time can cause cancer—particularly
in the lungs, but also the kidneys, testes and ovaries.

There are reports of a dramatic increase in the incidence of deformed
babies being born in the city of Fallujah, where DU weapons were in
wide use during the November 2004 assault on that city by US Marines.
The British TV station SKY UK, in a report last month that has
received no mention in any mainstream American news organization,
found a marked increase in birth defects at local hospitals. Birth
defects have also been high for years in the Basra area in the south
of Iraq, where DU was used not just during America’s 2003 “shock and
awe” attack on Iraq, but also in the 1991 Gulf War.

Deformed baby born in post-US Invasion Iraq: DU's legacy?Deformed baby
born in post-US Invasion Iraq: DU's legacy?

Further, a report sent to the UN General Assembly by Dr Nawal Majeed
Al-Sammarai, Iraq’s Minister of Women’s Affairs since 2006, stated
that in September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 babies born,
24% of which died within their first week of life. Worse yet, fully
75% of the babies born that month were deformed. This compares to
August 2002, six months before the US invasion, when 530 live births
were reported with only six dying in the first week, and only one
deformity. Clearly something terrible is happening in Fallujah, and
many doctors suspect it’s the depleted uranium dust that is permeating
the city.

But the real impact of the first heavy use of depleted uranium
weaponry in populous urban environments (DU was used widely especially
in 2003 in Baghdad, Samara, Mosul and other big Iraqi cities), will
come over the years, as the toxic legacy of this latest American war
crime begins to show up in rising numbers of cancers, birth defects
and other genetic disorders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, as in the case of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the toxic
effects of this latest battlefield use of toxic materials by the US
military will also be felt for years to come by the men and women who
were sent over to fight America’s latest wars. As with Agent Orange,
the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department have been assiduously
denying the problem, and have been just as assiduously denying claims
by veterans of the Gulf War and the two current wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan who claim their cancers and other diseases have anything
to do with their exposure to DU.

The record on Agent Orange should lead us to be suspicious of the
government’s claims.

The deformed and dead babies in Iraq should make us demand a cleanup
of Iraq and Afghanistan, medical aid for the victims, and a ban on all
depleted uranium weapons.


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