For the past few years, we’ve been hearing a lot about so-called “dirty bombs,’ that is, regular explosives combined with radioactive material. The idea of the dirty bomb is so appealing to guerrillas and terrorists because it maximizes destructive payoff with little added complexity–all you have to do is cover the bomb with anything radioactive and voila–you have a low-grade nuclear weapon.
Fox News is a good place to hear about dirty bombs. One of the functions of television news (and particularly FNC) is to feed the fear which leads to authoritarian governments and because dirty bombs are so easy to make, they’re a convenient bogey-man to keep the American populace in line. (Next time you hear the name Jose Padilla, consider that he was arrested after allegedly discussing the possibility of making a dirty bomb with some friends, and now he’s been labelled an “enemy combatant” without any civil rights.)
Strange, though, that mainstream news outlets have pretty consistently ignored the biggest dirty bomb story of them all, which is at least ten years old. Folks, I’m talking about depleted uranium. What’s depleted uranium, you ask?
Why, DU is that substance which coats all of our M-1 Abrams tanks, our armor-piercing shells, and many of our other munitions. It’s 1.7 times denser than lead, and radioactive. As a by-product of nuclear fission, depleted uranium differs from enriched uranium by having around 1% “depleted” Uranium-235 and 234 as well as some plutonium particles (both enriched and depleted uranium are 99% Uranium-238).
The military uses DU for several excellent reasons:
- It’s virtually impenetrable by traditional munitions; it’s denser (read: stronger) than steel. Ill-equipped armies like Iraq’s have virtually no chance of defeating an Abrams coated in DU. But if they started using all-tungsten missiles…
- It’s cheap–often offered to defense contractors for free as a by-product of the nuclear energy industry.
- It explodes on contact (creating fine radioactive dust), ripping its target apart.
Anti-DU activists focus on the last point when speaking of the ill-effects of DU on civilians; uranium is “aerosolized” when it impacts and burns, creating “poison dust” which can be inhaled up to 45 kilometres away. Of course, Uranium-238 has a half-life of about four-and-a-half billion years.
We’ve been using depleted uranium since before the first Gulf War. Like I said, it covers every M-1 tank and our armor-piercing shells. Now for those of you who’ve been following the parallel radiation-effects-on-humans story coverage in Marvel comics, it turns out that exposure to DU may grant you some of the following superpowers:
- Chronic illness due to a weakened immune system.
- Cancers.
- Tumors.
- Headahces and dizziness.
- Chronic fatigue syndrome.
- Neurological disorders.
- Vision problems.
- Skin problems.
- Muscle and joint pain.
- Infant mortality.
- Infertility.
- Birth defects.
- Having people’s “skin literally melted away from their bones.”
- “Another child lies in its mother’s arms. It’s impossible to tell if the child’s smiling or crying. Its mouth, which is a huge, purple, scarred, messy hole, is so disfigured it doesn’t change from its permanent position: wide open.“
- Salting the earth so that nothing will ever grow from for a couple billion years.
Truly A Weapon of Mass Destruction
For all the talk of Saddam’s formidable arsenal, he never deployed dirty bombs, missiles, or tanks in the conflict. Only “the Coalition” did–the UK and other US allies use depleted uranium as well. And why shouldn’t they? It’s the dirt cheap and stronger than steel. It makes your army almost invincible against armor-piercing technology, which in turn, is the guerrilla’s best friend.
One of my major reasons for opposing the War on Iraq was the inevitability of contaminating Iraqi cities with this nuclear waste. It’s not bad enough that there’s still plenty of DU lying around from the first Gulf War; this time we needed to hit far more targets inside the country, primarily in densely populated areas. Even after the political violence dies down (if it ever will), Iraqis will still be living in the most irradiated and densely inhabited territory on earth. And more hotspots are being discovered every day.
The other part of the DU issue has nothing to do with civilians or irradiating countries we’re supposedly “liberating.” Remember Gulf War Syndrome? When soldiers returned from Operation Desert Storm complaining of symptoms which seem an awful lot like they resulted from radiation exposure as detailed above? Well, it couldn’t have possibly been a result of the exposure to DU, because the U.S. military vehemently denies there is any health risk associated with depleted uranium. But every study done on the subject shows serious health problems associated with DU, particularly in Gulf War vets. There’s a lot of really specific medical information available about this, but let me give you a small taste from an article by Leuren Moret, whom there is an outside chance you recall as the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab whistleblower:
Not only were soldiers exposed to DU on and off the battlefields, but they brought it home. DU in the semen of soldiers internally contaminated their wives, partners and girlfriends. Tragically, some women in their 20s and 30s who were sexual partners of exposed soldiers developed endometriosis and were forced to have hysterectomies because of health problems. In a group of 251 soldiers from a study group in Mississippi who had all had normal babies before the Gulf War, 67 percent of their post-war babies were born with severe birth defects. They were born with missing legs, arms, organs or eyes or had immune system and blood diseases. In some veterans’ families now, the only normal or healthy members of the family are the children born before the war.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has stated that they do not keep records of birth defects occurring in families of veterans.
Now it has come to light that today’s GIs are experiencing radiation poisoning at a much greater rate, probably because they’re sticking around the scene of the war crime to patrol, exposing themselves to their own radioactive fallout. The above article mentions that soldiers deployed in Iraq have already started to develop malignancies. And of course, there are radiation hotspots all over Iraq today, including the former Presidential Palace, where the occupation forces had set up headquarters.
But really, why would the Pentagon admit that it was poisoning its own soldiers? The lawsuits alone could bankrupt America’s war machine. Not to mention the fact that if the government admitted how dangerous DU really is, we would have to clean it up in all the places we dropped it in Iraq, Kuwait, and Yugoslavia.
This is a major environmental disaster. We have dropped literally tons of this shit on Iraq and Afghanistan and we refuse to clean it up. We’re burning down the villages to save them, as always.
Links about DU:
Uranium Medical Research Center
Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets
IAC’s Depleted Uranium Education Project
Soldier’s new mission is exposing risk of depleted uranium
