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Depleted Uranium is a WMD

Anonyme, Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - 22:48

reposted

by Leuren Moret

Published on Tuesday, August 9, 2005 by the Battle Creek Enquirer (Michigan)

My grandfather, U.S. Army Col. Edwin Joseph McAllister, was born in Battle Creek in 1895. He does not know that his first grandchild is an international expert on depleted uranium. I have worked in two U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, and in 1991 I became a whistleblower at the Livermore lab. Depleted uranium is very, very, very nasty stuff:

# Depleted uranium (DU) weaponry meets the definition of weapon of mass destruction in two out of three categories under U.S. Federal Code Title 50 Chapter 40 Section 2302.

# DU weaponry violates all international treaties and agreements, Hague and Geneva war conventions, the 1925 Geneva gas protocol, U.S. laws and U.S. military law.

# 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 4.5 billion years.

# The U.S. has illegally conducted four nuclear wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and twice in Iraq since 1991, calling DU "conventional" weapons when in fact they are nuclear weapons.

# 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.

# The blueprint for DU weaponry is a 1943 Manhattan Project memo to Gen. L. Groves that recommended development of radioactive materials as poison gas weapons - dirty bombs, dirty missiles and dirty bullets.

# DU weapons are very effective kinetic energy penetrators, but even more effective bioweapons since uranium has a strong chemical affinity for phosphate structures concentrated in DNA.

# 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.

# Cancer starts with one alpha particle under the right conditions. One gram of DU is the size of a period in this sentence and releases 12,000 alpha particles per second.

Before my grandfather died, he told me that his generation had made a mess of this planet. I wonder what he would say to me now I would tell him to see "Beyond Treason" (www.beyondtreason.com), a new documentary about the history of treason by the U.S. government against our own troops: Atomic veterans, MK-Ultra, Agent Orange and DU. After Vietnam, Henry Kissinger said, "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy. . ." (from Chapter 5 in the "Final Days" by Woodward and Bernstein).

Leuren Moret is an international radiation specialist, with a B.S. degree in geology from University of California at Davis, a M.A. degree in Near Eastern studies from University of California at Berkeley and has done post-graduate work in the geosciences at UC-Davis. She is environmental commissioner for the City of Berkeley, Calif.

© 2005 Battle Creek Enquirer



Subject: 
Yes, DU tipped weapons are WMD, but I doubt some data
Author: 
Michael Lessard...
Date: 
Mon, 2006-08-28 09:11

I too have denounced DU weapons since 2000, but I am not convinced by some of the 'scientific' data mentionned here.

Leuren Moret write "Since 1991, the U.S. has released the radioactive atomicity equivalent of at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs into the global atmosphere."

Depleted uranium emits alpha particles (which exist in your environment where you live): its radiation normally cannot penetrate through your skin. It's not scientific nor informative to compare DU particles and its radiation with "400,000 Nagasaki bombs". I feel it reduces the gravity of the atomic bombings of the people of Japan.

DU weapons leave a dust that, if enhaled (usually by folks who gather near a destroyed tank), can stay trapped in the lungs and bones and therefore causes radiation within the body (it causes numerous health problems and can cause death on the long run). When the dust settles in the environment, there is a risk that too many DU particles become part of the food chain and hence can inscrease health problems and birth deformities of people nearby. I use the terms 'risk' and 'can inscrease', because there is uranium in our environment in general; the danger for nearby populations depends on the amount of DU dust left by the impact on metal targets. But, based on Iraq before the invasion, we have reason to fear that a massive use of DU tipped shells and missiles causes an important inscrease in birth deformities and health problems.

Yes, DU is immoral and those who select these weapons are criminals of war (according to activists, including myself, DU is totally incompatible with the Genenva Conventions and therefore are illegal weapons), but I doubt the scientific value of Leuren Moret propaganda.

You don't need to frighten the shit out of people to have an influence...

Michaël Lessard [me laisser un message]
Militant pour les droits humains.
Siriel-Média: média libre sur les 'politiques de destruction massive'


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