DU—doh!

One of the great untold stories of the Iraq debacle concerns the DOD's use of Depleted Uranium. I wonder why it has zero traction with the media, mainstream or otherwise.

A few months back Rob Nixon wrote an extensive overview of the subject for the Chronicle of Higher Education (see mirror of article here) and at the time I thought, "Christ, what an appalling story." But then months passed and I heard nothing about it, until yesterday when this story popped up in CommonDreams, written by Leuren Moret, environmental commissioner for the City of Berkeley.

Nixon describes why DU is such a big hit with the DOD:

As a byproduct of nuclear testing and nuclear power, depleted uranium is extremely cheap indeed, better than free. Half a century of nuclear-weapons and nuclear-power production has left the Department of Defense with over a billion pounds of nuclear waste in storage. The department is delighted to offload some of that waste onto arms manufacturers, gratis, in the form of depleted uranium. The result is a seductive kind of alchemy: Weapons manufacturers magically cut their production costs while the Defense Department magically rids itself of a five-alarm waste product that no American wants buried in his backyard. The result is a kind of anti-environmental recycling that converts highly toxic waste into even more deadly explosive forms.

Moret makes a number of provocative points about DU's use:

Since 1991, the U.S. has released the radioactive atomicity equivalent of at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs into the global atmosphere. That is 10 times the amount released during atmospheric testing which was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs. The U.S. has permanently contaminated the global atmosphere with radioactive pollution having a half-life of 2.5 billion years.

DU on the battlefield has three effects on living systems: it is a heavy metal "chemical" poison, a "radioactive" poison and has a "particulate" effect due to the very tiny size of the particles that are 0.1 microns and smaller.

... DU is the Trojan Horse of nuclear war - it keeps giving and keeps killing. There is no way to clean it up, and no way to turn it off because it continues to decay into other radioactive isotopes in over 20 steps.

Terry Jemison at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs stated in August 2004 that over 518,000 Gulf-era veterans (14-year period) are now on medical disability, and that 7,039 were wounded on the battlefield in that same period. Over 500,000 U.S. veterans are homeless.

In some studies of soldiers who had normal babies before the war, 67 percent of the post-war babies are born with severe birth defects - missing brains, eyes, organs, legs and arms, and blood diseases.

In southern Iraq, scientists are reporting five times higher levels of gamma radiation in the air, which increases the radioactive body burden daily of inhabitants. In fact, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan are uninhabitable.

I don't quite know what Moret means by that last sentence, but the gist of what she and Nixon say SHOULD mean that this is the biggest not-reported story out there.

I wouldn't be surpised if there are quibbles over some of the scientific points on DU's effects, but the fact that the VA has put so many vets on disability is a smoking gun, unless I'm not understanding something.

Nixon concludes his piece with an ominous prediction:

Most cancers take 5 to 30 years to incubate. In a classified acknowledgment of depleted uranium's perils, Britain's Atomic Energy Authority warned that in the gulf war's wake, depleted uranium could enter the food chain and cause half a million premature deaths in Iraq and Kuwait. If the gulf war is any measure, we can anticipate an even more disastrous epidemic of belated deaths following the war in Iraq, given the considerably greater volume of depleted-uranium munitions that American and British troops have deployed this time around.

Why isn't this story on page one?