- In the last few years a great deal rubbish on the subject
of depleted uranium has been published on the Internet, with some of it
finding its way into this website and other Internet publications. Not
long ago, Bob Nichols published on this site an article entitled "Radiation
in Iraq Equals 250,000 Nagasaki Bombs". Apparently someone arrived
at this figure by calculating the number of atoms of depleted uranium used
in Iraq and comparing that to the number of atoms in the nuclear bomb dropped
on Nagasaki. This comparison is remarkably naïve and wholly inappropriate.
The reason is that while depleted uranium is weakly radioactive, it does
not undergo fission that is characteristic of actual nuclear weapons. It
is also important to note that the killing effect of the Nagasaki bomb
was due primarily to the blast effects of the nuclear explosion and not
to radiation. Comparing the effects of nuclear weapons and depleted uranium
on the basis of weight (number of atoms) is similar to concluding that
1,000 pounds of one dollar bills have the same purchasing power as the
same weight of one thousand dollar bills. In other words the comparison
is silly.
-
- Incidentally Bob Nichols referred to the recent Iraq
war as a "nuclear" war because of the use of depleted uranium.
This also is a mistake and is a misuse of the English language. The fact
that a substance is radioactive does not make it a nuclear weapon. A banana
is radioactive. Do we consider bananas as nuclear weapons? Bob Nichols
and others greatly exaggerate the dangers of depleted uranium and would
have us believe that extremely dire consequences will come to anyone who
comes in the vicinity of this material. Nothing could be further from the
truth. The fact that something is a poison in some amount does not mean
that it is a poison in any amount. The poison is in the dose. The vast
majority of experts on the subject of depleted uranium believe that the
alarmists on this subject are mistaken. For more information on the details
of the mainstream scientific viewpoint on depleted uranium, see the website
of the Health Physics Society.
- Bob Nichols also made the following comment in his article:
-
- "An American General named Leslie Groves was in
charge of the bomb making operation called the Manhattan Project. In 1943
the War Department knew exactly what uranium bullets and bombs were good
for."
-
- The above comment is somewhat cryptic and not very well
explained. But it is derived from false information put out by one Doug
Rokke, a leading critic of depleted uranium. Rokke claimed that a 1943
memo to Gen. Groves described the dramatic effects of uranium dust used
as a battlefield weapon. The fact is that the memo dealt with fission products
and not uranium. Uranium was never mentioned in the memo, contrary to the
false quote from Rokke that is widely distributed on the Internet. Contrary
to Nichol's statement above, it was many years after 1943 before anyone
thought to use depleted uranium as a weapon. Even now it is not used because
it is weakly radioactive but because of the very high density of the uranium.
It is used more or less like a chunk of lead and not for its radioactivity.
- Here is a link that provides a clear explanation of the
memo and Rokke's abuse of it:
-
- http://www.ntanet.net/traprock.html
-
- In an earlier article on this site, Dr. Mohammed Daud
Miraki complained mightily about Afghanistan being the target of weapons
made of depleted uranium. Like many other activists, Dr. Miraki does not
understand the scientific details related to uranium. (His degree is not
in science). He mistakenly concludes that birth defects in Afghanistan
are related to the use of depleted uranium. In fact at least one percent
of all children born have birth defects and there is no reason to think
depleted uranium has any connection to the birth defects that he mentions.
It would require a very substantial research program to prove any connection,
if there is a connection, one that so far has not been done.
-
- Miraki and others have pointed to the results of the
Uranium Medical Research Center, one of the few scientific organizations
that support the alarmists, as providing evidence that uranium is adversely
affecting the health of Afghans. The UMRC has found elevated levels of
uranium (not depleted) in several Afghans. But the fact that the uranium
found was natural uranium and not depleted uranium, argues against a weapons
source. Most likely these Afghans were contaminated by natural uranium
from well water, rather than from weapons. There is no known instance of
the U.S. having used weapons containing natural uranium. Although the UMRC
made a hue and cry about the elevated levels of uranium found in 8 Afghan
civilians, it is worth noting that uranium levels 100 times higher were
found in 95 people in South Carolina who were getting it from well water.
No adverse health effects were found in the South Carolina group.
