[Peace-discuss] DU

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

San Francisco Chronicle
January 13, 2003

Iraq links cancers to uranium weapons 
U.S. likely to use arms again in war 
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer


-One American with personal experience of DU is Doug
Rokke, former director of the U.S. Army's Depleted
Uranium Project. He was in charge of a team of about
100 soldiers who examined and cleaned up Iraqi tanks
and American vehicles struck by DU shells during the
Gulf War. 
The work was ghastly -- the DU explosions so badly
burned the dead soldiers inside that the team dubbed
them "crispy critters." 
The team's members, uninformed about the danger of DU
residue, were themselves contaminated. Most have
suffered serious health problems in the intervening
years, and "too many" have died, says Rokke, who says
he eschews exact numbers because of the difficulty of
proving direct links to DU exposure. 
Rokke, who has a Ph.D. in physics and until recently
was a professor at Jacksonville State University in
Alabama, says he has "5,000 times the recommended
level of radiation in my body" and has called the
health woes among residents of southern Iraq and his
own colleagues "the direct result" of DU exposure. 




Baghdad -- Something is killing the children in Dr.
Emad Wisam's hospital ward, and filling it up again
and again with more sick and dying kids. 

Walking a visitor through the halls of Al Mansour
Children's Hospital in Baghdad last weekend, Wisam
stopped briefly at his small patients' bedsides to
commiserate. 

After checking 5-year-old Nur Abdullah, who has a
tumor in his throat, Wisam turned away with a pained
look in his eyes. 

"He will die soon," he said. "Most of these kids will
die. And there's almost nothing we can do." 

Iraq has experienced a dramatic increase in child
cancers, leukemia and birth defects in recent years.
Wisam, Iraqi medical authorities and growing numbers
of American activists cast blame on the U.S. weapons
containing depleted uranium that were used in the 1991
Gulf War and in the 1998 missile attacks on Baghdad
and other major cities. They also assert that such
munitions -- which were also used by U.S. forces in
Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia in far smaller quantities --
may be a cause of Gulf War diseases, elusive maladies
that have affected 50,000 to 80,000 U.S. veterans of
the 1991 conflict. 

The Pentagon says studies it has sponsored have found
no evidence that depleted uranium, known as DU, causes
serious illnesses, while many international medical
experts remain on the fence, citing the lack of
definitive scientific evidence on the issue. 

But with the renewed use of DU weapons by the U.S.
military considered likely in the event of a new war
with Iraq, the controversy is being stirred up again. 

Depleted uranium is the low-level radioactive waste
left over from manufacturing nuclear fuel and bombs.
It is used in bullets and missiles by the United
States, Britain, Russia and several other nations --
though, from all indications, not by Iraq. 


HIGHLY EFFECTIVE
Military experts regard DU as an almost magically
effective material. DU is 1.7 times denser than lead,
and when a weapon made with a DU tip or core strikes
the side of a tank or bunker, it slices straight
through and erupts in a burning radioactive cloud. In
addition, armor made of DU appears to make tanks far
less vulnerable on the battlefield. 

During the Gulf War, U.S. airplanes and tanks fired
off munitions containing 320 tons of DU. According to
Iraqi health statistics, the country's recent increase
in health problems has been concentrated in the same
areas of the country that took the brunt of U.S.
attacks: Baghdad, the southern port city of Basra, and
the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. 

No similar problems are known to have occurred in
Kuwait, where DU was also used, because such weapons
were used mainly outside of population centers and
because Kuwait carried out a comprehensive,
well-funded postwar cleanup of spent munitions and
combat wreckage. 

Among children throughout Iraq, the number of cancer
cases has risen five- fold since 1990, and congenital
birth defects and leukemia have tripled, say
government health officials. Overall cancer rates
among all Iraqis have risen by 38 percent, the Iraqi
government says. 

"There are thousands of cases of DU poisoning in Iraq
by the Americans and British," said Health Minister
Dr. Omeid Mobarik. 


