Radioactive War

The years of bombing of Iraq by US and British planes and cruise missiles (more or less continuous, at varying levels of intensity, since 1991) have left behind an even more deadly and insidious legacy: tons of shell casings, bullets, and bomb fragments laced with depleted uranium. In all, the US has hit Iraqi targets with more than 970 radioactive bombs and missiles.

More than ten years later, the health consequences from this radioactive bombing campaign are beginning to come into focus. They are dire. Iraqi physicians call it "the white death"--leukemia. Since 1990, the incident rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600 percent. The situation is compounded by Iraq's forced isolation and the sadistic sanctions regime, recently described by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as "a humanitarian crisis," that makes detection and treatment of the cancers all the more difficult.

"We have proof of traces of DU in samples taken for analysis and that is really bad for those who assert that cancer cases have grown for other reasons," says Dr. Umid Mubarak, Iraq's health minister.

Dr. Mubarak contends that the US's fear of facing the health and environmental consequences of its DU bombing campaign is partly behind its failure to follow through on its commitments under a deal allowing Iraq to sell some of its vast oil reserves in return for food and medical supplies.

"The desert dust carries death," said Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, an oncologist and member of England's Royal Society of Physicians. "Our studies indicate that more than forty percent of the population around Basra will get cancer. We are living through another Hiroshima."

Most of the leukemia and cancer victims aren't soldiers. They are civilians, many of them children. The US-dominated Iraqi Sanctions Committee in New York has denied Iraq's repeated requests for cancer treatment equipment and drugs, even painkillers such as morphine. As a result, the overflowing hospitals in towns such as Basra are left to treat the cancer-stricken with aspirin.

This is part of a larger horror inflicted on Iraq that sees as many as 180 children dying every day, according to mortality figures compiled by UNICEF, from a catalogue of diseases including: cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis, mumps, measles, influenza...

Iraqis and Kuwaitis aren't the only ones showing signs of uranium contamination and sickness. Gulf War veterans, plagued by a variety of illnesses, have been found to have traces of uranium in their blood, feces, urine, and semen.

Depleted uranium is a rather benign sounding name for uranium-238, the trace element left behind when the fissionable material is extracted from uranium-235 for use in nuclear reactors and weapons. For decades, this waste was a radioactive nuisance, piling up at plutonium-processing plants across the country. By the late 1980s there was nearly a billion tons of the material.

Then weapons designers at the Pentagon came up with a use for the tailings: they could be molded into bullets and bombs. The material was free and there was plenty at hand. Also uranium is a heavy metal, denser than lead. This makes it perfect for use in armor-penetrating weapons.

When the tank-busting bombs explode, the depleted uranium oxidizes into microscopic fragments that float through the air as carcinogenic dust, carried on the desert winds for decades. The lethal dust is inhaled, sticks to the fibers of the lungs, and eventually begins to wreak havoc on the body in the form of tumors, hemorrhages, ravaged immune systems, leukemia.

In 1943, the doomsday men associated with the Manhattan Project speculated that uranium and other radioactive materials could be spread across wide swaths of land to contain opposing armies. Gen. Leslie Grove, head of the project, asserted that uranium weapons could be expected to cause "permanent lung damage." In the late 1950s Al Gore's father, the senator from Tennessee, proposed dousing the demilitarized zone in Korea with uranium as a cheap failsafe against an attack from the North Koreans.

After the Gulf War, Pentagon war planners were so delighted with the performance of their radioactive weapons that they ordered a new arsenal and, under Bill Clinton's orders, fired them at Serb positions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Serbia. More than a hundred of the DU bombs have been used in the Balkans over the last six years.

Already medical teams in the region have detected cancer clusters near the bomb sites. The leukemia rate in Sarajevo, scarred by American bombs in 1996, has tripled in the last five years. But it's not just Serbs who are ill and dying. NATO and UN peacekeepers in the region are also coming down with cancer. As of January 23, eight Italian soldiers who served in the region have died of leukemia.

First, the Defense Department shrugged off concerns about depleted uranium as a wild conspiracy theory fomented by peace activists, environmentalists, and Iraqi propagandists. When the US's NATO allies demanded that the US disclose the chemical and metallic properties of its munitions, the Pentagon refused. It has also refused to order testing of US soldiers stationed in the Gulf and the Balkans.

At the official level the British have been less discreet. A 1991 study by the UK Atomic Energy Authority predicted that if less than 10 percent of the particles released by depleted uranium weapons used in Iraq and Kuwait were inhaled it could result in as many as "300,000 probable deaths."

The British estimate assumed that the only radioactive ingredient in the bombs dropped on Iraq was depleted uranium. It wasn't. A new study of the materials inside these weapons describes them as a "nuclear cocktail," containing a mix of radioactive elements, including plutonium and the highly radioactive isotope uranium-236. These elements are 100,000 times more dangerous than depleted uranium.

Typically, the Pentagon has tried to dump the blame on the Department of Energy's sloppy handling of its weapons production plants. This is how Pentagon spokesman Craig Quigley described the situation in chop-logic worthy of the pen of Joseph Heller: "The source of the contamination as best we can understand it now was the plants themselves that produced the depleted uranium during the 20-some year time frame when the DU was produced."

Indeed problems at DoE nuclear sites and the contamination of its workers and contractors have been well-known since the 1980s. A 1991 Energy Department memo reports: "during the process of making fuel for nuclear reactors and elements for nuclear weapons, the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant ... created depleted uranium potentially containing neptunium and plutonium."

Depleted uranium has a half-life of more than four billion years, approximately the age of the Earth. Thousands of acres of land in the Balkans, Kuwait, and southern Iraq have been contaminated forever. If George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton are still looking for a legacy, here's a grim one that will stay around for an eternity.