Weapons of Mass Deception

What the Pentagon doesn’t want us to know about depleted uranium.

By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03

http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=253_0_1_0_C

An Iraqi woman and a child sit in the leukemia ward of the Al Mansoor 
Hospital in Baghdad, where children with various forms of cancer, 
attributed to the 1991 use of depleted uranium munitions by the allies, 
are being treated.

In the weeks leading up to the war on Iraq, TV screens across America 
were crowded with images of U.S. soldiers readying for upcoming battles 
with a crazed dictator who would stop at nothing. One clip after another 
showed U.S. soldiers racing to don $211 suits designed to protect them 
from the chemical and biological attacks they would surely suffer on the 
road to ousting Saddam Hussein.

But these grim forecasts were wrong. Despite the advance hype, Hussein’s 
dreaded arsenal was not the biggest threat to Americans on the 
battlefield in Iraq. In fact, it was no threat at all.

The real threat—not only to U.S. troops but to Iraqis as well—may prove 
to be a weapon scarcely mentioned before, during or after the war: 
depleted uranium.

A toxic and radioactive substance, depleted uranium (DU)—otherwise known 
as Uranium 238—was widely used by U.S. troops as their Abrams battle 
tanks and A-10 Warthogs thundered through Iraq this spring.

Depleted uranium is a byproduct of enriched uranium, the fissile 
material in nuclear weapons. It is pyrophoric, burning spontaneously on 
impact. That, along with its extreme density, makes depleted uranium 
munitions the Pentagon’s ideal choice for penetrating an enemy’s tank 
armor or reinforced bunkers.

When a DU shell hits its target, it burns, losing anywhere from 40 to 70 
percent of its mass and dispersing a fine dust that can be carried long 
distances by winds or absorbed directly into the soil and groundwater.

Depleted uranium’s radioactive and toxic residue has been linked to 
birth defects, cancers, the Gulf War Syndrome, and environmental damage.

But the Pentagon insists depleted uranium is both safe and necessary, 
saying it is a “superior armor [and] a superior munition that we will 
continue to use.” Pentagon officials say that the health and 
environmental risks of DU use are outweighed by its military advantages. 
But to retain the right to use and manufacture DU weaponry and armor, 
the Pentagon has to actively ignore and deny the risks that depleted 
uranium poses to human health and environment.

To keep depleted uranium at the top of its weapons list, the Pentagon 
has distorted research that demonstrates how DU dust can work its way 
into the human body, potentially posing a grave health risk. According 
to a 1998 report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease 
Registry, the inhalation of DU particles can lead to symptoms such as 
fatigue, shortness of breath, lymphatic problems, bronchial complaints, 
weight loss, and an unsteady gait—symptoms that match those of sick 
veterans of the Gulf and Balkan wars. Dr. Rosalie Bertell, a Canadian 
epidemiologist, released a study in 1999 revealing that depleted uranium 
can stay in the lungs for up to two years. “When the dust is breathed 
in, it passes through the walls of the lung and into the blood, 
circulating through the whole body,” she wrote. Bertell concluded that 
exposure to depleted uranium, especially when inhaled, “represents a 
serious risk of damaged immune systems and fatal cancers.”

The Pentagon has to cloak this dangerous weapon in deceptive and 
innocuous language. The adjective “depleted,” with its connotation that 
the substance is non-threatening or diminished in strength, is 
misleading. While depleted uranium is not as radioactive and dangerous 
as U235—a person would not get sick merely from brief DU 
exposure—depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.5 billion years (as long 
as the solar system has existed) and may pose serious health risks and 
environmental contamination.

Don’t Believe the Hype: Propaganda Wars

As the U.S. military prepared to launch a new offensive against Iraq 
early this year, the Pentagon and White House embarked on a parallel 
effort to promote depleted uranium as a highly effective weapon that 
would protect the lives of innocent Iraqis. At the same time, the Iraqi 
government sought to exploit the use of depleted uranium and the serious 
public health concerns about its use in its propaganda war against the 
United States.

