DEPLETED URANIUM

Submitted by antarchi on December 3, 2007 - 01:27

By firing radioactive ammunition, the U.S., U.K., and Israel may have triggered a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East that, over time, will prove deadlier than the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan. So much ammunition containing depleted uranium (DU) has been fired, asserts nuclear authority Leuren Moret, "The genetic future of the Iraqi people for the most part, is destroyed."

Sherwood Ross, in Radioactive Ammunition Fired in Middle East May Claim More Lives Than Hiroshima and Nagasaki

If you have the stomach, and can bear to see the effects of the WMD we have taken into Iraq and other countries, look at some of the pictures on this page.

In fact - everyone should look, even if it makes you retch and cry. The world must sit up to this horror. The biggest armies of the world are shooting nuclear poisons at the poorest countries of the world, and their people breathe in radiation day by day.

[In April 1991] the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) "self initiated" a Report warning the government that if fifty tones of the residual dust, from the explosions of the weapons on impact, was left "in the region", they estimated it would generate "half a million" extra cancer deaths by the end of the century (2000.) Iraq's cancers and birth deformities have become an anomaly, compared to those in the Pacific Islands and amongst British troops after the nuclear testing in the 1950's.

... And far from fifty tones and that chilling warning, in Iraq several thousand tones now cover this ancient, Biblical land and with the bombs raining daily, the audit rises nearly hour by hour.

Felicity Arbuthnott, in Depleted Uranium - A Way Out?

They knew: they knew at least in 1991, and when there was still time to clean up after the first Gulf War, and before those half a million extra cancer deaths took hold. The British government was told then by the UKAEA that "The whole subject of the contamination of Kuwait is emotive and thus must be dealt with in a sensitive manner. It is necessary to inform the Kuwait government of the problem in a useful way"1

But they didn't warn the Kuwait government, and they didn't warn the Iraq government either.

The Americans - at least - knew how to clean it up, because Doug Rokke, who was the head of their depleted uranium project, was asked to tell them how to do it - and he told them, and they didn't do it. They never bothered to use the training video he produced, they never informed the troops who fought in Iraq about the dangers, nor provided them with protective equipment, and they never even tested them for DU on their return. They refused Doug Rokke medical treatment, although he returned from 'cleaning up' with 5,000 times the level of safe uranium in his blood. He is now desperately ill.

They knew before they shot off countless tons more radioactive bullets in Afghanistan, in Serbia, and then - once again, and to this day - in Iraq. Officials in the American military knew, officials in the US government knew, and officials in the British government and the British military knew.

They know what is happening now, and they continue to exacerbate the problem - to cover more and more of Iraq with poisonous toxins and radioactive debris which has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. They know that they could soften the impact slightly if they cleaned up after their war games. But they won't admit that they are dirty, and they won't clean up.

They know it is illegal too: in 1996, a sub-commission of the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights found the weapons to be 'incompatible with international law' (if that was not obvious already). But the British Ministry of Defence still insists that -

DU anti-armour munitions will remain part of our arsenal for the foreseeable future because we have a duty to provide our troops with the best available equipment with which to protect them and succeed in conflict.

People know - and the press won't write about it. People are dying and their children are condemned to die from radiation sickness, diseases, and deformities, and their children's children - and so on down the line for generations.

But if you know that the impact of your actions will be to condemn generations to death, just because they happen to live in a region of the world that you covet; and if you go out of your way to do it - even to persuade others that it would be right to do it - what does that make the act?

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II

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To see more horrific facts about this terrifying crime, go to this page.

To do something about it, go to the site of the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons. Sign the petition, at the very least.

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