Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - Cancer causing weapons used?

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Lebell- Thank you very much for bringing organization and sources to the side in support of DU. I was beginning to think no one was going to take a strong counterpoint.

That being said, I know that it seems the official stand of the military is that DU munitions are harmless. From your first link (www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/du.htm), and I quote:

"Like naturally occurring uranium, DU has toxicological and radiological health risks. Toxicologically, DU poses a health risk when internalized. Radiologically, the radiation emitted by DU results in health risks from both external and internal exposures; however, the external exposure risk is very low. The magnitude of the toxicological and radiological health risks of internalized DU is dependent on the amount internalized, the chemical form and the route of entry into the body. DU can be internalized through inhalation, ingestion, wound contamination and, as in the case of DU fragments, injection. Both non-combat and combat scenarios can lead to DU health risks." (http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/l...html#principal , Health and Environmental Attributes, DU Toxicological and Radiological Health Effects.)

That quote elegantly restates what the anti-DU side has been saying; while seemingly harmless because of it's lack of effect externally, DU can become a health risk upon internalization.

The website goes on to say: "In non-combat scenarios, inhalation can occur during DU munitions testing, during accidental fires at facilities storing munitions or fires in vehicles loaded with munitions, and during operations that can resuspend DU particulates. Ingestion can occur from hand-to-mouth transfer of contamination or as the result of DU-contaminated food or water. Army safety and health programs are in place to minimize such exposures."

So, to summerize the findings presented to congress, DU munitions are not harmful externally, but they pose a health risk high enough to set up safty and health programs to help protect our soldiers.

From your second website, and I again quote:

"The behaviour of DU in the body is identical to that of natural uranium."
"Intake from wound contamination or embedded fragments in skin tissues may allow DU to enter the systemic circulation."

As a matter of fact, there is an entire section of the second link that is called "Potential health effects of exposure to depleted uranium". It reads similar to several posts already here.

You see the problem is that upon inhalation, the DU can be deposited via blood in a person's bones, brain, liver, lymph system, spleen, testes and other organs. It is in these locatiuons where the damage is done. The skin, amazingly, is able to block almost all toxic effects of DU. The problem is that if the DU bypasses the skin, through a wound or brake in the skin, ingestion, or inhalation, we are no longer protected from it's effects. The efffects, though not immediatally dangerous, compound over however many years that the DU is in the system. This constant, small amount of exposure in these vulnerable areas eventually becomes harmful.

As any industrial hygenist can tell you, it is the amount of exposure to a given substance that ultimately determines toxicity, and that is what is in question here.

My main point is that as of right now, there is no overwhelming evidence to support banning such weapons.

There does appear to be reason to monitor the situation and possibly to clean up areas with a high percentage of DU in the same way that we would any other heavy metal contaminated site.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lebell

There does appear to be reason to monitor the situation and possibly to clean up areas with a high percentage of DU in the same way that we would any other heavy metal contaminated site.

Personally I'm baffled by this. You see the need for future clean up of heavy metal contamination but you don't see a need to prevent that contamination by not using DU? Do you really believe that once something like this is introduced to an ecosystem that complete clean up is possible? I'm only asking because gosh, 4.5 million years seems like an awfully long time.

Quote:

Is The Pentagon Giving Our Soldiers Cancer?
by Hillary Johnson
Rolling Stone; October 2, 2003
U.S. military might relies on depleted uranium, which incinerates tanks on impact. But soldiers and civilians alike say the radioactive ammo is making them sick.

THE WEAPONS OF WAR ARE QUIETLY CHANGING. The U.S. military's deadliest ammunition is now packed with depleted uranium -- radioactive waste left over from nuclear bombs and reactors. These so-called "hot rounds" penetrate armored tanks like a needle pierces burlap, vaporizing steel in hell-fires of 5,000 degrees Celsius. Unlike tungsten, the armor-piercing metal used since World War II that "mushrooms" when it hits a target, depleted uranium actually sharpens itself like a pencil as it bores into tanks. Flaming radioactive particles shear off in every direction on impact, igniting fuel tanks and whatever explosives the target might be carrying. With virtually no public oversight, radioactive weapons have replaced conventional weapons as the cornerstone of American military might. Whenever U.S. troops go to war, depleted uranium supplies the shock and awe.

In the annals of warfare, there has been nothing like DU, as it is often shorthanded. In both Iraq wars, and in Afghanistan, the U.S. military used depleted uranium to inflict enormous harm on the enemy while incurring almost none itself. During the first Gulf War, in 1991, "tank-killing" DU rounds brought Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard to its knees in only four days. Military experts estimate that at least 10,000 Iraqis were killed, compared with 147 Americans. In the corridors of the Pentagon, DU munitions quickly earned the nickname "silver bullet", and the Defense Department turned its attention to creating even faster, more powerful weapons systems fueled by depleted uranium. "We want to be able to strike the target from farther away than we can be hit back, and we want the target to be destroyed when we shoot at it," Col. James Naughton told reporters at a Pentagon briefing last March. "We don't want to see rounds bouncing off. We don't want to fight even. We want to be ahead. And DU gives us that advantage."