At a March 14 Pentagon briefing, Col. James Naughton of the U.S. Army 
announced that U.S. forces had decided to employ DU munitions in the 
looming war on Iraq. When asked about depleted uranium’s possible 
effects on civilians, Naughton characterized opposition to the use of DU 
weapons as a product of propaganda and cowardice. “Why do [the Iraqis] 
want [depleted uranium] to go away?” he asked. “They want it to go away 
because we kicked the crap out of them [in the first Gulf War].”

The White House echoed Naughton’s sentiment, rejecting reports linking 
depleted uranium to birth defects and cancers in Iraq. Early this year 
the White House released a report titled Apparatus of Lies: Saddam’s 
Disinformation and Propaganda 1990-2003, which includes a section on 
“The Depleted Uranium Scare.” In it, the White House accuses the Iraqi 
government of launching a “disinformation campaign” that uses 
“horrifying pictures of children with birth defects” as a tool to “take 
advantage of an established international network of antinuclear 
activists.” Iraq’s aim, the report charged, was to promote the “false 
claim that the depleted uranium rounds fired by coalition forces have 
caused cancers and birth defects in Iraq.”

But few anti-DU activists say that depleted uranium is the sole cause of 
cancer and birth defects. Rather, they contend there is an obvious link 
between depleted uranium and other toxins released into the environment 
during the 1991 Gulf War, that independent study is now required, and, 
in the meantime, that the United States should declare a moratorium on 
any future use of depleted uranium.

Depleted Uranium Use Increasing

Over the past 15 years, the Pentagon has become increasingly dependent 
on DU weapons and armor. The 1991 Gulf War was the first major conflict 
in which DU weaponry and armor was used. Almost 320 tons—an amount equal 
to the weight of five Abrams battle tanks—were fired in the Iraqi 
desert. About 10 tons of DU munitions were used in Kosovo and the former 
Yugoslavia in the ’90s. DU weaponry was reportedly used in Afghanistan 
in 2001 as well, but reliable estimates are not yet available.

Depleted uranium was used extensively in this year’s war on Iraq, but if 
Pentagon officials have an accurate accounting of total DU use, they are 
keeping that number to themselves. In a May 15 article in the Christian 
Science Monitor, reporter Scott Peterson wrote that after the war, the 
Pentagon, when pressed by reporters, announced that about 75 tons of DU 
munitions were fired from A-10 Warthogs. However, the Pentagon has 
stalled on releasing additional relevant data on how much depleted 
uranium was fired from Abrams battle tanks—the other system that uses 
only DU munitions. More importantly, it has not addressed concerns that 
DU weaponry was used much more extensively in Iraq’s urban and densely 
populated areas in the 2003 war than in 1991.

The use of DU weapons in urban areas and against civilian targets in 
Iraq gives the lie to the Pentagon’s insistence that it needed the DU 
advantage in order to win the recent war quickly. To illustrate the 
power of this wonder weapon, a March Pentagon press conference 
prominently featured pictures from the first Gulf War of an Abrams tank 
firing a DU munition through a sand dune to destroy an Iraqi tank hidden 
behind. While this makes good TV, did depleted uranium really provide a 
critical advantage to the U.S. military in Iraq? The answer is no. The 
U.S. military did not need a wonder weapon in Iraq because the crippled 
country was not a wonder opponent. Its arsenal was antiquated and had 
been poorly maintained since the first Gulf War. Suffering under more 
than 12 years of U.N. economic sanctions, moreover, Iraq had not been 
able to develop or purchase comparable high-tech armored weaponry.

In his May 15 article, Peterson describes video footage from the last 
days of the recent war showing an A-10 Warthog strafing the Iraqi 
Ministry of Planning in downtown Baghdad. This was not an armored 
target; it was a building in a heavily populated neighborhood. Peterson 
visited the area and found “dozens of spent radioactive DU rounds, and 
distinctive aluminum casings with two white bands, that drilled into the 
tile and concrete rear of the building.”

The indiscriminate use of DU munitions in densely populated areas 
throughout Iraq, which put large numbers of civilians in jeopardy of 
radioactive and toxic exposure, violates the Geneva Convention’s 
protocol prohibiting the use of weapons that do not distinguish between 
soldiers and civilians during wartime.

