- KHARANJ, Iraq -- The rusting
tanks are gathered in Iraq's southern desert like an open-air exhibit of
the 1991 Gulf War.
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- But these are not just museum pieces. This still radioactive
battlefield - and the severe health problems many Iraqis and some US Gulf
War veterans ascribe to it - may also be an omen of an unsettled future.
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- As American forces prepare to take on Iraq in a possible
Gulf War II, analysts agree that the bad publicity and popular fears about
depleted uranium (DU) use in the first Gulf War, and later in Kosovo and
Afghanistan, have not dented Pentagon enthusiasm for its "silver bullet."
US forces in Iraq will again deploy DU as their most effective - and most
controversial - tank-busting bullet.
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- War seems more imminent as the White House indicated
late this week that the decision for war could come by late January.
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- But this bleak desert just north of Iraq's border with
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia offers a window on the human impact nearly 12 years
after a toxic stew of DU, chemical agents, pesticides, and smoke from burning
oil wells poisoned this war zone. Few suggest that a new war, if it involves
Iraqi armored resistance, will have any less of an effect. "Nobody
thinks about what is going to happen when the shooting stops," says
Robert Hewson, editor of the London-based Jane's Air-Launched Weapons.
"The people who are firing [DU] will demand that they have it...they
will not want to go to war without it. The primary driver will always be
the mission and getting the job done."
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- DU is made from nuclear-waste material left over from
making nuclear weapons and fuel. American gunners used 320 tons of it in
1991 to destroy 4,000 Iraqi armored vehicles and swiftly conclude victory.
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- But the invisible particles created when those bullets
struck and burned are still "hot." They make Geiger counters
sing, and they stick to the tanks, contaminating the soil and blowing in
the desert wind, as they will for the 4.5 billion years it will take the
DU to lose just half its radioactivity.
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- Unaware of the risks, two shepherds earlier this week
relaxed on the ground as their sheep picked at scrub grass near one tank.
Similar tanks struck by DU during the Gulf War were deemed a "substantial
risk" and buried by US forces in Saudi Arabia or a low-level radioactive
waste dump in the US.
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- Pentagon spokesmen said yesterday that US troops are
being given no new DU protection training for any Iraq campaign. In the
mid-1990s, US troops were required to wear full protective suits and masks
within 50 yards of a tank struck with DU bullets. Those rules, based on
Nuclear Regulatory Commission safety guidelines, were dramatically revised
in the late 1990s.
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- In most cases, the rules now say, any face mask is sufficient.
Pentagon officials note their policy has been "inconsistent,"
but admitted in 1998 that their "failure" to alert soldiers to
the risks before the Gulf War resulted in "thousands of unnecessary
exposures." The latest rules, a US Army spokesman said yesterday,
"reflect the most current ... data regarding DU."
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- Critics charge that the official downplaying of DU's
dangers keeps the magic bullet in the arsenal, while thwarting DU-specific
compensation claims by Gulf War vets.
-
- The Iraqi battlefield will be "very dangerous"
in the aftermath of a new war, says Asaf Durakovic, a former chief of nuclear
medicine at a veteran's hospital and head of the private Uranium Medical
Research Center. In the peer-reviewed journal "Military Medicine"
last August, he published results that 14 of 27 ill Gulf War vets had DU
in their urine nine years after the war.
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- Testifying before Congress in 1997, Dr. Durakovic predicted
DU will ensure that "battlefields of the future will be unlike any...in
history," and "injury and death will remain lingering threats
to 'survivors' of the battle for ... decades into the future."
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- Though DU clearly enhances the chances of victory, some
say the price is too high. Risks are difficult to quantify, but US military
and expert reports indicate DU can be a hazard that may cause cancer, and
that total soil decontamination is impossible.