Five days after the briefing, U.S. forces launched the second war on Iraq. This time around, however, DU projectiles were exploded not only in uninhabited deserts but in urban centers such as Baghdad -- a city the size of Detroit. Stabilized in steel casings called "sabots", the shells were fired from airships, gunships, Abrams tanks and Bradley troop carriers, striking targets 1.5 miles away in a fraction of a second. The weapons contained traces of plutonium and americium, which are far more radioactive than depleted uranium.
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The Pentagon insists that the weapons pose no threat to U.S. soldiers or to non-combatants. "DU is not any more dangerous than dirt," declares Naughton, who recently retired after years as director of Army munitions. But a broad consortium of scientists, environmentalists, and human-rights activists -- as well as thousands of U.S. soldiers who served in the Gulf in 1991 -- cite mounting evidence that depleted uranium will cause death and suffering among civilians and soldiers alike long after the war's end. DU projectiles spew clouds of microscopic dust particles into the atmosphere when they collide with their targets. These particles, lofted far from the battlefield on the wind, will emit low-level radiation for 4.5 billion years -- the age of the solar system itself. Some doctors fear that long-term exposure to such radiation could eventually prove as deadly as a blast from a nuclear bomb -- causing lung and bone cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma (a cancer of the immune system known in medical circles as the "white death").

"This is a war crime beyond comprehension," says Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician who has campaigned against nuclear weapons for years. "This is creating radioactive battlefields for the end of time."

Others are more measured but equally concerned. "There are medical nuances I don't fully grasp," says Chris Hellman, a senior analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation, in Washington, D.C.. "But if you're going to be fighting wars for the goal of winning hearts and minds and bringing democracy and the altruistic things we associate with the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the last thing you want to be doing is poisoning the people you're trying to help."

The percussion of the first shell pulverized a glass rosary inside the vehicle and knocked the crew unconscious. Jerry Wheat remembers popping the hatch, climbing out and pulling off his burning Kevlar vest. "My whole body was pretty much smoking." That's when the second round struck. "I could feel myself getting hit with shrapnel in the back of the head and back."

Wheat, a divorced father of two who works for the post office in Las Lunas, New Mexico, was twenty-three when he found himself halfway around the world in the Iraqi desert at the center of a fierce tank battle in 1991. A sandstorm was raging. He was driving a four-man Bradley fighting vehicle, on which one of his crew-mates had painted Garfield the cat saying, "Fuck Iraq." In photos of the vehicle, two jagged holes are visible at the top. That's where the Bradley was struck by "friendly fire" from an Abrams tank as Wheat steered toward the center of the battle and rescued members of another American tank crew.

A day later, Army medics removed pieces of shrapnel from Wheat's body as he lay on the back of a truck. Curiously, the wounds hardly bled, though second- and third-degree burns marked the entry points. "They were worried about a chest wound, but the shrapnel was so hot when it went in, it sort of cauterized, and I wasn't bleeding that bad." His sergeant major stopped by to tell him he had been hit by an Iraqi tank. "When we asked if we were hit by friendly fire, they said no, so I ate, slept, and lived off my vehicle for the next four days."

Wheat continued to drive the Bradley, though he noted a "dusty residue" coated it inside and out. "It was pretty nasty. Imagine a huge fireball going off inside your car - that's pretty much what the inside of my vehicle was like." He and his buddies also smoked eight cartons of cigarettes that had been stashed in the Bradley when it was hit. "You had these little pieces of metal falling out, and you would hold your fingers over the holes as you smoked them. They were all coated with DU. No one had ever even mentioned DU except to say that we were firing it. We were told not to worry. They said, 'It won't hurt you. It's depleted.' It was on your hands, your food. We didn't even think about it. We were just happy to be alive."

MILITARY SCIENTISTS BECAME intrigued by depleted uranium in the 1940s, at the very advent of the nuclear age. But it wasn't until the 1960s that American weapons designers began inventing ways to use DU in battle. Depleted uranium is what remains after "enriched" uranium, a crucial component in nuclear bombs and reactors, is processed from uranium ore. Although its radioactive properties have diminished by forty percent, it's hardly safe. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has strict rules pertaining to the handling and transporting of DU in this country -- rules that don't apply to the military during battle.

Depleted uranium has long been used as ballast in military and commercial planes, but the introduction of DU onto the battlefield began modestly, without fanfare. According to a Pentagon official, U.S. troops carried DU "penetrators" into both Grenada and Panama. "It wouldn't have been very much, because there wasn't much to shoot at," says Naughton. "The first large-scale use was Desert Storm."
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By its own estimates, the military exploded as many as 320 tons of DU in sabot-encased projectiles in the deserts of Iraq and Kuwait. Gunners shot DU rounds from the cannons of Abrams tanks or from airships such as the A-10 "Warthog". Depleted uranium is the heaviest of metals, which results in its superior penetrating abilities; it is also highly pyrophoric, bursting into flames at temperatures of 170 degrees Celsius. To imagine the carnage, one need only recall Iraq's infamous "Highway of Death", a desert road between Basra and Kuwait's border that remains strewn with radioactive trucks, cars, and tanks. U.S. soldiers found bodies inside those vehicles that were burned in such astonishing ways that they dubbed the remains "crispy critters".

Iraqi civilians were also exposed to low-level radiation from DU -- and preliminary evidence indicates that the consequences have been devastating. Iraqi doctors, many of them specialists trained at eminent Western institutions, such as Sloan-Kettering in New York or Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, report twelve-fold increases in Iraqi cancer rates since the first Gulf War, as well as sharp rises in birth defects in southern Iraq, where much 0f the fighting took place. According to Iraqi doctors, some infants there emerged from the womb with one eye, or no brain, or without limbs. They add that in the dozen years since the conflict, rates of childhood cancer linked to radiation exposure -- especially leukemia and lymphoma -- have jumped four-fold.