FUTURE USE PREDICTED
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month
that branches of the U. S. military are looking for
alternatives to DU, but officials refuse to say
publicly whether DU weapons will be used in a new war
against Iraq. Defense Department spokeswoman Barbara
Goodno has acknowledged, "Depleted uranium is an
important component in the U.S. arsenal." 

"Despite being engaged multiple times (during the Gulf
War), often at close range, by Iraqi tanks and
anti-armor weapons," she added, "not a single U.S.
tank protected by DU armor was penetrated or knocked
out by hostile fire." 

Experts say the crucial edge that DU technology
affords makes it too effective to pass up. 

"Yes, certainly the U.S. will use it," said John
Eldridge, editor of the authoritative book Jane's
Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defense. 

Christopher Hellman, a senior analyst at the Center
for Defense Information in Washington, said U.S. and
British military planners are likely to be swayed more
by DU's effectiveness than by possible health
concerns. 

"Their view is very simple," said Helman. "This is
war, and a destroyed enemy tank is less dangerous than
one that's shooting at you, regardless of whatever
residual effects DU may have." 

Just what those health effects may be, however, is
hotly debated. 

Pentagon officials deny any links, either to Iraqi
civilians or American Gulf War veterans. They dismiss
Iraq's reports of increases in cancer, birth defects
and leukemia, saying their pre-1990 baseline figures
are unreliable. 

They point in particular to a Pentagon-funded review
of scientific literature on cancer and DU carried out
by the Rand Corp. in 1999. It concluded that no link
had been found. Initial studies by the World Health
Organization and the European Community also have
found no link. 

But the Rand report -- which leans heavily on research
into the relatively mild effects of conventional
uranium -- acknowledges that "few studies to date . .
. have focused directly on DU." 

While the Veterans Administration has conducted
limited studies of some veterans exposed to DU, and
found no links so far to serious illness, U.S.
activists point out that none of the published studies
have tested broad numbers of sick Americans or Iraqis
who have been exposed to DU. The U.S. military has
conducted several such studies, but they remain
classified. The Iraqi military refuses all comment on
whether its veterans have experienced their own Gulf
War illnesses. 


AMERICAN EXPERT
One American with personal experience of DU is Doug
Rokke, former director of the U.S. Army's Depleted
Uranium Project. He was in charge of a team of about
100 soldiers who examined and cleaned up Iraqi tanks
and American vehicles struck by DU shells during the
Gulf War. 

The work was ghastly -- the DU explosions so badly
burned the dead soldiers inside that the team dubbed
them "crispy critters." 

The team's members, uninformed about the danger of DU
residue, were themselves contaminated. Most have
suffered serious health problems in the intervening
years, and "too many" have died, says Rokke, who says
he eschews exact numbers because of the difficulty of
proving direct links to DU exposure. 

Rokke, who has a Ph.D. in physics and until recently
was a professor at Jacksonville State University in
Alabama, says he has "5,000 times the recommended
level of radiation in my body" and has called the
health woes among residents of southern Iraq and his
own colleagues "the direct result" of DU exposure. 

In an interview on Saturday, Rokke said of his own
health: "I'm trashed." He said that Pentagon officials
routinely tell him and others who were contaminated in
the gulf theater that the elevated levels of uranium
in their bodies are "just coming out of our diets." 


INTERNATIONAL OPINION
But organizations outside the United States have come
down against DU munitions: 

-- In 1999, the European Parliament voted to urge NATO
to suspend the use of DU munitions pending results of
an independent study. The request was ignored. 

-- Last August, the U.N. Subcommission on the
Promotion and Protection of Human Rights authorized a
study of the dangers of DU, which the panel had
already labeled a weapon of mass destruction. The move
-- coming over the objections of the United States and
Britain -- was a significant victory for Karen Parker,
a San Francisco lawyer who works with the
International Educational Development/Humanitarian Law
Project and has campaigned against DU for years. 