-
- So in summary, it is true that uranium and depleted uranium
have the potential to be harmful, but there isn't any strong evidence that
depleted uranium is a problem in the practical sense in the real world.
It does however, make a very convenient stick with which to hit the United
States government among those elements who are already predisposed to do
so.
-
- About the author:
- Dr. Robert Holloway is a radiochemist with 30 years experience
in the area of environmental radioactivity. He can be reached by email
at: holloway3@aol.com
-
-
- Comment
- From Name Wittheld
- 4-7-4
-
- Dear Jeff Rense,
-
- Thank you for presenting "the other side,"
as always. Kudos for your good work.
- However, I must say that I find this essay written by
Robert Holloway disturbingly overstated, as well as shot through-and-through
with buzz words.
- I will list some of his buzz words and phrases: "rubbish,"
"remarkably naive," "wholly inappropriate," "silly,"
"a mistake," "misuse of the English language," "alarmists,"
and another doctor "does not understand."
-
- This does not sound like an objective scientific summary.
- The truth is, we do not have all the facts about depleted
uranium (or most other toxins), because this information is being kept
from us. At the same time that the truth is being hidden, we are hearing
from representatives of various corporations who are all telling us the
same thing over and over again: "there isn't any evidence that (fill
in the blank) causes any problems."
- I'd like to quote from a couple of other pieces that
I found on your website. http://www.rense.com/general33/depl.htm
-
- Excerpt:
-
- "Talking to Rokke on the telephone is disturbing
enough without him laughing about such horrors. A strange echo accompanies
every utterance. When this bizarre sound is pointed out to him, Rokke says
he isn't surprised: he claims his phone has been tapped for years.
-
- "It may be tempting to dismiss Rokke as a crank
or a conspiracy theorist, but Rokke is 35-year-veteran of the U.S. Army,
and he isn't just a disgruntled grunt. Rokke ran the U.S. Army's depleted
uranium project in the mid-90s, and he was in charge of the Army's effort
to clean up depleted uranium after the Persian Gulf War. And he directed
the Edwin R. Bradley Radiological Laboratories at Fort McClellan, Ala."
-
- (End of excerpt)
-
- Regarding Holloway's comment that "In fact at least
one percent of all children born have birth defects and there is no reason
to think depleted uranium has any connection to the birth defects,"
I would like to present the following (also excerpted from your site),
which quotes from The Independent - London http://www.rense.com/general17/south.htm
:
-
- "During the Gulf war, Britain and the United States
pounded the city and its surroundings with 96,000 depleted-uranium shells.
The wretched creatures in the photographs - for they were scarcely human
- are the result, Dr Amer said.
-
- "He guided me past pictures of children born without
eyes, without brains. Another had arrived in the world with only half a
head, nothing above the eyes. Then there was a head with legs, babies without
genitalia, a little girl born with her brain outside her skull and the
whatever-it-was whose eyes were below the level of its nose.
-
- "Then the chair-grabbing moment - a photograph of
what I can only describe (inadequately) as a pair of buttocks with a face
and two amphibian arms. Mercifully, none of these babies survived for long.
-
- "Depleted uranium has an incubation period in humans
of five years. In the four years from 1991 (the end of the Gulf war) until
1994, the Basrah Maternity Hospital saw 11 congenital anomalies. Last year
there were 221.
-
- "Then there is the alarming increase in cases of
leukaemia among Basrah babies lucky enough to have been born with the full
complement of limbs and features in the right place. The hospital treated
15 children with leukaemia in 1993. In 2000 it was 60. By the end of this
year that figure again will be topped. And so it will go on. Forever.
-
- "(Depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.1 billion
years. Total disintegration occurs after 25 billion years, the age of the
earth.)
-
- "In any other country, in which the vital drugs
are available, 95 per cent of these infant leukaemia cases would be treated
successfully. In Basrah, the figure is 20 per cent. Most heartbreakingly,
many children on the road to recovery go into relapse part way through
treatment when the sporadic and meagre supply of drugs runs out. And then
they die."
-
- (End of excerpt)
-
- In summary, please allow me to use a few buzz words of
my own. I feel that total dismissal of the effects of depleted uranium
is foolhardy at best, most likely self-serving and based upon self-serving
"studies" funded by the corporations making the depleted uranium,
and it appears to me as an atrocious lack of civilized concern for the
innocent inhabitants of this Earth onto whom depleted uranium is being
dumped.