So why did the Pentagon insist on using DU weapons in Iraq? Tungsten 
alloys would have worked as well. Depleted uranium, it turns out, has 
one tremendous advantage over tungsten. It is provided to weapons 
manufacturers nearly free of charge by the U.S. government—an ingenious 
method of radioactive waste disposal. Essentially, depleted uranium is 
the waste left over from decades of nuclear weapons development. In 
fact, the United States has stockpiles of depleted uranium scattered at 
sites throughout the country—728,000 metric tons to be exact—a tiny 
fraction of which is used in the manufacture of depleted uranium warheads.

Lies and Silence

In an April 14 video address, President Bush spoke directly to military 
personnel and their families, thanking them for their role in the Iraq 
war. The monuments to Hussein had been toppled in Baghdad, and the first 
troops were beginning to return home triumphant. The message, broadcast 
on armed services networks around the country and beamed to troops on 
the Iraq battlefield, included Bush’s promise that veterans of 
“Operation Iraqi Freedom” would receive “the full support of our 
government. We will keep our commitment to improving the quality of life 
for our military families.”

The same day, the Defense Department and the Centers for Disease Control 
released the results of their four-year study on birth defects in the 
children of Gulf War Veterans. Although the study did not mention 
depleted uranium specifically, it found “significantly higher 
prevalences” of heart and kidney birth defects in veterans’ children. 
Unfortunately, the study’s disturbing findings were not reported by any 
U.S. media outlets until June.

The Pentagon and White House propaganda on depleted uranium was never 
challenged by the mainstream media this past spring. If members of the 
national press corps had done their homework, they would have found 
ample evidence that the Pentagon is fully aware of the dangers posed by 
DU weaponry and is actively ignoring its own research and warnings.

A 1974 military report evaluated the medical and environmental effects 
of depleted uranium, noting that “in combat situations involving the 
widespread use of DU munitions, the potential for inhalation, ingestion, 
or implantation of DU compounds may be locally significant.” This 
contradicts recent Pentagon claims that depleted uranium does not pose a 
threat and demonstrates the military’s understanding of how depleted 
uranium is absorbed into the human body, posing risks to organs.

In a 1998 training manual, the U.S. Army acknowledged the hazards of 
depleted uranium, requiring that anyone who comes within 25 meters of 
DU-contaminated equipment or terrain wear respiratory and skin 
protection. The manual cautioned: “Contamination will make food and 
water unsafe for consumption.”

And in November 1999, NATO sent its commanders the following warning: 
“Inhalation of insoluble depleted uranium dust particles has been 
associated with long-term health effects, including cancers and birth 
defects.”

They Hid It Well

The fact that these reports are in the public record is the result of 
years of hard work, study, and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 
requests by anti-DU activists. The Pentagon and Bush administration have 
also been hard at work. In the past two years, they have clamped down on 
sources of information that had been immensely valuable to service 
personnel and their families over the past decade.

Dan Fahey served in the United States Navy just months after the 
fighting ended in the Gulf War. Seeing the havoc the war wreaked on his 
fellow veterans, he set out to become an independent expert on depleted 
uranium. He sits on the board of Veterans for Common Sense and has 
played a major role in obtaining U.S. government documents about 
depleted uranium through FOIA.

Fahey says that, under President Bush, the Department of Defense is 
controlling the release of information about depleted uranium so tightly 
that if he were starting his research and disclosure efforts today, he 
would be unable to get any information through the Freedom of 
Information Act. “There is less information and more secrecy,” he says. 
“There are tighter restrictions on access to information.”

Fahey was responsible for publicizing the findings of a July 1990 report 
by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a defense 
contractor commissioned by the Pentagon to study depleted uranium.

The report revealed that the Pentagon knew that depleted uranium was 
harmful before 1991, when they sent 697,000 American troops to the Gulf, 
where they could be exposed to DU dust and residue. SAIC asserted that 
depleted uranium is “a low-level alpha radiation emitter” that could be 
“linked to cancer when exposures are internal.” The report further 
warned, “DU exposures to soldiers on the battlefield could be 
significant, with potential radiological and toxicological effects.” In 
addition the report found that “short-term effects of high doses [of 
depleted uranium] can result in death, while long-term effects of low 
doses have been implicated in cancer.”