As for U.S. troops, the Pentagon says that only 900 of the 700,000 soldiers deployed during the war were exposed to DU, when they were fired upon or went into destroyed tanks to rescue others. But scientists and military whistle-blowers who have studied the campaign say the number of soldiers exposed to DU dust and debris is closer to 300,000. Soon after the fighting stopped, soldiers who worked on supply lines at the rear were loaded on buses and taken to the battlefields so they could be photographed with their comrades on burned-out Iraqi tanks. No one warned them to avoid the sticky black soot coating the vehicles, which was radioactive.
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Within months of the war's end, thousands of Gulf War veterans began suffering from odd, nameless maladies, including hair loss, bleeding gums, memory loss, joint pain, incontinence. and disabling fatigue. In 1992, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked the General Accounting Office, an independent research arm of Congress, to study American tanks that had been hit by DU rounds during the war. GAO investigators learned that most soldiers had never been informed by their superiors about the hazards of DU. The GAO's findings were summarized in the title of its report issued a year later: "Army Not Adequately Prepared to Deal with Depleted Uranium Contamination".

Military and civilian doctors agree that the host of ailments now known as Gulf War Syndrome were probably caused by a multitude of physical insults: vaccinations, pesticides, toxic solvents, and oil fires (which deposited a film in the nostrils so thick that soldiers relied on Popsicle sticks to remove it). But many of the diseases -- including increased rates of lymphoma -- are consistent with either radiation sickness or the toxicological effects of exposure to depleted uranium.

It will take years, if not decades, to determine how much of a role DU played in the illnesses, but the sheer magnitude of the problem could make the struggle over Agent Orange, the cancer-inducing chemical used to defoliate jungles during the Vietnam War, look like an encounter with Dr. Phil. More than 150,000 veterans of the first Gulf War are currently on medical disability, and another 50,000 have applied for benefits -- nearly one-third of the entire fighting force. By comparison, nine percent of veterans from World War II and the Vietnam War applied for similar compensation.

"About two weeks after I was wounded, I was sent back to Germany. There was a lot of shrapnel -- my sleeping bag had eighty-two holes in it. All my gear was filled with holes. I brought it all into the house. I had a son who was three months old at the time. Within twelve hours, I was taking my baby to the hospital for respiratory problems. They kept him there for three days.

"I left Germany in December of 1991. I started having really bad abdominal cramps. I couldn't hold my food down. I was discharged, so I had no health insurance. Then, my wife miscarried, and no one knew why.

"In March, my dad calls me and says, 'Hey, did you know you were hit with depleted uranium?' I had given my dad a bunch of the shrapnel. I could still squeeze pieces out of my body. I had another piece up in my head. My dad was an industrial-hygiene technician for the Los Alamos labs. So he decided to put a Geiger counter to the shrapnel. It was radioactive -- the highest possible reading you can get. To this day, it's still in my system, and it's not losing any of its radioactivity."

THE PENTAGON NEXT USED DU weapons in the Balkans in 1994 and 1995. Just as there is a disease called Gulf War Syndrome in this country, there is a corollary in Europe: Balkans Syndrome. Four years later, NATO pilots fired DU ammo at Serbian tanks in Kosovo, leaving thirteen tons of DU on the ground, according to the Pentagon. When the United Nations recently measured radiation at eleven sites in Kosovo where NATO fired DU rounds, eight were found to still be contaminated.

Europeans are more acquainted with the DU controversy than Americans, in large part because a handful of Italian soldiers, most of whom were sent to Yugoslavia as peacekeepers when the Balkans conflict ended, developed leukemia. When seven of the Italians died, and the deaths of at least nine other Balkan veterans were linked in news reports to DU exposure, anti-DU fervor rapidly swept across Europe.

In Geneva, the Human Rights Tribunal declared DU projectiles weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations has made its position on depleted uranium abundantly clear: Use of such weapons is illegal, because they continue to act after the war ends, they unduly damage the environment, and they are inhumane. Next month, the first international conference on eliminating such weapons will convene in Germany; a country that outlaws the use of DU munitions.

"Depleted uranium weapons are radioactive weapons, even if they are not by definition nuclear weapons," says Victor Sidel, co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and an expert in weapons of mass destruction. "And because they are radioactive, their use is contrary to international law."

But the Bush administration remains un-swayed by international opinion. The U.S. used DU weapons in Afghanistan, though the Pentagon will not say how much or where. In Iraq, the A-10 "Warthog", the Apache helicopter, the MI Abrams tank, and the Bradley fighting vehicle were all equipped with DU. The Pentagon won't reveal how much depleted uranium it deployed in Iraq. "I can't reasonably guess," says the Army's Naughton. "Even if I gave you a guess, it would be classified." Nor will he say how much DU is left over from the first Gulf War. "It's not as if there's a massive pile of DU where we could say, 'Hah, here it is,' and clean it up."

Dan Fahey, a former Navy officer deployed in the Gulf in 1991, has reviewed the latest military assessments. He estimates that as many as 176 tons of DU were used in the second war on Iraq, roughly one-third to one-half the amount used in the first. In May, the Christian Science Monitor's Scott Peterson, who was touring battle sites with a Geiger counter, reported that Baghdad and other cities were littered with DU ordnance, all of which was producing extremely high levels of radiation.

But the Bush administration flatly rejects Iraqi reports that lingering radiation from the first Gulf War is causing lymphoma and leukemia among civilians. A month before DU-plated American tanks began their steady crawl into Baghdad, the White House issued a report called "Apparatus of Lies: Saddam's Disinformation and Propaganda". The report implies that Iraq's "baby funerals", blocks-long processions of marchers carrying infants' coffins, were staged by Saddam to ward off DU attacks. "Uranium is a name that has frightening associations in the mind of the average person, which makes the lie relatively easy to sell," the report states.