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- British troops deploying to Kosovo in 1999 were sent
out with full suits and masks, and told to use them "if contact with
targets damaged by DU ammunition is unavoidable." A report commissioned
by the US Army on the eve of the Gulf War found that "no dose [of
DU particles] is so low that the probability of effect is zero." Another
report by the British Atomic Energy Agency used an estimate of 40 tons
of DU to create a hypothetical danger level, and predicted that that amount
of DU - one-eighth of what actually was fired - could cause "500,000
potential deaths."
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- "I don't think we know if DU can be used safely,
and until we know that, we shouldn't use it," says Chris Hellman,
a senior analyst with Washington's Center for Defense Information. "The
military's mindset is clear: 'This is war, war is hell...the guy who shoots
first wins, and he hits them with everything he has.'"
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- In the US, every aspect of DU creation, use, and disposal
is strictly controlled. The US Army alone has 14 licenses to handle the
substance. Disposal requires burial in low-level radioactive waste dumps;
particles must be mixed with concrete and encased in two barrels.
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- But when it comes to fighting armor, no substance can
match DU bullets, denser than lead and self-sharpening. They burn through
armor on impact and are cheap. US gunners love them and say DU saves lives
on the front line.
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- This graveyard of tanks shows why. DU burns so hotly
into its target that a targeted tank's own ammunition ignites, causing
a blast that often rips the turret right off the top of a tank. In the
process, however, the DU round aerosolizes into a lethal dust that emits
alpha particles.
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- Though alpha particles have a limited range of a quarter-inch
or so, they pack a punch 20 times more powerful than beta or gamma radiation,
and can lodge easily in the body if inhaled or ingested. Many US vets believe
DU may also be a key factor in Gulf War syndrome, the set of symptoms for
which the Veteran's Administration has already provided compensation for
nearly 1 in 4 vets.
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- Iraqis say DU is a major cause of the severe health problems
such as cancer and birth defects that they graphically show are surging
in southern Iraq, though they do not have the clinical capability to link
DU to health problems.
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- "No one wins in war, everyone loses, and Basra will
again be a great battlefield," says Thamer Ahmad Hamdan, an orthopedic
surgeon in Basra. In 1998, when visited by the Monitor, he had one box
of x-rays depicting grotesque abnormalities. "Now it is boxes,"
he says. "We will remember the Americans used this again, that it
was killing miserable people. Hopefully, they are not going to do it."
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- Iraqi doctors say poverty, malnutrition, and poor water
and sanitation are key to current health problems, along with DU and chemical
exposures, and trauma from the last war. Jawad Khudim al-Ali, director
of the cancer ward at Basra's Saddam Teaching Hospital, says pre-war cancer
rates have increased 11-fold; the mortality rate 19-fold.
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- While US war planners in the Gulf War and in campaigns
since have taken great care to minimize civilian casualties, the longterm
impact of DU is tough to define. And the reviled Iraqi regime of Saddam
Hussein may limit concerns of civilian suffering, analysts say. "I
don't think there is a consensus in this country about whether war is the
right thing to do," says CDI's Hellman. "But there is a consensus
that Saddam is right up there with Satan on the evil-people-in-the-world
list. And therefore, whatever methods of warfare are going to bring him
down, and safeguard American troops in the process, is going to be acceptable
[to Americans]."
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- "If [fallout on civilians] was a serious consideration,"
concurs Hewson, of Jane's, "we would not be contemplating a major
land battle in Iraq. At the levels where this stuff is being planned, no
tears are being shed for those people."
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- Abdulkarim Hussein Subber, a gynecologist at the Basra
Maternity and Children's Hospital, has three photo albums full of images
of unimaginable birth defects that he claims are six times more prevalent
today than before the Gulf War.
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- "We have become very familiar with these cases,"
Dr. Subber says, adding that numbers have leveled off since expectant mothers
began using ultrasound to detect - and terminate - severe cases. "The
problem is [our patients] are afraid of being pregnant again, because of
the fear of malformations," Subber says. "The problem is the
pollution from the war."
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