-- A 1991 study by Britain's Atomic Energy Authority
found that use of DU weapons in the Gulf War could
eventually lead to half a million "potential deaths
from cancer." The report was suppressed by the British
government until 1998. 

Hard science on the DU issue remains scarce, however. 

Richard Clapp, an epidemiologist at Boston University
School of Public Health and one of the few experts to
investigate the DU-cancer relationship, is carrying
out a study of Gulf War diseases among Massachusetts
veterans. 

His initial findings suggest increased incidences of
Hodgkin's disease in Gulf War veterans exposed to DU,
but no increases in other types of cancer. 

But Clapp cautions that further comprehensive study is
needed. In an e-mail interview, he wrote: "The
potential for a DU-cancer link (especially lung cancer
in those who breathe DU through dust and smoke
particles) is still an open question. I certainly
would not rule it out on biological grounds, and 'no
proof of harm is not proof of no harm,' as we say." 


OIL FIRES, CHEMICAL WEAPONS
Iraq's health problems and Americans' Gulf War
illnesses could have many additional causes besides
DU, Clapp and other U.S. experts say. Other possible
factors include pollution breathed in from the oil
fires ignited in Kuwait by retreating Iraqi soldiers
or from Iraqi chemical weapons stores hit by U.S.
missiles. 

"The reason there is no proof of causality between DU
and any particular disease is that no one has
seriously looked for it," said Steve Leeper, co-
director of the Global Association for Banning DU
Weapons, a U.S.-Japanese coalition based in Atlanta,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

"The biggest problem with radiation, especially
involving a low-level radiation source that is also a
toxic chemical, is that it can get you in so many
ways," said Leeper. 

"Which disorder you wind up with depends on where the
DU winds up in your system and what sort of damage it
does to what sort of cells. To really find an effect,
the government would have to study all the veterans,
especially the 205,000 that have applied for medical
help from the Veterans Administration, and the people
of southern Iraq and test for uranium in their urine,
organs and bones, then look for correlations with
various pathologies." 

Dr. Alim Yacoub, a British-educated epidemiologist who
is dean of the medical school at Mustansiriya
University in Baghdad, expressed anger at the world's
response to the Iraqi health crisis. 

"Why have no international studies been carried out?"
he asked. "Where is the World Health Organization?
This issue is highly political and has been affected
by propaganda, by American pressure." 

WHO officials say that in 2001, the U.N. organization
proposed to Iraq a comprehensive study of all cancer
problems, including DU, but received no response. 


U.N. SANCTIONS
Yacoub insists that the project was blocked by the
strict U.N. sanctions imposed on Iraq since the Gulf
War. He said the International Atomic Energy Agency
has refused to allow Iraq to import radiology
equipment needed to carry out the research because it
is termed "dual use," meaning that it could be used to
help develop nuclear weapons. 

Defense analyst Hellman summed up the standoff over DU
by saying, "The science on this is not unanimous. 

"My approach is: If you can't use it safely, then you
shouldn't use it. The military's approach is 180
degrees from that. They say, 'If you can't prove it
isn't safe, we're going to keep using it.' " 



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ORIGIN, USES, EFFECTS OF DEPLETED URANIUM
Depleted uranium (DU) is a byproduct of the process
during which fissionable uranium (uranium 235) used to
manufacture nuclear bombs and reactor fuel is
separated from natural uranium, a heavy metal found in
soil and water everywhere on earth, mainly in trace
quantities. 
DU (uranium 238) is about 40 percent less radioactive
than natural uranium, but it remains radioactive for
4.5 billion years. Because it is such a highly dense
metal -- heavier than lead or steel -- it is prized
for its abilities to both penetrate military armor and
provide shielding against attack. 

Upon impact, DU produces extremely fine uranium oxide
dust that is both chemically toxic and radioactive.
Easily spread by wind, it is inhaled and absorbed into
the human body and absorbed by plants and animals,
becoming part of the food chain. 

E-mail Robert Collier at rcollier at sfchronicle.com.