Naughton is equally dismissive. "If you go to a cancer ward, you should expect to find cancer patients," he says. "If you go to a casino, you should expect to find gambling going on. The question that needs to be asked is whether the occurrence of cancer in Iraq is higher than places where there's been no DU. Aside from the fact that we're bombing the crap out of Iraq, and did so twelve years ago, what is the general state of the environment over there? I would look in the water. I'm pretty well convinced it's not DU."
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Jim McDermott isn't so sure. The imposing, white-haired Democratic congressman from Seattle, who is also a doctor and child psychiatrist, visited hospitals in Iraq in September 2002. "I spent a good deal of time looking at the increase in childhood leukemia, lymphoma, and malformations -- which are felt by the doctors there to be directly related to the residue from the use of depleted uranium," McDermott says. "These are serious malformations -- without eyes, limbs. One obstetrician told me, 'The average Iraqi woman giving birth no longer says, "Is it a boy or a girl?" She asks, 'Is the baby normal?'" McDermott studied the records Iraqi doctors were keeping that show a rise in birth defects after the war. "You can say, 'They made it all up.' That's one explanation," he says. "But if they didn't make it all up, then there is something we made happen when we brought that war there. It would be a tragedy for us to bring democracy to Iraq and leave in our wake a horrendous cloud of nuclear waste."

"It felt like someone was ripping out my insides. I was going to the hospital in Albuquerque. They didn't know what was causing it. Back then, no one was saying, 'Gulf War Syndrome.' I didn't have a place to live. I was sick. I had just been put out of the military.

"Since I've been back, I've had joint pain, abdominal pain, headaches, minor respiratory problems -- shortness of breath, my lungs make gurgling sounds. I don't run. I walk everywhere. Last time a doctor asked me to blow into a hose to check my lung power, I puked. I take methadone every day for the joint pain. My foot goes numb on me. I get shooting pains in my legs. In 1993, 1 went from 220 pounds to 160 in three months for no reason. The VA just said, 'If you could figure out how you did it, you would be a rich man.'

"My left arm started hurting several years after the war. They did a biopsy at the VA hospital in Baltimore, and said, 'It's not cancer, but we're going to take it out of you anyway.' So in 1998, 1 had a tumor taken out of a bone in my arm. When I went in to have it removed, I asked them to send it to a hospital in Canada. But they got rid of it! They said they sent it out to one of their military hospitals to be examined. I have no idea what they found, but lately my right arm is feeling like my left arm.

"I'm in touch with a couple of my crew -- my gunner and my loader. My gunner's still in active duty. He's had health problems, but he didn't want to say anything or he would be kicked out of the military. The loader -- the same.

"I'm only thirty-six right now, and I'll be lucky if I make it another two years before I can't work."

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION HAS BEEN equally adamant in denying a link between depleted uranium and the host of illnesses suffered by American troops. So far, the Veterans Administration has agreed to study only ninety soldiers who were exposed to depleted uranium. "There has been no cancer of bone or lungs," Michael Kilpatrick, the military's top spokesman on Gulf War Syndrome, told journalists last March. He added that the vets, twenty of whom carry DU fragments in their bodies, have suffered "no medical consequences of that depleted uranium exposure."

Kilpatrick failed to mention that one of the vets being studied had been diagnosed with lymphoma, and that Jerry Wheat, who continues to report for testing twice a year, had a bone tumor. He also neglected to mention that every vet in the study continued to excrete depleted uranium in their urine nine years after their exposure -- evidence that DU is present in their organs and tissues.

The few independent studies that have been done on Gulf War veterans also suggest a link between depleted uranium and cancer. Han Kang, an environmental epidemiologist at the Department of Veterans Affairs who examined death certificates of Gulf-War-era vets, discovered a thirty percent increase in lymphoma. And Richard Clapp, an environmental epidemiologist at Boston University, used state medical records to track cases of cancer among 30,000 vets in Massachusetts. The statistical likelihood of finding even a single case of lymphoma among such a small sample is zero. So far, Clapp has found four.

Clapp warns it is too soon to draw conclusions from his research, noting that it usually takes at least ten years for those exposed to radiation to develop lymphoma. "That's especially true of other kinds of tumors such as lung cancer and solid cancers," he says. "So we have to keep looking at this."

The federal government, however, has supported almost no independent research into the effects of DU exposure. "The government depends on its own agencies for its information," says Rosalie Bertell, an expert in the relationship between low-level radiation and cancer who has been turned down for federal grants to study Gulf War vets. "Unless you say what the Pentagon says they won't pay any attention to you."

Bertell and other scientists are looking into how the fireballs created by DU explosions spew vast clouds of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. The military insists that such "oxides" fall to the ground within fifty meters of a target. But Asaf Durakovic, a retired Army colonel and former chief of nuclear medicine at the VA hospital in Wilmington, Delaware, calls the assertion "a mind-boggling admission of ignorance. The particles remain permanently suspended in the atmosphere. And dust containing depleted uranium has been detected several dozen miles from the point of impact." Twenty years ago, he notes, a physicist in Schenectady, New York, detected depleted uranium in his workplace, thirty-eight miles from a plant manufacturing DU weapons.