-
- Thank you, Jeff. If you would like to post this comment
you have my permission, but please do NOT publish my name or my email address.
-
- Please keep up the good work in keeping us informed.
- Best regards,
-
- (name withheld)
- Comment
From Shirley McDonald
Hi Jeff,
-
- I don't know what planet this 'PhD' is from but it's
not this one. Anyone should just use
- site search engine and start reading...especially the
stories by Dr. Doub Rokke. Here's a story from Robert Fisk, as a simple
example.
-
- By Robert Fisk
- 1-10-1
-
- They smiled as they were dying. One little girl in a
Basra hospital even put on her party dress for The Independent's portrait
of her. She did not survive three months.
-
- All of them either played with explosive fragments left
behind from US and British raids on southern Iraq in 1991 or were the children
unborn at the time of men and women caught in those raids. Even then, the
words "depleted uranium" were on everyone's lips. The Independent's
readers cared so much that they contributed more than £170,000 for
medicines for these dying children. Our politicians cared so little that
they made no enquiries about this tragedy and missed a vital clue to the
suffering of their own soldiers in the Balkans eight years later.
-
- In March 1998, Dr Jawad Khadim al-Ali trained in Britain
and a member of the Royal College of Physicians showed me his maps of cancer
and leukaemia clusters around the southern city of Basra and its farming
hinterland, the killing fields of the last days of the 1991 Gulf War that
were drenched in depleted uranium dust from exploding US shells.
-
- The maps showed a four-fold increase in cancers in those
areas where the fighting took place. And the people from those fields and
suburbs where the ordnance were fired were clustered around Dr Ali's cancer
clinic in Basra. Old men, young women with terrible tumours, whole families
with no history of cancer suffering from unexplained leukaemias.
-
- They stood there, smiling at me, wanting to tell their
stories. Their accounts, tragically, were the same. They had been close
to the battle or to aerial bombing. Or their children had been playing
with pieces of shrapnel after air raids or their children born two years
after the war had suddenly began to suffer internal bleeding. Of course,
it could have been one of Saddam's bombed chemical plants or the oil fires
that were to blame. But a comparison of the location of cancer victims
to air raids, right across Iraq from Basra and Kerbala to Baghdad, are
too exact to leave much doubt. And tragic did not begin to describe the
children's "wards of death" in Baghdad and Basra.
-
- Ali Hillal was eight when I met him he was to live less
than two months more lived next to a television broadcasting transmitter
and several factories at Diala, repeatedly bombed by Allied aircraft in
February 1991. He was the fifth child of a family that had no history of
cancers he now had a tumour in his brain. His mother, Fatima, recalled
the bombings. "There was a strange smell, a burning, choking smell,
something like insecticide," she told me.
-
- Little Youssef Abdul Raouf Mohammed came from Kerbala,
close to Iraqi military bases bombed in the war. He had gastro-intestinal
bleeding. There were blood spots in his cheeks, a sure sign of internal
bleeding. Ahmed Fleah had already died in the children's ward, bleeding
from his mouth, ears, nose and rectum. He took two weeks to bleed to death.
-
- About the same time, the first British "Gulf War
syndrome" victims were telling of their suffering. It was often identical
to the stories told in Arabic that I listened to in Iraqi hospitals. Something
terrible happened in southern Iraq at the end of the Gulf War, I reported.
But the British Government now so anxious to allay fears for the health
of British soldiers who have been in contact with depleted uranium shells
in the Gulf and in the Balkans put their collective nose in the air.
-
- Doug Henderson, then a defence minister and later to
be such a public supporter of Nato's bombing of Kosovo wrote in an extraordinary
letter that "the Government is aware of suggestions in the press,
particularly by Robert Fisk of The Independent, that there has been an
increase in ill-health including alleged [sic] deformities, cancers and
birth defects in southern Iraq, which some have attributed to the use of
depleted uranium-based ammunition by UK and US forces during the 1990-91
Gulf conflict.
-
- "However, the Government has not seen any peer-reviewed
epidemiological research date on this population to support these claims
and it would therefore be premature to comment on this matter."