SAIC says in its report that widespread knowledge of depleted uranium’s 
harmful properties could lead to public outrage about the “acceptability 
of the continued use of DU kinetic energy penetrators for military 
applications.” That’s what worries the Pentagon.

All the while, as the Pentagon hides behind claims that more study is 
needed to prove depleted uranium’s connection with the ailments suffered 
by Gulf War veterans and Iraqi civilians, their own research 
demonstrates that, at best, depleted uranium is radioactive and 
toxic—and that at worst, it can lead to incurable diseases and death.

Veterans Suffer

The Pentagon says more study is needed. But veterans of the Gulf War, 
meanwhile, need medical care, information, and benefits, and for the 
Pentagon to come clean about depleted uranium. The veterans had been 
exposed to a “toxic soup” of smoke from oil and chemical fires, 
pesticides, vaccinations, depleted uranium and, most likely, plutonium.

Two types of depleted uranium exist. One is “clean” depleted uranium, a 
byproduct of the processing of uranium ore into uranium-235 (which is 
used in nuclear fuel and weapons). The other type is created at 
government facilities as a byproduct of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel 
(done to extract plutonium for nuclear warheads) and is known as “dirty” 
depleted uranium because it contains highly toxic plutonium.

In November 2000, U.N. researchers examined 11 sites in Kosovo hit by DU 
shells and found radioactive contamination at eight of them. 
Furthermore, those tests uncovered evidence that at least some of the DU 
munitions in the U.S. arsenal used in Kosovo contained “dirty” depleted 
uranium. This raises the question: How much of its plutonium-processing 
waste did the U.S. government supply to weapons manufacturers?

If some of the DU shells in the U.S. arsenal have been made from dirty 
depleted uranium, that could help explain why about 300 of 5,000 
refugees from a Sarajevo suburb heavily bombed by NATO jets in 1995 had 
died of cancer by early 2001. And it could also help explain the fact 
that 28 percent of veterans who served in the first Gulf War have over 
the past 12 years sought treatment for illness and disease resulting 
from their military service and filed claims with the Veterans 
Administration for medical and compensation benefits. In all, 186,000 
veterans of that war have sought treatment for a collection of maladies 
including chronic fatigue, joint and muscle pain, memory loss, 
reproductive problems, depression, and gastrointestinal disorders. 
Together these ailments are known as the Gulf War Syndrome.

Based on the struggles of Gulf War veterans, Congress passed a law in 
1997 requiring the Pentagon to conduct pre- and postdeployment medical 
screenings of troops and military personnel so that medical 
professionals would have an accurate base of information if health 
problems developed. In the early months of this year, as U.S. troops 
were being deployed to Iraq, lawmakers found that the Pentagon was not 
complying with the 1997 law: The troops were not being screened at all.

According to Steven Robinson, a former Army Ranger who now directs the 
National Gulf War Resource Center, it took two congressional hearings, 
30 news interviews, 60 radio interviews, and a timely New York Times ad 
courtesy of www.TomPaine.com to pressure the Pentagon to follow the law. 
On April 29, the Pentagon announced it would begin conducting 
postdeployment examinations. Anti-DU activists say the military’s 
grudging compliance is too little, too late.

Activists are struggling for treatment of veterans, for information 
about depleted uranium and other toxins that could be responsible for 
the Gulf War Syndrome, and for some sort of government acknowledgement 
or apology. But they are also battling against a legacy of lies, 
secrecy, and official promotion of an ends-justifies-the-means posture. 
Veterans with Gulf War Syndrome can be seen as the latest in a long line 
of Pentagon guinea pigs that includes the troops ordered to witness the 
atomic blasts in the early days of the Cold War, soldiers exposed to 
Agent Orange in Vietnam, and the black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, who 
were subjected to federal government-sponsored syphilis experiments.

Keeps on Killing

If the Pentagon and the Federal government can treat American troops and 
their families with such casual disregard and use doublespeak with such 
abandon, what hope is there for Iraqi civilians and troops?