Chris Busby, a British specialist in low-level radiation, conducted his own field assessments in Iraq before the second Gulf War and measured radiation more than 100 times normal near target sites. He concluded that oxide particles are blown far afield by the wind. Such super-fine particles cannot be dislodged from the lungs by coughing; some will make their way into internal organs and bone, where they can irradiate nearby cells and eventually cause genetic mutations that lead to cancer.
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Indeed, there is now concern that the latest fighting produced another Gulf War Syndrome. Two service members are dead, and at least sixteen others have been placed on life support as the result of a mysterious aliment that is afflicting U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The Army is investigating, but so far is unable to explain the illness.

WHEN THE FIRST GULF WAR ended in 1991, the military needed to bring home fifteen damaged tanks and nine troop transports contaminated with depleted uranium. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf asked Maj. Doug Rokke to head the effort to clean them up. The top brass knew the mission was dangerous. Rokke remembers those at the command level telling him, "We've got our Agent Orange of the Nineties."

Rokke went to Iraq with several hundred men under his command. "I planned how the decontamination should be undertaken," he says. "Nobody really knew anything about it then. We were wearing what we had available -- gas masks and anti-contamination suits and coveralls. I was scraping up body parts from these tanks with a putty knife. If you listen to the briefings today, they say, 'All you need is a dust mask.'"

When it was all over, Rokke received a citation for meritorious service. That wasn't all he got, however. Today he suffers from cataracts, kidney damage, and a disease called RADS -- a lung-destroying malady caused by inhaling hazardous substances over short periods. Another colleague, an engineer, developed throat cancer nine months after the decontamination project and died. Rokke claims that thirty other men who worked with his team eventually died of cancer. Ask him about his own health today, twelve years later, and he says simply, "I'm trashed."

Ultimately, Rokke and his team shipped the vehicles to a military facility in Barnwell, South Carolina. "It's a giant facility that deals with the recovery of radioactive-contaminated equipment," he says. "There are exceptional scientists there, but it took three years to clean up twenty-four vehicles." Some of the vehicles, he says, were sent back into service, where they joined thousands of others that remain contaminated. Cleaning them up, he says, "is not even feasible."

For the past twelve years, Rokke has tried to educate the military command about the dangers posed by DU. "I recommended medical care for every soldier who had been involved in friendly fire," he says. "They won't do it. They never looked for problems, so they didn't find any. And people wonder why a quarter of the vets are sick? But hey, I'm just a friggin' blue-jean-type moccasin scientist. I'm not a lab guy. I'm the guy who is scraping this stuff up with a putty knife. It's real simple: This stuff is effective, and they're going to use it. If they acknowledge what happened to the vets, they have to acknowledge what happened to the non-combatants. There are sick people all over the Gulf."

THE THREAT POSED BY DU ISN'T limited to Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers. The military has been testing depleted uranium at home, even firing missiles into the Pacific. "We've fired DU all over the country," says Naughton, the retired Army spokesman. "If you shoot it into the same area over and over, you create a contamination problem that's just not worth cleaning up. If you have enough DU lying around, someone is going to ask you to clean it up, and you would rather not do that."

Depleted uranium has attracted its share of conspiracy theorists. Some say the military is deploying DU to help rid the United States of nuclear waste; others charge the Pentagon with genocide, claiming that radioactive weapons are being used to deliberately destroy the genetic future of targeted populations in Iraq and elsewhere. But even the most measured activists who take pains to distance themselves from such claims say the military is distorting the truth and putting troops at risk to keep its silver bullet in action. "The Pentagon is lying," says Dan Fahey, the former Navy officer. "This is the precedent that has been established with atomic veterans and with Vietnam veterans. If they're not going to let us know what they know, they should give the benefit of the doubt to the veteran. But they don't want anyone telling them what weapons they can and cannot use."

The military is certainly worried that public opposition could put an end to its favorite weapon. As early as 1991, Lt. Cola M.V. Ziehmn of the Los Alamos labs in New Mexico sent a memo to his bosses at the Pentagon warning that, "DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus be deleted from the arsenal." Naughton concedes that the press briefing on depleted uranium held a few days before the attack on Iraq last March was called to blunt criticism. "There have been considerable efforts by a variety of people and institutions to take DU away from the U.S. Army," Naughton says. "We used a little bit in Kosovo and got a really big reaction from our allies. The public-affairs people just wanted to get out there before the shooting started -- before people start complaining there are sick people in Iraq."

Chris Hellman, the military-policy analyst, says the Pentagon is ultimately unconcerned with whether it is turning entire areas of countries into radioactive hot zones. "That's not the military's view of this," he says. "When they wake up in the morning and look at Iraq, number one is to win the war." The only way to put a stop to depleted uranium, he adds, is for Congress to pass a law banning DU ordnance. "It's up to the policy-makers to make this decision for them. It's the policymakers, not the military, who make decisions about morality and 'collateral damage'."

Left to its own devices, the military has made clear that it considers depleted uranium worth any risk it poses. "The military benefits are so much larger compared to any health problems," Naughton says. "We feel we have to use it. It's radioactive -- I wish it wasn't, but I can't change the laws of physics. The issue is, once you've had the hit, once you're involved in the catastrophic failure of the tank, did the crew survive long enough to really care whether it was tungsten or DU that hit them? Anyone who does should count themselves damn lucky. I'm sure every one of them would thank God that they lived forty years to contract lymphoma."

"I don't even know what to say about the Veterans Administration. I put in for disability on my back and they won't give it to me. I spoke with the chief investigator of the study, and I don't know whether she's downplaying it or what. She said, 'DU doesn't hurt you.' That was pretty much what she said in a nutshell. But that study is funded by the government, and I guess if I wanted the job, I would say what the government wants, too.