-
- And there Mr Henderson lost interest. Had he been able
to see Hebba Mortaba, the tiny girl in Basra whom I met with a tumour the
size of a football pushing up from her stomach, perhaps his reply would
have been more serious. Many of the other children in this purgatorial
hospital were bald and suffering from non-Hodgkins lymphoma. All came from
heavily-bombed areas of Iraq. A few knew they were dying; some told me
they would recover. None of them did. When in 1998 I visited the killing
fields outside Basra, the burned-out Iraqi tanks still lay where they had
been attacked by Major General Tom Rhame's US First Infantry Division,
bombed amid the farms and streams.
-
- Many of the local farmers had relatives dying of unexplained
cancers. One of them, Hassan Salman, walked up to me through the long grass,
a man with a distinguished face, brown from the sun. "My daughter-in-law
died of cancer just 50 days ago," he said. "She was ill in the
stomach. Her name was Amal Hassan Saleh. She was very young she was just
21 years old. A woman walked out of a tomato field and offered me an over-large
pale green tomato, a poisoned fruit according to the Basra doctors, from
a poisonous war, grown on a dangerous stem, bathed in fetid water.
-
- Yes, of course, it made good propaganda for Saddam. Yes,
of course, he gassed the Kurds who had gone over to Iran's side in the
1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Yes, of course, the Iraqis later laid on a propaganda
showcase of statistics for their dying and mock funerals for the infant
dead. But the children I met were dying and have died. Their leukaemia
was real and growing. One Baghdad doctor had just watched a child patient
die when I went to visit him. He sat in his chair in his clinic with his
head in his hands, the tears flowing down his face. This was not propaganda.
-
- In Basra, in the poorest part of the city still, ironically,
regularly attacked by the USAF and RAF I asked a random group of women
about the health of their families. "My husband has cancer,"
one said. Sundus Abdel-Kader, 33, said her aunt had just died suddenly
of leukaemia. Two other women interrupted to say that they had younger
sisters suffering from cancer. And so it went on, in a society where merely
to admit to cancer is regarded as a social stigma. Why had so many Iraqis
especially children suddenly fallen victims, I asked myself, to an explosion
of leukaemia in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War?
-
- Of course, the victims were Iraqis. They were Muslims.
They lived and died in a far-away country. They were not Caucasians or
Nato soldiers. But I do wonder if I'm going to have to tour the children's
wards of Bosnia and Serbia in the years to come, and see again the scenes
I witnessed in Iraq. Or perhaps the military wards of European countries.
That's why I asked Nato just after the Kosovo bombing in 1999 for the locations
of depleted uranium munition explosions. The details, I was told, were
"not releasable".
-
- http://www.independent.co.uk/news/UK/This_Britain/2001-01/fisk100101.shtml
-
-
-
- Comment
From Red Walker
4-8-4
-
- Dear Sir -
-
- Holloway's opinion stated at is that:
-
- "In fact, at least one percent of all children born
have birth defects and there is no reason to think depleted uranium has
any connection to the birth defects that he mentions. It would require
a very substantial research program to prove any connection, if there is
a connection, one that so far has not been done."
-
- Perhaps Holloway is ignorant of the history of birth
defects in Iraq. Perhaps if he were aware of it, he would understand why
most scientists believe that there is ample reason to believe that depleted
uranium causes birth defects.
-
- Permit me to quote a different website: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/95178_du12.shtml
-
- "At the Saddam Teaching Hospital in Basra, Dr. Jawad
Al-Ali, a British-trained oncologist, displays, in four gaily colored photo
albums, what he says are actual snapshots of the nightmares."
-
- The photos represent the surge in birth defects -- in
1989 there were 11 per 100,000 births; in 2001 there were 116 per 100,000
births -- that even before they heard about DU, had doctors in southern
Iraq making comparisons to the birth defects that followed the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII.
-
- "The Afghans who see their children born with birth
defects are not ignorant of the Iraq evidence. They are smart enough to
make the connection between depleted uranium and birth defects." It
is not very surprising that Holloway can continue to ignore the evidence.
