In the years of the Cold War nuclear stalemate, there was always a push to create a nuclear weapon small enough to be useable in battle, to make the nuclear threat “credible” in action. But despite much effort to create atomic land mines, atomic artillery shells and the like (not to speak of “suitcase bombs”), nuclear weapons, post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki, never made it onto the battlefield for obvious reasons. Not until recently, anyway.
As the two pieces that follow make clear, the Pentagon slipped a nuclear fast one past us. With almost no adverse publicity, it has managed to arm tank shells and missiles (as well as armoring tanks) with DU or depleted uranium, which turns out to have a radioactive life of 4.5 billion years (no kidding). These DU-tipped weapons with incredible piercing power, or their prototypes, were then tested out in “labs,” which passed for battlefields, starting in 1991 in the Gulf War, then in Kosovo, and more recently, evidently, in Afghanistan. The second Gulf War, should it happen, will undoubtedly only be more — and more — of the same. So in the post-Cold War era the dream of nuclear planners has finally become a reality: we now have weapons capable of creating a radioactive battlefield that can be used more or less without protest.
Though, as a fine piece in the San Francisco Chronicle makes clear, the medical results are not in on DU (mostly because relatively little research has been done on its effects), one thing is obvious — the modern imperial battlefield is dangerous to your health in new ways. And soldiers and former soldiers (who have already passed through the increasingly toxic battlefields of our world) know it, as websites like Veterans for Common Sense make clear. This is why, I believe, an antiwar movement within the military and among former servicemen is likely to grow rapidly as we face, or experience, the next Iraq war.
I’m convinced that someday the very use of such weapons will be widely seen as a crime against humanity. Quite literally so. For DU-tipped weaponry, we’ll surely need a new term. Something like weapons of forever destruction (WFD). I’m including an old but very solid piece I overlooked from last March’s Le Monde Diplomatique on the subject. For many of you, I’m sure, it will be far too much. So let me just start here with its final striking paragraph, which makes the point far better than I could. Tom
“In Jefferson County, Indiana, the Pentagon has closed the 200-acre (80-hectare) proving ground where it used to test-fire DU rounds. The lowest estimate for cleaning up the site comes to $7.8bn, not including permanent storage of the earth to a depth of six metres and of all the vegetation. Considering the cost too high, the military finally decided to give the tract to the National Park Service for a nature preserve – an offer that was promptly refused. Now there is talk of turning it into a National Sacrifice Zone and closing it forever. This gives an idea of the fate awaiting those regions of the planet where the US has used and will use depleted uranium.”
Iraq Links Cancers to Uranium Weapons
U.S. Likely to Use Arms Again in War
By Robert Collier
the San Francisco Chronicle
January 13, 2003BAGDHAD — 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.
Iraq Links Cancers to Uranium Weapons
U.S. Likely to Use Arms Again in War
By Robert Collier
the San Francisco Chronicle
January 13, 2003BAGDHAD — 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.
To read more of this San Francisco Chronicle piece click here
DEPLETED URANIUM IN BUNKER BOMBS
America’s big dirty secret
by Robert James Parsons
Le Monde Diplomatique“The immediate concern for medical professionals and employees of aid organisations remains the threat of extensive depleted uranium (DU) contamination in Afghanistan.” This is one of the conclusions of a 130-page report, Mystery Metal Nightmare in Afghanistan? (1), by Dai Williams, an independent researcher and occupational psychologist. It is the result of more than a year of research into DU and its effects on those exposed to it.
Using internet sites of both NGOs (2) and arms manufacturers, Williams has come up with information that he has cross-checked and compared with weapons that the Pentagon has reported – indeed boasted about – using during the war.