"At first, being hit with friendly fire really disturbed me. But at that point, I wasn't really aware of any problems with DU. Over the years, I've kind of changed. The friendly fire has become less important to me, and the DU is concerning me more and more.

"I personally think the Pentagon is covering this up. They have a shameful history of hiding these things from the vets. It's not until half of these people are dead or coming down with cancer that they say, 'OK, now we're going to take care of you.' Don't take me as un-American or anything, but there's no way in hell I would want one of my sons out there fighting now."

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Originally Posted by Locobot

I agree. The logic that says 'we think there's nothing wrong with it' while acknowledging the fact that cleanup would be necessary escapes me. If we don't use them in the first place there is no need to cleanup.

All the fuss is over DU's properties as a heavy metal. By your standards we should ban all heavy metal use in war. come on.

No, stevo22. I suggest reading the posts in a given thread before posting yourself. It might help you to avoid confusion in the future. I admit to being frustrated at your post above.

"All the fuss" is about a toxic substance being deposited in your bones, brain, liver, lymph system, spleen, testes and other organs. Just like uranium, DU poses toxicological and radiological health risks. It pulverizes upon impact and becomes airborn. People inhale it from the air, or eat foods that the DU landed on. From there it gets deposited throughout your body. So, 1 (DU has toxicological and radiological health risks) + 1 (DU inside your unprotected body for years) = 2 (very dangerous).

Edit:No...no....I'm done with this thread....must....stop...posting..

Just for the record.. there is no such thing as a toxic substance. At all. Certain amounts of ANY substance can be toxic. Its an important distinction to keep in mind. After reading the articles it appears there isnt much concensus as to whether there are toxic AMOUNTS of DU in use. But, I'm always for erring on the side of caution when it is compelling reason to do so.

I'm sorry. I should have been more specific about what I meant by "toxic". Actually Uranium causes mutations in and damages DNA, and uranium exposure can result in increased chromosomal aberrations. It can cause cancer. DNA mutation cannot be caused by any substance.

The total amount of DU munitions used in the Gulf War was outlined in the opening post. Around 350 tons of DU officially were used.

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Originally Posted by Lebell

By this logic, lead core bullets are also illegal, since a toxic quanty of lead is being introduced into the body.

As it is, I see a lot of misinformation on Uranium, heavy metals and radiation.

If memory serves, uranium is primarily an alpha emitter, (that is, a helium nucleus) and therefore isn't primarily a radiation hazard (this type of radiation can be stopped by a sheet of paper and won't even penetrate the skin, unlike beta and gamma radiation). Alpha emitter's become dangerous only when they are absorbed into the body where the radiation can damage tissue and DNA (such as when plutonium displaces calcium in bone). So the charge of high radiation levels in "shell holes" is irrelevant. But most of uranium's toxic effects come from the fact that it is a heavy metal.

There are several studies out regarding the toxic effects of DU, including a notable one from the World Health Organization that concludes DU is not a long term health hazard. Still, there are studies that claim it is.

Given the conflicting claims, we should continue to monitor for long term health effects, but also given the major studies that conclude there are no long-term effects from DU munitions, we should continue to use them when the alternative might mean longer battles and presumably, higher casualities.

Lebell,

I respect your post and the way you focussed on the issue and gave your links as foundations for your belief.

I just have a few questions: is it not better to use something that isn't surrounded by controversy, such as a Tungsten? OR to at least have details clean up the DU in the areas after we have secured them? And again I have to ask, if we are facing such an inferior army over there what is the need to use these weapons anyway?

Can we afford to wait and see if there is any truth to the DU contamination, and how long do we continue to use it before we decide there are serious problems?

I'm sorry but our troops deserve to not be guinea pigs, and DU right now sounds exactly like the historical readings of Agent Orange. I'm not willing to take those chances, and in all honesty our government shouldn't either. To me the fact that there are so many questions and possibilities of harmful after affects to our troops and civilians, that I would cease all use or I would make sure we had in place a way to clean the DU up.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Locobot

I thought I was being clear enough, but I will restate it.

I DO NOT necessarily see the need for future cleanup. What I said, was that it is a possibility. What is in doubt is how probable it is.

That is why I also said that further monitoring is advisable, so as to determine said probability.

As to the half life of U235, the number in and of itself is meaningless without knowing what the type of decay is and the daughter products. Indeed, in some cases, a longer half life is preferable as it means the substance is decaying slower and giving off less radiation.

Also, as I've stated, it is the heavy metal aspect that is of more concern with U235.

I also find it interesting that several people have said things akin to "introduced into the eco-system" as if U235 came from outerspace or was made in a laboratory somewhere. It came from the eco-system albiet one deep underground and before refining. Still, the point is important.

So once again, the key here is not just one or two numbers, but the actual effects it has given the amount, weighed against the cost of not using it and the cost of cleaning it up.

And THAT is what I am advocating; a reasoned approach based on what we currently know.

pan,

I addressed a few of your points, but I think you deserve a more personalized response.

I do think that sometimes the DOD reporting on itself is like the Fox reporting on the Chicken count, but that is supposedly why we also have congressional oversite, imperfect as it can be. I am also aware of the Agent Orange debacle, as well as the atomic medicine tests, syphilis tests, etc. and frankly, I think a few Army folks should have been sent to prison for a long time.