The people of Iraq have known nothing but decades of war, deprivation, 
and oppression. It is understandable that many cheered when the statues 
of dictator Saddam Hussein toppled. At the same time, how could they 
greet the United States, their liberators, with anything other than the 
deepest skepticism?

In his just-released book The New Rulers of the World, Australian 
journalist John Pilger recounts conversations with Iraqi doctors like 
Jawad Al-Ali, a cancer specialist in Basra. Before the Gulf War, Dr. 
Al-Ali told Pilger, “We had only three or four deaths in a month from 
cancer. Now it’s 30 to 35 patients dying every month, and that’s just in 
my department. That is a 12-fold increase in cancer mortality. Our 
studies indicate that 40 to 48 percent of the population in this area 
will get cancer. That’s almost half the population.”

Not only are Dr. Al-Ali’s patients suffering, but his own family members 
are ill as well. “Most of my own family now have cancer, and we have no 
history of the disease,” he told Pilger. “We strongly suspect depleted 
uranium.”

The public has had to rely on anecdotal evidence like Dr. Al-Ali’s 
testimony to get a sense of the health crisis in Iraq. Throughout the 
’90s, Hussein’s government released data on cancer and birth defects, 
but it is unlikely that those figures provide an accurate picture.

Kathy Kelly, director of the Chicago-based Voices in the Wilderness and 
three-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, has visited Iraq 
repeatedly since the first Gulf War and has built strong relationships 
with doctors and nurses there. She recounted a day she spent in a 
pediatric hospital in November 1998. “Four babies were born that day 
with deformities. I was shocked, but the doctors said, ‘This is not 
unusual.’”

“So, I asked them,” she continues, “‘Did you know where the mothers were 
when they conceived? Were their fathers involved in the war? Were they 
in an area exposed to depleted uranium?’”

“One of the doctors replied, ‘All of these questions are very important, 
and we need to be collecting this data, but we cannot. Let me show you 
something.’ And she showed me a prescription for a baby that was written 
on the back of a candy wrapper. Because of the effects of the economic 
sanctions, they did not even have paper to write prescriptions on.”

There is an overwhelming need for medical research in Iraq, but it is 
impossible to initiate within the context of the pressing health needs 
and the lack of medical supplies and equipment that constitute the 
fallout of war. This situation allows the U.S. military to continue 
insisting that there is no proof that DU exposures lead to cancers. “No 
proof of harm is not proof of no harm,” Richard Clapp, an epidemiologist 
at Boston University, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “The potential 
for a DU-cancer link (especially lung cancer in those who breathe 
depleted uranium through dust and smoke particles) is still an open 
question.”

Rep. Jim McDermott, a doctor from Washington state, traveled to Iraq in 
the fall of 2002. He visited hospitals, speaking with his peers, and saw 
the hospital beds crowded with the dying. He returned to the United 
States adamantly opposed to a new war in Iraq and deeply committed to 
challenging the continued use of depleted uranium. McDermott drafted 
legislation requiring studies of the health and environmental impact of 
depleted uranium. His bill, introduced just as the war started this past 
spring, is co-sponsored by a number of other Democrats but needs wider 
support.

Clearly, this legislation, if passed, would be an important first step 
in understanding the long-term effects of depleted uranium.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has called for an outright ban on 
shells made from depleted uranium. That would indeed be another sensible 
place to start.

In addition, anti-DU activists Dan Fahey, Steve Robinson, and Kathy 
Kelly should be encouraged and financially supported in their ongoing 
efforts to compile data and release their findings to the public. Next, 
manufacturers of DU weapons—like the Minnesota-based Alliant 
Techsystems, which built 15 million DU shells for the A-10 
Warthog—should be held accountable for the long-term effects of their 
“products.”

Finally, we might take up Yugoslavian President Vojislav Kostunica’s 
suggestion: “We should be discussing the depleted conscience of those 
who used the notorious depleted uranium.”

Only then will the cycle of deception and silence about depleted uranium 
be broken.

Frida Berrigan is a senior research associate with the Arms Trade 
Resource Center, a project of the World Policy Institute.