He has assistance from the United States. Ross Mirkarimi writes at motherjones.com
about the censorship of his data regarding the effects of depleted uranium
and other weapons in Iraq:
-
- '"We were in Iraq as part of a nonpartisan public
health-science team organized by Harvard University, non-governmental organizations
and the government of Jordan. The team, the first to detail the comprehensive
damage to Iraq's populace and environment, established the baseline methodology
that is still used today by international relief organizations in assessing
infant mortality, economic stability, environmental health and the psychological
impacts of war on women and children. The team's findings were reported
worldwide. The study was scientific. The toll was horrific.
-
- Surgical strikes lacked precision, and the aftermath
of combat exceeded US Department of Defense collateral damage reports to
the infrastructure that nurtured civilian life. (The UN was supposed to
convene a special session in late 1991 to receive our report, but under
Security Council protocol, any permanent member nation was allowed to reject
such a hearing. One vote from the United States aborted our presentation.
Despite fanfare abroad, our study team's data proved academic here at home."
-
- source: http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2003/04/we_351_01.html
-
- Additional claims that depleted uranium causes birth
defects can bw found at:
-
- http://www.chugoku-np.co.jp/abom/uran/index_e.html and
-
- http://www.chugoku-np.co.jp/abom/uran/england_e/000604.html
-
- Somehow it is not surprising that the victims of depleted
uranium have found a sympathetic audience in Japan.
-
-
-
- Comment
From Jim Phelps
4-8-4
-
- Hi,
-
- Perhaps you would like to tell me how credentials as
a radiochemist qualifies you as a health specialist in DU. Let me guess,
you are also a Health Physics person?
-
- I read lots of HP mags too. And I also know the research
is missing in some very critical areas. Perhaps we should say, not funded
for a reason. This is the DOE afterall, and one of the most corrupted
agencies in the US.
-
- Lets deal in the real issues with less handwaving for
the man, so to speak. Can you really speak as an expert on DU. DO you
know the immune system activation signatures? Do you even know the holes
in the research?
-
- Perhaps you might like to discuss, in your messages to
the world, the retention time in the lung for very fine DU oxides and how
this process differs from other intake processes for retention of uranium
from nature. You seem to leave out pathways differences.
-
- There is a huge difference in DU oxides exposure, uptake,
and retention that is highly dependent on pathways. And the lung route
is much different from the gut absorption pathway. Perhaps you would do
well not to sell apples for sesame seeds.
-
- Perhaps you should also compare what similar levels of
mercury trapped in the lung might do to the immune system response----since
we are speaking principally of metals toxicity. How is DU additive to
these many preexisting exposures with other metals?
-
- Perhaps comment on the studies that show the retention
time of DU in the lungs, its migration into the local lymph nodes, the
removal rate from the lymph nodes, the activation of the cytokine immune
signal system in lungs and lymph nodes, how the DU can be additive with
other metal oxides retained in the lung, this association with the Th-1
inflammation mode, and how this effect can lead to the problems many connect
with DU inhalation.
-
- Then, lets do get into the synergism effects. Many toxic
metals become more toxic when they are combined with other elements or
compounds. One of the most interesting effects comes from reactions with
fluoride compounds and metals, which make special compounds that interfere
with G-protein trigger systems of cells.
-
- This is one very hot item in the metals problems associated
to sick worker effects in Oak Ridge. Where, BTW, that uranium workers
have similar illnesses that the GWV's experience. You won't see that
in HP publications either, but it is very real and quite a problem.
-
- Now, I am certainly sure that a radio chemist can appreciate
the critical nature of these bonding angles for G-protein interaction of
cells. So, lets do get to the meat of the problems connected with DU and
fluorine synergism.
-
- BTW. I go to the GWI conferences and I have met Dr.
Doug Rokke and I do think that if you inhaled the levels of DU dusts that
he did in his decon Gulf War unit----that you too would both be sick and
complaining about DU. Would you be willing to prove this with similar
exposures to your own lungs? Perhaps you should consider helping veterans,
not shooting at them further as targets for your ire or limited insights
into the real DU and immune modulation health effects.
-
- I do think that you and some others of your like mind
are speaking out of turn here and are not helping the citizens and soldiers
of the US.
-
- Jim Phelps, a real national security type who knows the
system real well.
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