But in this case, there are other reports out there that conflict, some dramatically. As to actual numbers, ie, when do we stop using them, what proof is enough, etc., I really don't have an answer to that. I suppose if I did, I would be in another line of work.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lebell

I also find it interesting that several people have said things akin to "introduced into the eco-system" as if U235 came from outerspace or was made in a laboratory somewhere. It came from the eco-system albiet one deep underground and before refining. Still, the point is important.

The point is not important. You could just as easily say nothing is artificial and therefore there can be no artificially ccreated consequences.

The eco-system is not simply everything that exists. There is an eco-system in my living room. Put 100lbs of DU in my living room and you will destroy the eco-system. Whether DU is naturally occuring, manufactured in a lab or delivered to us from another dimension is irrelevant to the question of whether it has negative properties. DU is not natural to any eco-system other than one which already includes DU particles of similar quantity - and even then, to double the quantity is to alter the eco-system. DU did not come from the eco-system of Iraq, circa 2004 - it was introduced.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Manx

The point is not important. You could just as easily say nothing is artificial and therefore there can be no artificially ccreated consequences.

Not true.

Polychlorinated byphenols, or PCBs are not a naturally occuring substance that has been introduced into the ecosystem and had devestating effects.

Still, refining a substance, such as mercury, can change the way in which we must deal with it's disposal.

My point however, is that the 'ecosystem' can usually deal with a certain amount of a naturally occuring substance, such as U235, mercury, asbestos, etc, whereas it might not be able to deal with another substance, such as PCB.

But once again, substance, form and quantity must be addressed for the specific situation.

You missed my point. There are essentially no artificial substances. If a substance doesn't exist and it is created in a lab, it is still a natural product. So to claim that because DU exists somewhere, under some conditions (deep underground, on Mars, wherever) it is not an artificial danger to the ecosystem is true. But nothing at all, man-made or not, is an artificial danger to the ecosystem. But anything (even water) can be an danger to a specific ecosystem when it is artifically added.

So essentially, your original point, the distinction of the "naturalness" of DU is not important.

Um no, Depleted Uranium is not naturally present in any ecosystem.

What about Doug Rokke in the article posted above? He only came into contact with DU in a clean-up capacity and now "suffers from cataracts, kidney damage, and a disease called RADS -- a lung-destroying malady caused by inhaling hazardous substances over short periods." He was told by his superiors that they needed him to help mitigate an "agent orange for the 90s."

If you can't deal with even-handed journalism, like the article I posted, which shows that yes, DU poses a significant health threat then you may as well stick your head back in the sand like Dragonlich and Ustwo. Ignoring it will not make this problem go away.

BTW Lebell or other mods - you censored the wrong picture! There is still a photo of a child while you deleted a photo of an adult examining a destroyed tank! I'll edit it though--

Sigh.

Manx, Locobot,

If DU doesn't come from an ecosystem, where does it come from? (and I guess that chunk of carnotite I have out in the garage must mean that the southwestern Colorado doesn't have an ecosystem).

But I've stated my position of continued use with further study and clean up if necessary. If that's "sticking my head in the sand", I can live with it.

Just to clarify something that seems to be bothering people, very small amounts of uranium are found almost everywhere in soil, rock, and water. HOWEVER, concentrated deposits of uranium ores are found in just a few places, almost always in hard rock or sandstone. These deposits are normally covered over with earth and vegetation (in other words, the naturally occouring uranium does exist in an ecosystem, but that ecosystem is deep underground and is not exposed to land animals or plants).

The DU deposited in Iraq back in 1992 was at least 350 tons. That's a lot more uranium than is regularly deposited in ANY surface environment. Normally, uranium deposits larger than 500 grams per square mile can start to effect the natural environment in any given area. The only deposits more than that are found deep under ground. So, to clarify for super awesome moderator Lebell (heh, call me a brown noser), the amount of DU now in the areas where DU was used is exponenially larger than the natural amount that would have been. This can create an imbalance in said environment. Uranium not onl y effects humans at a genetic level, but all organisms. Imagine all animal and plant life developing cancerous growths and many of the organisms not being able to procreate.

Please ask if you need clarification on any of this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lebell

It's fascinating to me that you're able to equate a rock you found in the mountains with a byproduct of refined nuclear fuel particulated, aerated, and disseminated in to the environment through weapons systems. How is it possible that you're able to take this blind leap with logic? Does depleted uranium truely fit your definition of a naturally occuring substance? Or are you making a disingenous claim to support an ideology-based belief?

Thanks for your post, Willravel, and I agree with pretty much everything you've said.

As I've stated above, the only question now is what the amounts and effects of such 'deposits' are, and if the cost of using the weapons outweighs the cost of not using the weapons which has not yet been adequately answered, as far as I'm concerned.

Agreed. I think the only differences between each side of this is one side errs on the side of caution because of the probable health risks of DU, and the other side errs on the side of using the effective weapons. The reason I choose to err on cautions side is that if DU is as dangerous as it seems to be, it will have negative detrimental effects on health for generations not only for Iraqis, but for the soldiers over their and their children. If there is proof that it is safe, then I say go ahead with care. But the risk is far to great in this situation with the available information.

This whole situation seems like the DoD just wants to get rid of uranium waste in another country. They rushed in without making sure it was safe, and now we are beginning to see the effects in Gulf War syndrome and the birth defects in Iraq.

The reason I started this post is because I have a small amount of DU in my system from when I went to northern Iraq a few years back myself. *ATTENTION* If you have been in an area that DU munitions were used or manufactured, you should go to your doctor and take the uranium urine test. If you test positive, there are ways to flush your system in order to avoid the health risks stated above. Treatments with tiron, gallic acid, DTPA, p-aminosalicylic acid, sodium citrate, EDTA, 5-aminosalicylic acid and EGTA were shown to help to move the uranium out in your feces. Tiron would be my first choice, as it is the most effective. I have also heard of taking magnetic clay baths to pull the mtals out of the body, although I have no proven medical data to back that up.

For the sake of time, I'm going to summerize the argument for stopping the use of and studying further DU munitions.
Point 1: over 350 tons of DU munitions were used in Iraq during the American disarming of Iraq after the attack on Kuwait, a.k.a. Desert Storm.
Point 2: When DU munitions are used, the DU bullets and bombs to not splat like lead munitions. They splinter and puncture, turning to dust. This dust can easily be inhaled by the soldiers firing the munitions just as the soldiers/insurgents/civilians being attacked can also inhale the DU dust.
Point 3: While DU is basically harmless externally (the skin can protect you from the ill effects of DU), when taken in through inhalation - breathing DU air, ingestion - eating food with DU dust on it, or injection - DU shrapnel, it can be spread through the blood stream to vital parts of the body such as the bones, brain, liver, lymph system, spleen, testes/ovum and other organs.
Point 4: DU, like naturally occouring uranium, has detrimental effects on DNA and chromosomal growth such as destruction or mutation. DU exposure can result in increased chromosomal aberrations. It can cause DNA to form incorrectly, possibily leading to cancer. DU has been linked to damage in the liver, kidney, and lymph system.
Bottom line: We should stop using DU munitions for however long it takes to prove CONCLUSIVLY that it is safe and non toxic to organisms. We understand that DU munitions primary use is for breaking through armor, and that it is important in making war. However it's radiological effects could last for generations.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lebell

Sigh.

Manx, Locobot,

If DU doesn't come from an ecosystem, where does it come from?

I can't figure out how you got me saying DU doesn't come from an ecosystem in what I actually did say.

I'll try one last time:

Take your average amateur home fresh water fish tank. Add a few pounds of salt. Watch your fish die. Salt is natural, it comes from the global ecosystem (as does everything and anything). But in some ecosystems, it kills. DU is the same in that respect. So, as I said, your desire to point out that DU comes from somewhere is entirely irrelevant.

Manx,

Great analogy and I'll use it myself.

Given the same fish tank (except I'll ad a filter that gradually removes the salt, because ecosystems aren't closed, like a fishtank is), you can also add a little bit of salt and the fish will be fine.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lebell

OK, what would function as a "filter" in your fishtank analogy? Is that to account for natural dispersion of depleted uranium? To be more accurate you'd have to add your filtered salt into another fishtank, filter that one, and so on. I wonder what would happen if you added a little bit of DU to your fishtank...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Locobot

No, you would not.

Eventually, you would reach an equalibrium where everything is still fine, which is what happens in nature and the point I have been trying to make repeatedly.

I can appreciate what you're saying, Lebell, but how long do you think it'll take to reach 'equilibrium'? And how long do you think it'll take the soldiers and civilians DU contaminated bodies to reach equilibrium? To me it sounds like you are hoping for a natural, non human answer to this problem. Unfortunatetly, that's not how it works. This fish tank (good anaolgy for pointing out the first ecosystem question, but it has problems matching up after that) is a large area of land. This area of land has been coated with DU every time the U.S. and it's allies decide to beat on the Iraqi people. The 350 or more tons I quoted was only for Desert Storm. There is supposed to be over 890-1300 tons total DU munitions used on Iraqi soil between 1992 and mid 2004. Also, the DU munitions are not spread evenly over the whole of Iraq. A great deal of the munitions were used in towns and cities. In other words, a lot the DU dust is localized in medium to heavily populated civilian areas.

I am fully aware of all of that.

Like all analogies, this one shouldn't be taken too far.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lebell

No, you would not.

Eventually, you would reach an equalibrium where everything is still fine, which is what happens in nature and the point I have been trying to make repeatedly.

"Eventually" in this case is 4.5 million years. Do you see why I find this answer unsatisfactory?

Would it take anything short of testing positive yourself for DU after visiting Iraq to make you believe that this is probably dangerous? I wish I could have answered yes to this, but I never got that chance.

What leads you to believe that?

As to testing positive, have you had any health effects that can be attributed to DU?

I was tested the day after I got back (I needed a lot of sleep). As soon as the results came back - about 2 days later - I was getting treatment. The uranium was basically gone from my body after a week or so. Acording to my doctor I am now in no danger. I consider myself to be VERY lucky. I have no idea what would have happened to me had I not been treated, but my doctor assures me it would have eventually been at great health risk.

I'm glad that you are ok, but I must say that your personal experience doesn't back up the claim of the post.

Let me clear this up: I do not intend to back up my claim in this thread with my personal experience. All that what happened to me does is spark my interest. The only information I took away from that experience is DU munitions can be spread and inhaled, there are DU munition dust particles in the air in Iraq, and the best course of action is to consult your doctor for all serious medical problems.
My stand in this thread (we should test further because of the possible dangers of DU) is seperate.

This thread needs a bit of updating. Also, I apologize for posting utter crap before. No excuses.

The effects of depleted uranium aerosol have been confirmed by respected studies (despite still being denied by the DoD) since my last post, and the effects are nearing a point where they are undeniable.

Without a doubt DU is absolutely horrible and is at bare minimum causing similar effects as what happens with lead or other heavy metal poisoning.

This stuff is being exposed to soldiers and Iraqis in the same way that would get me as a contractor in deep shit for doing with lead.